Trinkets

A few things.

First, I would like to point everybody to Shoals' latest master-stroke on the NCAA tournament. Vintage.

Second, I would like to again thank everybody who took my study last week. As promised, I will unveil the results. Unfortunately, it pretty much turned out to be a massive (yet inexpensive) bust, which presents me with the following dilemma: I need to present the results of and ideas behind the study, but I would also like to give this another go-around in a few weeks and therefore don't want people to know too much. I'll try to walk this line the best I can...(also, for people who didn't take the study, this will make no sense).

Basically, there were two studies involved. The first study involved being primed via the sentence unscrambling task. To read more about priming see here, and to read a summary of a study that used this sentence unscrambling task to prime the concept of God, see here. Different people received different unscrambling tasks, and I'm not going to state exactly what we were trying to prime in different conditions, but you might be able to figure it out. Also, it is important to note that the prime DID NOT WORK, so we can't really conclude everything. Our basic idea was we were trying to find out how this priming task influenced the subsequent task where people evaluated the humanness of an ingroup member (sports fan of their favorite team) and an outgroup member (sports fan of their least favorite team). However, because the prime didn't work, all we did instead was show that people see fans of their least favorite team as less essentially human, a nice finding, but one that merely replicates the work of decades of psychology research.

The second study was really just a pilot study trying to determine how people behave in common goods dilemmas or free-riding paradigm. Downloading music is a classic dilemma of this nature and we wanted to see how people responded when we framed the question in different ways. Unfortunately, our effects were null on this, but it gave us some good ideas for future research.

So, thanks for taking your time to help me out. And I think I'm gonna throw another one of these up in a few weeks that will hopefully yield more interesting results. Also, feel free to email me with more questions at uchicagostudies "at" gmail "dot" com

In other news, the grand imperial Nick Catchdubs sent this to us.
















I have a feeling Seikaly leads a pretty awesome life. Anybody want to make guesses as to what type of music he plays?