Guilt in decision making. The effect of guilt emotion on how a decision maker focuses on a problem was investigated in the January 2007 issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (see Exercise 3.48, p. 183). A sample of 77 volunteer students participated in one portion of the experiment, where each was randomly assigned to one of three emotional states (guilt, anger, or neutral) through a reading/writing task. Immediately after the task, students were presented with a decision problem where the stated option had predominantly negative features (e.g., spending money on repairing a very old car). Prior to making the decision, the researchers asked each subject to list possible, more attractive alternatives. The researchers then compared the mean number of alternatives listed across the three emotional states with an analysis of variance for a completely randomized design. A partial ANOVA summary table is shown below.
a. What conclusion can you draw from the ANOVA results?
b. A multiple comparisons of means procedure was applied to the data using an experimentwise error rate of .05. Explain what the .05 represents.
c. The multiple comparisons yielded the following results. What conclusion can you draw?
Exercise 3.48
Guilt in decision making. The effect of guilt emotion on how a decision maker focuses on a problem was investigated in the Jan. 2007 issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (see Exercise 1.32, p. 52). A total of 171 volunteer students participated in the experiment, where each was randomly assigned to one of three emotional states (guilt, anger, or neutral) through a reading/writing task. Immediately after the task, students were presented with a decision problem where the stated option had predominantly negative features (e.g., spending money on repairing a very old car). The results (number responding in each category) are summarized in the accompanying table. Suppose one of the 171 participants is selected at random.
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Exercise 1.32
Guilt in decision making. The effect of guilt emotion on how a decision maker focuses on the problem was investigated in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (January 2007). A total of 171 volunteer students participated in the experiment, where each was randomly assigned to one of three emotional states (guilt, anger, or neutral) through a reading/writing task. Immediately after the task, the students were presented with a decision problem (e.g., whether or not to spend money on repairing a very old car). The researchers found that a higher proportion of students in the guilty-state group chose to repair the car than those in the neutral-state and anger-state groups.
a. Identify the population, sample, and variables measured for this study.
b. Identify the data-collection method used.
c. What inference was made by the researcher?
d. In later chapters you will learn that the reliability of an inference is related to the size of the sample used. In addition to sample size, what factors might affect the reliability of the inference drawn in this study?