1.23 Haters are gonna hate, study confirms. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology asked a group of 200 randomly sampled men and women to evaluate how they felt about various subjects, such as camping, health care, architecture, taxidermy, crossword puzzles, and Japan in order to measure their dispositional attitude towards mostly independent stimuli. Then, they presented the participants with information about a new product: a microwave oven. This microwave oven does not exist, but the participants didn’t know this, and were given three positive and three negative fake reviews. People who reacted positively to the subjects on the dispositional attitude measurement also tended to react positively to the microwave oven, and those who reacted negatively also tended to react negatively to it. Researcher concluded that “some people tend to like things, whereas others tend to dislike things, and a more thorough understanding of this tendency will lead to a more thorough understanding of the psychology of attitudes.” 60 (a) What are the cases?
The data collected for the each of the 200 randomly selected which would represent 1 row on a data frame for these data.
The response variable in this study is the subject’s attitude toward the fictional microwave oven.
The explanatory variables are the subject’s attitude toward the the various independent stimuli such as camping, health care, and crossword puzzles, etc.
The problem text does state that the sample was obtained by random sampling.
This would be an observational study, because it is conducted by survey, and experimental methods such as control groups, treatment groups and blinding are not present in the methodology.
Since this is an observational study a causal relationship cannot be established, there could be a confounding variable not accounted for such as what mood the person was in that day
Yes, if the sample was truly random, then you can generalize it to the population at large. You need to make sure that the sample was randomly selected from everyone, and not just as an example, psychology undergrads at the college where the PI teaches.