Table 1

Helping Students Understand the Article

Section

 Tips, Comments, and Problem Areas

Title

Demotivating: making a person feel less interested in something

Abstract

Affirm: confirm, strongly support

Affective: emotional

Starkly: clearly

Implicit: unspoken, unstated

Intrinsically motivating: the person liking to do the task (e.g., “I like this!”), as opposed to wanting to the task simply for the rewards (e.g., doing it for the money) from within the person (as opposed to extrinsic motivation that may come from being offered rewards to do something)

Introduction

1^st paragraph

supposition: assumption

mundane: common; ordinary; characteristic; typical of the real world

2^nd paragraph

domains: areas

provision: offering, supplying, providing

perceived control: feeling in charge

3^rd paragraph

illusory perceptions of choice: believing one has a choice even though one does not

4^th paragraph

constraints: limits

imposed: placed, given, laid down

5^th paragraph

preference-matching contexts: situations in which people know exactly what they want and are hoping to find that  thing (e.g., a person at a restaurant who hopes that the restaurant has [will match]her favorite  dessert—German chocolate cake).

6^th paragraph

defer: delay, put off

7^th paragraph

integration: putting together; combining

heuristics: simple strategies; general rules

elimination strategy: deciding what option to pick by ruling out options that have undesirable qualities. For example, in choosing an apartment,  you might immediately rule out the expensive ones.

Noncompensatory decision rule: a strategy in which you do not let an option’s advantage in one area (e.g., an apartment being closer to school) make up for a weakness in an another area (e.g., being more expensive).

Efficient: less mentally taxing, easier

9^th paragraph

ecologically unusual: not typical of real life situations

10^th paragraph

simple preference matching: participants choosing the option they had in mind before they entered the situation (e.g. coming into the study strongly preferring a certain dessert and then, during the study, finding and then choosing that dessert).

Study 1

Method

Procedure

Counterbalanced: systematically varied to balance out effects. To understand why the researchers counterbalanced, suppose that shoppers are hungrier and more likely to buy sweets during lunchtime (12-1) than at other times. If the limited-choice condition was offered during lunchtime on both Saturdays, time of day could account for the limited-choice (lunch) group eating more chocolate. To avoid confounding the manipulation with time of day, the researchers counterbalanced. For example, if the limited-choice condition was at noon for the first session, the extensive –choice condition would be at noon for the second session.   

Unobtrusive: not easily noticed; inconspicuous

Solicitations: invitations to try something (in this case, the jams)

“Subsequent analyses …”: If the research assistants had been more friendly in the limited-choice condition, the experiment would be biased. However, there was little evidence that the assistants were biased. Specifically, the result of the F test (they could have used a t test instead) to determine whether there was a difference between the raters was ns (not statistically significant).

Results

c2 (1, N = 502)Each participant’s behavior was categorized as either (a) stopping at the booth or (b) not stopping at the booth. In other words, rather than participants varying in the quantity (amount) of behavior they did, participants varied in the quality (type) of behavior they did (stopping or passing). With such categorical (qualitative) data, researchers would not use a t test or ANOVA. Instead, they would use a test suitable for qualitative data: the chi square (c2 ) test (for more on the chi-square test, see pages 211, 528-529, and 537-539 of Research design explained). The “1” indicates the degrees of freedom. (They had one degree of freedom because [a] degrees of freedom = [rows –1] * [columns –1]; [b] they had a 2 row [limited –choice or extensive-choice] , 2 column [stopped or did not stop] table; and [c) [2-1) * [2-1] = 1 * 1 = 1). The N = 502 means they had 502 participants.

Note that nobody sampled more than 2 jams.

Remember that ns means not statistically significant. Note that the 0.83 is not a p value; instead, 0.83 is the value of the F test.

Discussion

2^nd paragraph

Multitude: many

Prone: likely

Altered: changed

3^rd paragraph

Note that participants should be randomly assigned to condition; they should not be allowed to choose their condition.

