Imaginary Experiment

Select an area of psychology that interests you, and design an experiment to test a hypothesis that will support a theory from that area. Your job is to write the abstract, introduction, method, and references sections for the experiment in APA style. (Of course, since you won’t be doing the experiment, your abstract won’t summarize the results, and there will be no results section.)

Although this is an imaginary experiment, it is not a wild west free-for-all. Here are your guidelines.

• This is an experiment, not an observation or a survey. Make sure that you are controlling some independent variable to discover its influence on a dependent variable.
• You must have at least two references to previous research, and they must be from peer-reviewed journals or books.
• You may not use any paper by Milgram, Skinner, Zimbardo, Asch, or Bandura as a reference, nor may they be the topic of your reference. Yes, they did groundbreaking work, but much has been done since.
• The experiment must be capable of being performed in this reality within a finite time.
• You may presume that any laboratory equipment you need is available.
• You may presume that you have a large pool of participants available to you. Nonetheless, your number of participants must be reasonable. Four is too few; the entire population of Evergreen Valley College is ridiculously too many.
• Your experiment should be ethical.¹ See chapter 13 in the book for more details about ethical issues.

Some hints:

• Use operational definitions! “Hand-eye coordination” is a concept; “mean number of millimeters distance between cursor position and position of a moving target on a computer screen” is an operational definition that is relevant to the concept being measured.
• Be careful to not introduce extraneous or confounding variables.
• Your method must be spelled out in enough detail to allow someone else to replicate your experiment.
• Write in past tense. Write as though the experiment has already been performed. Thus: “I measured the participants’ response time,” not “I will measure the participants’ response time.”

When You Finish

Name the file in the form imaginarynnnn.rtf (if Rich text Format), or imaginarynnnn.odt (if OpenDocument text), where nnnn is your code number. Email it to the instructor, and print out a copy to give to the instructor in class. The filename must be all lowercase, and may not contain blanks.

Grading the Assignment

I will be using this rubric as a guide to grading your assignment.

Some Examples

Here are four examples from previous semesters. Some of them are good, and some aren’t. You should be able to tell which ones are which by reading them.

• imaginary1234.pdf
• imaginary2992.pdf
• imaginary3613.pdf
• imaginary8970.pdf

This one: imaginary2202.pdf is not an experiment! Do you know why?

¹ At the very least, experiments must not be dangerous or illegal. An experiment such as “Effect of snorting cocaine on accuracy of motion tracking” would be ethically problematic at best. If this has gotten you thinking of absurdly unethical experiments, go ahead and think about them now and get it out of your system.