PSY 301: Scientific Thinking in Psychology Activity Assignment #1 Due Wednesday, Jan. 16 by 4pm Identifying empirical claims in the media 1. Read the popular press report “Giving Your Kids Sips of Beer Can Turn Them Into a Teenage Drunk” and fill in the table below. For each of the four validities, ask a relevant question that would interrogate that particular validity in the context of this study. The claim Variable(s) in the claim Type of claim (frequency, association, or causal) Construct validity question External validity question Statistical validity question Internal validity question 2. Assume that a journalist would like to make a causal claim about the “Sips of Beer” study. Analyze the study in terms of the three criteria for causation. After your analysis, discuss whether it is appropriate to make a causal claim. PSY 301: Scientific Thinking in Psychology Identifying empirical claims in scientific articles 3. Read the attached peer-reviewed scientific article, “Praising Young Children for Being Smart Promotes Cheating ” by Zhao et al. (2017), and fill in the table below. For each of the four validities, ask a relevant question that would interrogate that particular validity in the context of this study. The claim Variable(s) in the claim Type of claim (frequency, association, or causal) Construct validity question External validity question Statistical validity question Internal validity question 4. Assume that a journalist would like to make a causal claim about the “Cheating” study. Analyze the study in terms of the three criteria for causation. After your analysis, discuss whether it is appropriate to make a causal claim. https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/z4g9vw/giving-­‐your-­‐kid-­‐sips-­‐of-­‐beer-­‐can-­‐turn-­‐them-­‐ into-­‐a-­‐teenage-­‐drunk     Giving Your Kid Sips of Beer Can Turn Them Into a Teenage Drunk A new study suggests that those innocent tastes of Chianti at the dinner table could morph your child into a bleary-eyed, booze-guzzling, teenage ne’er-do-well. Munchies Staff MAR 31 2015, 10:30AM Photo via Flickr user Alan Levine What's the harm in giving a four-year-old a tiny little itsy bitsy sip of Guinness, right? It's not like they're going to get drunk off of half a mouthful of the stuff. Europeans do it, and everyone knows that they've got everything right. And at least it's not like you're giving infants double Americano IV drips like those psychotic Bostonites. Those innocent tastes of Chianti at the Thanksgiving dinner table could morph your child from a sweet, sober cherub into a bleary-eyed teenage booze-guzzling ne'er-dowell. New research in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs has found that children who sip alcohol as youngsters have an increased likelihood of becoming drinkers by the time they reach high school. In a long-term study by Brown University of 561 students in Rhode Island, researchers found that those who had tried even small sips were a whopping five times more likely to have tried a whole beer or cocktail by the time they reached ninth grade, and four times more likely to have gotten rip-roaring drunk. Roughly 30 percent of the students said that they had tasted alcohol when in sixth grade (aww, tweenhood), mostly due to exposure from their parents while at a party, on vacation, or in other special circumstances. Of that group (the "early sippers"), 26 percent reported having consumed a full alcoholic drink by ninth grade, while only 6 percent of non-early-sippers had experienced the pleasures of an ice-cold Natural Ice or homemade Screwdriver. And at that same age (roughly 14-15 years old), 9 percent of early sippers had gotten totally trashed, while only 2 percent of those with less-loose parents had. Lead researcher Kristina Jackson, PhD, is quick to point out that parents, or even the boozy sips themselves, are to blame for the correlation. "We're not trying to say whether it's 'OK' or 'not OK' for parents to allow this," Jackson said in a press release. However, she does argue that parents who think that exposing their children to alcohol early on and in safe environments will somehow make them less likely to down an entire bottle of peach schnapps and jump naked into their friend's swimming pool. Turns out, it's actually the other way around. Give the kiddies a taste of liquor, and it'll wet their chops—or at least falsely build their personal sense of worldliness—for an adolescence of brown-bagging behind the bleachers. But Jackson also believes that other factors correlate with these numbers, in addition to the "early sipper" factor. Parents' drinking habits, a family history of alcoholism, and general personality and behavioral characteristics also have strong impacts on the boozy worldviews of children and teenagers. But being permitted to try alcohol at a young age could send the message that drinking is more