Religion
In reply to the discussion: Queen's study finds religion helps us gain self-control [View all]MarkCharles
(2,261 posts)performance of tasks WITHOUT doing the unscrambling of anything!
The null set is NOTHING as a precursor.
I'm afraid I will have to ATTEMPT to verbally resurrect this "experiment", for those of us who may NOT be familiar with how to put something like this together.
Number one.... population... how many, where when and demographic, religious, and ethnic background, ages, educations, etc.
We need to know ranges of all of that.
Number two....what exactly were the tasks, the precursors to tasks, etc.?
Number three.....when was this done, over how many days weeks months years. (FOR EXAMPLE, social science experiments scheduled for September 11, 2001, were THROWN OUT in most experiments of this nature around the world, and many tests of this nature were thrown out for all of September in the greater NYC colleges and universities, can you guess why?)
Number four... who did the precursor tasks? Who did the follow-up tasks? Who observed each or both? We must screen for what we call the "Hawthorn effect", people who know that they are being observed perform differently. Likewise, the "Cinderella effect", and the "Stockholm effect"
Number five...what were the "rewards" for one behavior over another? Both on the precursor test and on the subsequent tests? Just verbal praise? What praise? Smiles? Gender of testers and testees? All of this has to be controlled for.
So NO...this had nothing to do with social science research, this has to do with an agenda, and a press release and no details, so it was, OF COURSE, re-published on a religious web site.