Final paragraph

Yoked design: the authors explain what they mean by that design in the last part of the last sentence of the discussion. They give a more concrete description of their yoked design in the fourth paragraph of the Procedures section.

Study 2

The researcher used two measures of intrinsic motivation (for more on intrinsic motivation, see our notes on the article’s Abstract).

Method

Procedures

4^th paragraph

Control group participants were assigned to one of the following five versions:

Note that the inter-rater correlation was substantially higher for form scores than for content scores. When looking at inter-rater correlations, you should expect more than that the correlation is significant (the raters agreed more than would be expected by chance alone). Instead, you should be looking for a high inter-rater correlation (usually above .80).

Results

Preliminary analyses

“and no interactions between gender and condition”: There was no evidence that women had a different reaction to the choice manipulation than men did (e.g., women being more likely to do the extra credit in the extensive choice condition, but men being more likely to do the extra credit in the limited choice condition).

“data were collapsed across this factor”: in the final analyses, this factor (gender) was ignored. For example, rather than having a chi-square table that has both gender and choice-condition, the chi-square table would only have choice-condition. That is, the final chi square table was not the 4 X 2 table below.

Instead, it was a 2 X 2 table like the following:

Assignment completion

c2 (1, N = 193) = 3.93, p < .05. Each participant’s behavior was categorized as either (a) doing the extra credit or (b) not doing the extra credit. In other words, rather than participants varying in the quantity (amount) of behavior they did, participants varied in the quality (type) of behavior they did (extra credit or not). With such categorical (qualitative) data, researchers would not use a t test or ANOVA. Instead, researchers would use a test suitable for qualitative data: the chi square (c2 ) test (for more on the chi-square test, see pages 211, 528-529, and 537-539 of Research design explained). The “1” indicates the degrees of freedom. (They had one degree of freedom because [a] degrees of freedom = [rows –1] * [columns –1]; [b] they had a 2 row [limited –choice or extensive-choice] , 2 column [stopped or did not stop] table; and [c) [2-1) * [2-1] = 1 * 1 = 1). The N=191 means they had 191 participants. The 3.93 is the value of the Chi-square test and that value is, as you can see by looking at Table E-2 on page 539, statistically significant at the .05 level.

Quality of Essays

The authors could have used  t tests for each of the three analyses they reported. However, they used  F tests instead. If they had used t tests, the results would be basically the same. For example, if they had used a t test, the first analysis, rather than being reported as F (1, 124) = 4.18, p < .05 would have been reported as  t (124) = 2.04, p < .05.

Discussion

First paragraph

Contexts: situations; environments; circumstances

Second paragraph

Counterintuitive: contrary to common sense; unexpected

Intrinsic motivation: personal interest; drive that comes from within the person

Third paragraph

Mediating mechanisms: As discussed in Chapter 2 of Research design explained (pages 50-51), mediating mechanisms are the processes within the participant—usually mental or physiological events—that are responsible for the observable stimulus having its effect on behavior. In other words, knowing the mediating mechanisms allows us to know how the cause has its effect. In this case, the researchers want to know how extensive choice causes decreases in motivation. For example, it might be that extensive choice situationà  not considering pros and cons of each option (not “optimizing) à less confident of and less committed to the chosen option. Or, it might be that extensive choice situations à regret over possibly not having chosen the best option à less confident of and less committed to chosen option.

Fourth paragraph

The authors define optimization (choosing the best option). “simplifying heuristic strategies that are much more selective in their use of available information”: rather than weighing all the pros and cons, people use a mental short cut that involves less mental work because it involves considering less information.

The authors also define “satisfice.” They then explain that satisficing in the extensive choice condition could be a rational strategy because doing all the work to choose the best option would probably not pay off in a choice that was much better than if participants just selected the first satisfactory option they encountered.

Sixth paragraph

Instantiation: example

Eighth paragraph

Note that the authors needed a three-group study that included a control group to determine whether motivational differences between the limited-choice and extensive-choice conditions were due to (a) limited choice increasing motivation or due to (b) extensive choice decreasing motivation.