acceptable or less dangerous But if you've already let your kindergartener get loose on a swill of your IPA, don't panic. "We're not saying your child is doomed," Jackson says. There are plenty of other ways to screw up your children, and this isn't even close to the worst of them. Just allot for some additional groundings when they reach their first day of high school, though they'll learn soon enough that a terrible hangover is the worst punishment of all. 721529 research-article2017 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797617721529Zhao et al.Smart Praise Short Report Praising Young Children for Being Smart Promotes Cheating Psychological Science 2017, Vol. 28(12) 1868­–1870 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0956797617721529 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617721529 www.psychologicalscience.org/PS Li Zhao1,2, Gail D. Heyman3,4, Lulu Chen1, and Kang Lee5 1 Institutes of Psychological Sciences, Hangzhou Normal University; 2Zhejiang Key Laboratory for Research in Assessment of Cognitive Impairments, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego; 4Department of Psychology, Zhejiang Normal University; and 5Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto Received 3/31/17; Revision accepted 6/28/17 Praise is one of the most commonly used forms of reward. It is convenient, is nearly effortless, and makes the recipient feel good. However, praising children for being smart carries unintended consequences: It can undermine their achievement motivation in a way that praising their effort or performance does not (Cimpian, Arce, Markman, & Dweck, 2007; Kamins & Dweck, 1999; Mueller & Dweck, 1998; see Dweck, 2007). In this study, we investigated whether the negative consequences of praising children for being smart extend to the moral domain, by encouraging cheating. There is some prior work suggesting that evaluative feedback can influence children’s moral behaviors (Fu, Heyman, Qian, Guo, & Lee, 2016; Mueller & Dweck, 1998; Zhao, Heyman, Chen, & Lee, 2017). Telling 5-yearolds (but not younger children) that they have a reputation for being good leads to a reduction in their cheating, presumably because they are interested in maintaining this reputation (Fu et al., 2016). We propose that telling children that they are smart, a form of ability praise, may have the opposite effect by motivating them to cheat to appear smarter. In a study consistent with this possibility, Mueller and Dweck (1998) found that 10-year-olds exaggerated how well they had performed after receiving ability praise. However, little is known about whether ability praise can influence young children’s moral behavior. The present research addressed this question by comparing the effects of ability and performance praise on preschool children’s cheating. to 4.00 years, M = 3.62, SD = 0.27; 71 boys, 79 girls) and one hundred fifty 5-year-olds (age range = 5.01 to 6.00 years, M = 5.38, SD = 0.33; 78 boys, 72 girls). To measure cheating, we used a version of a wellestablished peeking paradigm (see Heyman, Fu, Lin, Qian, & Lee, 2015), in which an experimenter hides a playing card (with a number from 3 to 9, excluding 6) behind a barrier and children guess whether it is greater or less than 6. The children are told that they can win a prize if they guess correctly on at least three of the six trials. The session began with a practice trial in which the children were told that they had guessed correctly. They were then randomly assigned to three conditions (50 children in each condition): In the ability condition, children were told, “You are so smart.” In the performance condition, they were told, “You did very well this time.” In the baseline condition, no praise was given. The real guessing game, which was identical across the three conditions, followed this practice trial. On each trial, the children were instructed not to peek. Unbeknownst to them, the game was rigged to ensure success on two of the first five trials and failure on three. On each trial, the children were told whether they had been successful, but no praise was given. During the pivotal sixth trial, the experimenter left the room for 60 s after eliciting a promise not to peek at the card. Acts of cheating, defined as any obvious forms of peeking (i.e., the child got out of his or her seat or Method Corresponding Author: Kang Lee, Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, 45 Walmer Rd., Toronto, Ontario M5R 2X2, Canada E-mail: kang.lee@utoronto.ca Participants were 300 preschool children in eastern China: one hundred fifty 3-year-olds (age range = 3.08 Smart Praise 1869 Ability Condition Performance Condition 80% Baseline Condition Participants Who Cheated (%) 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 3-Year-Olds 5-Year-Olds Boys Girls Total Sample Group Fig. 1. Percentage of participants who cheated in