4 ms·

Simple enough to swap the actresses around to remove the individuals as confounding variables. On a related note. HN gets pretty obnoxious nit picking about e

by parfe 12y ago

Simple enough to swap the actresses around to remove the individuals as confounding variables. On a related note. HN gets pretty obnoxious nit picking about experiments. Guaranteed half the posts about a social science experiment come from novices whining about some flaw only they can see in the experiment yet a hard science paper gets posted and surprisingly no one has any complaints about the experimental design.

hyp0 12y ago
How would swapping actresses help? The issue is not a quality of the individual person, but of their action - and the relationship between their action and the baby's later response to that person is very thing being tested. BTW: Whatever your intention, calling people "obnoxious", "nit picking", "novices" and "whining" because they question something does not actually raise the level of discourse.
- parfe 12y ago
  >How would swapping actresses help? Using many actresses would allow the investigators to see if an individual receives a different response compared to the overall group. But it looks like you actually meant say the babies knew the testers felt bad so refused to share, not because the baby had been slighted. I think you need to read more on what the study tested. >BTW: Whatever your intention, calling people "obnoxious", "nit picking", "novices" and "whining" because they question something does not actually raise the level of discourse. Reread your comment: >I wonder if they controlled the effect of the actresses own response. The level of disrespect you show is amazing. It would be one thing if you actually read the study and realized that "Hey, they used the baby's mom and a drug addict in withdrawal as the two testers! Clearly the study is flawed." Nope, your first comment is essentially "I wonder if these professionals are incompetent."
  - hyp0 12y ago
    What did the study test then? (I don't have a subscription to "Psychological Science", so can't read the full text, at least, not from the above link). From the abstract on the first expt (and from the story linked here on HN), it seems unambiguous. My understanding is: one actress offered then refused the toy (intentional); a second actress offered but accidently dropped the toy (unintentional). Later, the baby treated the two actresses differently. My thinking was that it would be impossible to control for the effect I described (i.e. the Clever Hans Effect), given the social nature of what they were investigating. You probably already know about Clever Hans and so didn't read the wikipedia article I linked, but it's pretty entertaining/interesting, and addresses the problems of controlling for the effect in some social experiments (EDIT: what I'm referring to is that it says in some social experiments they can't control for it just have to accept the effect may be there). It would be really cool if they had a clever way of controlling for it (I've come across a few very clever experimental designs in Psych studies), so I was wondering if they did or not, and if so how. I didn't think the conductors of the experiment were incompetent. Thanks for rereading my comment.

by parfe 12y ago

hyp0 12y ago

How would swapping actresses help? The issue is not a quality of the individual person, but of their action - and the relationship between their action and the baby's later response to that person is very thing being tested. BTW: Whatever your intention, calling people "obnoxious", "nit picking", "novices" and "whining" because they question something does not actually raise the level of discourse.

parfe 12y ago
>How would swapping actresses help? Using many actresses would allow the investigators to see if an individual receives a different response compared to the overall group. But it looks like you actually meant say the babies knew the testers felt bad so refused to share, not because the baby had been slighted. I think you need to read more on what the study tested. >BTW: Whatever your intention, calling people "obnoxious", "nit picking", "novices" and "whining" because they question something does not actually raise the level of discourse. Reread your comment: >I wonder if they controlled the effect of the actresses own response. The level of disrespect you show is amazing. It would be one thing if you actually read the study and realized that "Hey, they used the baby's mom and a drug addict in withdrawal as the two testers! Clearly the study is flawed." Nope, your first comment is essentially "I wonder if these professionals are incompetent."
- hyp0 12y ago
  What did the study test then? (I don't have a subscription to "Psychological Science", so can't read the full text, at least, not from the above link). From the abstract on the first expt (and from the story linked here on HN), it seems unambiguous. My understanding is: one actress offered then refused the toy (intentional); a second actress offered but accidently dropped the toy (unintentional). Later, the baby treated the two actresses differently. My thinking was that it would be impossible to control for the effect I described (i.e. the Clever Hans Effect), given the social nature of what they were investigating. You probably already know about Clever Hans and so didn't read the wikipedia article I linked, but it's pretty entertaining/interesting, and addresses the problems of controlling for the effect in some social experiments (EDIT: what I'm referring to is that it says in some social experiments they can't control for it just have to accept the effect may be there). It would be really cool if they had a clever way of controlling for it (I've come across a few very clever experimental designs in Psych studies), so I was wondering if they did or not, and if so how. I didn't think the conductors of the experiment were incompetent. Thanks for rereading my comment.