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Shouldn't the control group have had a non-apology comment about the weather or something? Instead of comparing, "Sorry for the weather. May I use your phone?
by nimble 13y ago
Shouldn't the control group have had a non-apology comment about the weather or something? Instead of comparing, "Sorry for the weather. May I use your phone?" to "May I use your phone?", it would seem much preferable to compare it to "Lousy weather we've been having. May I use your phone?"
- snoldak924 13y agoThat's exactly what I thought when I read the article. I'm not quite sure how that was missed during the design of the experiment.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoUnfortunately in many disciplines, bold conclusions are favored over careful interpretation.
- Flimm 13y agoBold conclusions are more interesting, hence they hit hacker news more often.
- r00fus 13y agoAlso, in the UK, the term "Sorry" is a rather common replacement for "Excuse me", in fact, some might consider it more polite. Aside from the non-apology weather control group, they could have introduced another control that used different construction on the apology: "Apologize for the dreadful weather", etc.
- consonants 13y agoI don't want to jump to conclusions as that is a glaringly obvious control and I find it hard to believe a researcher worth their salt would leave out such a control group. Does anyone have a link to the full paper? edit: grammar
- tedks 13y agohttp://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Brooks%20Dai%20Schweitzer%202013_d2f61dc9-ec1b-485d-a815-2cf25746de50.pdf http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Brooks%20Dai%...
- consonants 13y agoThanks. To add to your quote above, from the paper: > In Study 2, we extend our investigation by considering alternative explanations. In Study 1, it is possible that our con- trol condition decreased benevolence-based trust. In the control condition in Study 1, the confederate sent no message. This might have seemed impolite. To investigate this alternative explanation, we include two different comparison conditions in Study 2. We include a traditional apology (‘‘I’m sorry to interrupt.’’) and neutral greeting (‘‘How are you?’’). > In addition, we extend our investigation by exploring superfluous apologies in a new domain. In Study 1, both the unfortunate circumstance (the random action of the computer) and the outcome (behavioral measure of trust) were related to the trust game. In Study 2, the apology (for a flight delay) is unrelated to our measure of trust (lending a cell phone). We expect that an apology for a flight delay will increase trust even when the subsequent interaction is unrelated to the flight.
- ledge 13y agoSo in Study 2, they do seem to include a non-superfluous apology. Study 4 (the one about the rain, and the topic of the blog post) doesn't have the same controls. Why? I find this pretty odd.
- tedks 13y agoFrom the paper: """ When they meet the seller, the seller greets them in one of the following three ways: ‘‘Hi there. Oh, I’m so sorry it’s raining.’’ (superfluous apology), ‘‘Hi there. Oh, it’s raining.’’ (acknowledgment), or ‘‘Hi there.’’ (neutral) """
- smsm42 13y agoThey should have tried "I apologize for the rain" and counted how many times the answer would be "Oh, so you are God Almighty? Nice to finally meet you in person".