each age group, within each gender, and overall, broken down by condition. leaned over the barrier), were recorded by a hidden camera. A pretest was used to assess basic numerical understanding, and the 3 children who failed (all 3-year-olds) completed an analogous color-guessing task instead (see the Supplemental Material available online for more details about the procedure, including the pretest). Because our analyses showed that the pattern of results did not differ when these 3 children who failed the pretest were excluded, we report results that included the data from all participants. Results Figure 1 shows the cheating rate for each age group and gender, broken down by condition. There was more cheating in the ability condition than in the other conditions overall, in each age group, and within each gender (ps < .05 for all chi-square tests). We conducted a binary logistic regression analysis in which condition, age, gender, and their interactions were the predictors of cheating. The final model was significant, χ2(3, N = 300) = 15.68, p = .001, −2 log likelihood = 399.13, Nagelkerk R 2 = .068, and revealed two significant effects. One was a main effect of condition (Wald = 10.12, df = 2, p = .006). A priori comparisons with the ability condition as the reference showed that cheating rates were significantly higher in the ability condition than in the performance and baseline conditions—performance condition: β = 0.78, SE = 0.29, Wald = 7.26, df = 1, p = .007, odds ratio = 2.19, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [1.24, 3.87]; baseline condition: β = 0.82, SE = 0.29, Wald = 7.93, df = 1, p = .005, odds ratio = 2.27, 95% CI = [1.28, 4.02]. The other significant effect was a main effect of gender; compared with girls, boys cheated more across the three conditions, β = 0.55, SE = 0.24, Wald = 5.39, df = 1, p = .020, odds ratio = 1.74, 95% CI = [1.09, 2.77]. No other effects were significant (ps > .1). Cheating latency did not differ significantly across conditions (ps > .1). Discussion We examined how different forms of praise affect young children’s moral behavior. The results showed that 3- and 5-year-olds who were praised for their ability on a single occasion were more likely to cheat than Zhao et al. 1870 their counterparts who were praised for their performance, or not praised at all. It is likely that ability praise promotes cheating because, unlike performance praise, it is a generic form of language that implies the presence of a stable ability (e.g., smartness) that underlies performance (Cimpian et al., 2007). In our study, ability praise may have motivated children to cheat in order to uphold the positive trait assessment or the reputation of being smart (Zhao et al., 2017). Surprisingly, the effect was the same for 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds. This finding demonstrates that even 3-yearolds are sensitive to the difference between ability and performance praise, and that their understanding of ability overlaps with that of older individuals. This finding also raises questions about what kind of conceptual understanding is required for ability praise to have behavioral consequences. Our findings demonstrate that ability praise can promote cheating in young children. More broadly, they build on evidence suggesting that subtle social cues have the power to shape children’s thinking and behavior (Bryan, Master, & Walton, 2014) and suggest that researchers cannot rule out the importance of socialization effects in young children just because there are no obvious sources of direct teaching or reinforcement. Action Editor James K. McNulty served as action editor for this article. Author Contributions L. Zhao, K. Lee, and G. D. Heyman developed the study. L. Chen collected the data. L. Zhao performed the data analysis and drafted the manuscript. K. Lee and G. D. Heyman provided critical revisions. All the authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission. Acknowledgments We thank Brian Compton for his helpful comments on the manuscript. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article. Supplemental Material Additional supporting information can be found at http:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797617721529 Open Practices All data have been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/ p2z8a/. The complete Open Practices Disclosure for this article can be found at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ suppl/10.1177/0956797617721529. This article has received the badge for Open Data. More information about the Open Practices badges can be found at https://www.psychological science.org/publications/badges. References Bryan, C. J., Master, A., & Walton, G. M. (2014). “Helping” versus “being a helper”: Invoking the self to increase helping in young children. Child Development, 85, 1836–1842. doi:10.1111/cdev.12244 Cimpian, A., Arce, H. M. C., Markman, E. M., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Subtle linguistic cues affect children’s motivation. Psychological Science, 18, 314–316. doi:10.1111/j.14679280.2007.01896.x Dweck, C. S. (2007). The perils and promises of praise. Educational Leadership, 65(2), 34–39. Fu, G., Heyman, G. D., Qian, M., Guo, T., & Lee, K. (2016). Young children with a positive reputation to maintain are less likely to cheat. Developmental Science, 19, 275–283. doi:10.1111/desc.12304 Heyman, G. D., Fu, G., Lin, J., Qian, M. K., & Lee, K. (2015). Eliciting promises from children reduces cheating. