Week 9: Surprising Surprises

Bzzz bzzz! What do you all think about changing answers while grading? If there was a quiz full of material you never learned, would you cheat?

Well that’s what we asked everyone using anonymous surveys over the past few weeks that described the exact scenario played out in our experiment —- the participant would have to take a graded quiz where they could not figure out the answers in any way and were given the opportunity to cheat during self-grading.   Our results showed that  many expressed they would cheat. But, what is even more surprising is that these same respondents expressed that teachers simply saying “Please do not cheat, because if you do, I won’t know what material you don’t understand, and then I can’t help you learn as well” instead of just “Please do not cheat” brought about statistically SIGNIFICANT differences (1-tail chi-square at .05 level of significance) between student’s answers of whether or not they would cheat (p = .035).

What is even more surprising about this finding is the fact that in our real-time high school experiments, differences between the two messages were not statistically significant (p = .51).

These extremely different p-values between the hypothetical scenario surveys and what people actually did in the situation possibly show a flaw in the popular psychology research method of using hypothetical scenario surveys. They do not always depict reality.

That was my TED talk. Catch you al next week! ลาก่อน