(For more explanation of why a two-group study would not have answered the research question, see page 303 of Research design explained.)

Study 3

One way of looking at Study 3 is as follows:

Another way of looking at Study 3 is tabled below:

Method

Instruments

Affective: emotional

Sample: in this case, it means “eat” or “taste”

Manipulation checks—For more about manipulation checks, see page 116 of Research design explained.

Demographic measures: measures that allow researchers to describe the sample in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, and other background characteristics.

Experimental Procedures

The experimental group saw a display of five rows, each containing 6 chocolates (in the table below, “C” is an abbreviation for chocolate; the different numbers indicate different flavors of chocolates, so “C1” might be “Grand Marnier Truffle” and “C2” might be “Stawberry Cordial”).

In a sense, there were five limited-choice groups: (a) groups that saw only Row 1, (b) groups that saw only Row 2, (c) groups that saw only Row 3, (d) groups that saw only Row 4, and (e) groups that saw only Row 5.

Any F value below 1 is not statistically significant.

ns: not statistically significant.

Results

Preliminary Analyses

First paragraph

Women did not score differently than men on any of the measures. Nor did the manipulation have a different effect on women than on men. Therefore, for the final analyses, the researchers did not use gender as a variable: They did not look for differences between men and women.

Second paragraph

Because participants were randomly assigned to condition and because the measures discussed were collected before the choice manipulation occurred, there should not be a difference between choice and no-choice groups on those measures—and there wasn’t.

Third paragraph

In the no-choice conditions, it did not seem to matter whether participants saw the six-item array or the 30-item array condition.

Decision-Making Measures

As pointed out on pages 310-311 of Research design explained, Fs below 1 are not significant (abbreviated ns).

Coded negatively: because regret scores negatively correlated with enjoyment (people with high regret scores tended to have low enjoyment scores), the researchers could not get an enjoyment score by adding regret scores to enjoyment scores. Instead, the researchers had to change the regret scores so that low scores on regret were equivalent to high scores on enjoyment. To do this, the researchers could have subtracted each regret score from 8. In that case, a low regret score (e.g., a “1”) would result in a high score (because 8 – 1 = 7). Conversely, a high regret score (e.g., a “7”) would result in a low score (because 8 - 7 = 1).

z scores are calculated by subtracting  the mean from each score and then divide by the standard deviation. That way, the mean for each scale was 0 and the standard deviation for each scale was 1. In technical terminology, the original scores were transformed into standard scores.

c2 (2, N = 134) = 21.84, p < .0001: c2 is an abbreviation for chi-square. The numbers in parentheses next to the chi-square indicate two things.

First, the “2” indicates that the chi-square had 2 degrees of freedom. (Degrees of freedom are the result of going to the chi-square table  [like the 2 X 2 chi-square on page 529 of Research design explained], and multiplying one fewer than the number of rows times one fewer than the number of columns. In the case of Study 3, the two degrees of freedom were the result of having three rows [one for each of the three groups] and two columns [one representing buying, the second representing not buying]. Thus, [rows –1] * [columns – 1] = [3-1] * [2-1] = 2 * 1 = 2).

Second, “N = 1134” indicates that the researchers had 134 observations (in this case, 134 participants). The value of the chi-square (c2) statistic was 21.84—a value that is unlikely if there is no effect for the manipulations. To be more specific, there is less than a  .0001 (.01%) chance of getting a chi-square this big or bigger if there is no difference between the groups. Note that the chi square has only 1 degree of freedom for the tests that compare two groups. Finally, note that the results of the chi-square are what you would expect given that 48% of the limited choice condition chose chocolate, 12% of the extensive-choice chose chocolate, and 10% of the no-choice condition chose chocolate.

General Discussion

Approach-approach conflict: choosing between two desirable options.

Aversion: dislike

Plethora: many; numerous

Affective “bleedover”: mood from one situation (in this case, the frustration involved in making the decision) carrying over to a related object (in this case, the selected option).

Arduously: relating to continous hard work

Paradox: something that seems, at first glance, to be a contradiction, but is actually true