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 139, 242–248. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2015.04.013 Kamins, M. L., & Dweck, C. S. (1999). Person versus process praise and criticism: Implications for contingent self-worth and coping. Developmental Psychology, 35, 835–847. doi:10.1037//0012-1649.35.3.835 Mueller, C. M., & Dweck, C. S. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children’s motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 33–52. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.33 Zhao, L., Heyman, G. D., Chen, L., & Lee, K. (2017). Telling young children they have a reputation for being smart promotes cheating. Developmental Science. Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/desc.12585 TABLE 3.2 Examples of Each Type of Claim CLAIM TYPE SAMPLE HEADLINES Frequency claims 4 in 10 teens admit to texting while driving 42% of Europeans never exercise Middle school kids see 2-4 alcohol ads a day Association claims Single people eat fewer vegetables Angry Twitter communities linked to heart deaths Girls more likely to be compulsive texters Suffering a concussion could triple the risk of suicide Causal claims Music lessons enhance IQ Babysitting may prime brain for parenting Family meals curb eating disorders Why sleep deprivation makes you crabby causes people to be single The verb enhance indicate The kind of claim a psycho kind of studu un - weak. In fact, because of dmired in North America) TABLE 3.5 Interrogating the Three Types of Claims Using the Four Big Validities but the relationship ht, your prediction will be FREQUENCY CLAIMS (“4 IN 10 TEENS ADMIT TO TEXTING WHILE DRIVING") TYPE OF VALIDITY is no ASSOCIATION CLAIMS ("PEOPLE WITH HIGHER INCOMES SPEND LESS TIME SOCIALIZING") CAUSAL CLAIMS (“MUSIC LESSONS ENHANCE IQ") Usually based on a survey or poll, but can come from other types of studies Usually supported by a correlational study Must be supported by an experimental study ical significance of a par uudy might simply be due ed by a few individuals t is probably not due to because the association significant, it means the Construct validity How well has the researcher measured the variable in question? How well has the researcher measured each of the two variables in the association? How well has the researcher measured or manipulated the variables in the study? Statistical validity What is the margin of error of the estimate? -ple alone. What is the effect size? How strong is the association? Is the association statistically significant? If the study finds a relationship, what is the probability the researcher's conclusion is a false positive? If the study finds no relationship, what is the probability the researcher is missing a true relationship? What is the effect size? Is there a difference between groups, and how large is it? Is the difference statistically significant? AVOIDING Internal validity Frequency claims are usually not asserting causality, so internal validity is not relevant. be complicated. Full eparate, semester-long I we will focus mainly an effect. ves two kinds of mis- results from a sample es (e.g., gratitude and the full population. People who make association claims are not asserting causality, so internal validity is not relevant to interrogate. A researcher should avoid making a causal claim from a simple association, however (see Chapter 8). Was the study an experiment? Does the study achieve temporal precedence? Does the study control for alternative explanations by randomly assigning participants to groups? Does the study avoid several internal validity threats (see Chapters 10 and 11)? External validity this kind of mistake, ncrease the chances To what populations, settings, and times can we generalize this estimate? How representative is the sample-was it a random sample? To what populations, settings, and times can we generalize this association claim? How representative is the sample? To what other problems might the association be generalized? To what populations, settings, and times can we generalize this causal claim? How representative is the sample? How representative are the manipulations and measures? hat there is no asso-
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