Ideas needed for a Psychology experiment involving popular fiction (Movies mainly) and biases and heuristics

post by Tenoke · 2012-11-21T14:34:11.779Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 1 comments

I am conducting a simple experiment as my last year project for my BSc in Psychology. It is supposed to be a group project done largely under Supervision over a long period of time, but things took a different turn for me so I am making it on my own without almost any supervision as I convinced my Supervisor that I would rather not do anything in his field. Anyway I need ideas for the questionnaire that I need to develop for the study.

The information on my experiment bellow is directly copied (and written by me) from my Ethics Approval form:

1.    Title of project.

 

The effect of popular fiction on aspirations, goals and inclinations

 

2.    Purpose of project and its academic rationale.

 

The purpose of the project is to find whether popular fiction influences the kind of experiences we want. The basis for the study comes from the mere-exposure effect, the availability heuristic and the availability cascade. I hypothesize that due to their effects people are more likely to prefer experiences to which they have been exposed(due to the mere-exposure effect) by popular culture (in popular movies, tv shows, etc) and which spring to mind faster(the availability heuristic) than similar experiences which have not been taken from popular fiction.

 

3.    Brief description of methods and measurements.

 

The participants will be given a Likert scale Questionnaire. The items on the questionnaire will be descriptions of experiences with half of them being taken from popular movies and TV shows and the other half will be description of similar kinds of experiences not taken from popular fiction. The participants will be asked to rate how much they want to have the experience and the scores for the popular movie items and the other items will be compared to test the hypothesis.

A simple example of two items on this list can be:

Swimming with dolphins.

and the counterexample

Riding a zebra.

This is obviously not a great example and I also need to justify why I have chosen an experience from a given book/movie so I decided to use rankings like the top 250 on imdb and the box office rankings to choose movies that I can claim to be widely popular.

I've just started working on this and so far I have a list of possible ideas for some statements from movies, but haven't yet came up with enough such statements nor have I came up with any similar statements that aren't from a pop fiction.

The really drafty version of my draft is:

1. Escape from prison (shawshank)


2. Help save Earth or a big portion of it by using
means unavailable to the general public.

3. Be a part of a jury and convince the rest to vote for the
right guy (a la 12 angry man)


4. Would you want if it is possible to go into someone's dream
vs vr (not matrix)?

5.  Find a lost artifact (Indy)

6. Discover history (da vinci code, indy)?

7. Be a spy for Mi6/Whatever with technology weapons etc.
8. Participate in a car chase
8a. Say follow that car
9ish a. Stop the presses! (The paper,  The Great Muppet Caper)
9b Blow an engine's whistle (BttF2, The polar express)
9c Round up the usual suspects! (The boogie man)
9d pull tablecloth  from a table (ghostbusters)
9e kick a door (jumanji)
9f we come in peace (sphere)
9g take me to your leader
10. Get superpowers and fight crime
vs
Get superpowers and let yourself be tested or some shit
11.Travel to another planet or something vs ?? and save it (a la avatar)
12. Have an alien friend (E.T.)
13. Be able to talk to dead people (6th sense)
14. Something Narnia-related
15. Fight off robbers (a la home alone)

 

If anyone can propose similar (hopefully better) examples from movies that would be great. It would be even better if anyone can propose the counter-examples (the examples that are similiar to a movie-statement but are not from an actual popular movie).

Also I need to finish this by tomorrow and any comments that might be helpful are welcome.

 

Edit: The actual design of the questionnaire is unlikely to have any (significantly big) difference on my final grade as they grade me on the final writeup at the end of the year after I've conducted the experiment. As far as I know even the significance of the results do not influence my grade. I am asking for ideas so I can contribute something slightly better to science.

 

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