(male professor)
For example, I recently read about a case in which a researcher was given two groups of monkeys and he was asked to train these monkeys to pick up a ball and put it in a box, and he was told to record how many hours it took to train each monkey to learn to do this.Now, before he started the training, the researcher was told that one group of monkeys was highly intelligent and the other group was less intelligent. In truth, there was no difference between them. All the monkeys were actually very similar in terms of intelligence. But the researcher didn't know that. He thought one group was smarter, so he expected that group would be easier to train.So, what happened? Well, the researcher trained the monkeys to perform the action, and it turned out that, on average, it took him two hours less time to train the supposedly smart monkeys than the supposedly less intelligent monkeys. Why? Well, it turns out that with the supposedly smart monkeys the researcher smiled at them a lot, gave them a lot of encouragement, talked to them a lot, worked hard to communicate with them. But with the monkeys he thought were less intelligent, he wasn’t this enthusiastic, he didn’t try this hard, wasn’t quite optimistic.
Explain how the example from the professor’s lecture illustrates the experimenter effect.
When the researchers expect certain result during their experiment, the expectations usually affect the outcome. This phenomenon is called experimenter effect. The professor illustrates this with a monkey experiment that he read about. In the experiment, a researcher was given two groups of monkey and asked to teach them to pick up a ball and put it in a box. And he had been told that one group was smarter than the other, which was not true. Therefore, anyway, the researcher expected that the smarter group was easier to train. And it took two hours less time to train the supposedly smarter monkey because he tried to communicate with them, frequently smiled at them, encouraged them, and talked to them. While with the other group, he was not that enthusiastic. So actually it's the researcher's behavior that influenced the result. That's how experimenter effect is achieved during the experiment. (152 words)
