Here are some tips on how you can structure your introduction. You do not necessarily need to follow these in order to write a good paper. However, this is one good series of steps you could follow. When appropriate, make sure to cite the papers we read at the beginning of the course!
Here is some information about the design of our study that will help you in writing the methods section of your paper:
Participants: 250 participants recruited on the amazon mechanical turk. They earned 50c in exchange for participation with the possibility of an additional bonus of up to 1.00. For every 10 points participants earned in the study, they earned a bonus of 1 cent. Those who ended with negative points did not earn any bonus.
Stimuli: Each participant had to make 200 choices between three options labelled A B and C, where each option represented a normal distribution of points. The positive option had a mean of +5, the neutral option had a mean of 0, and the negative option had a mean of -5. The standard deviation of the options depended on the difficulty condition. The location of each option was randomly determined for each participant.
Experimental design: 3 between subjects independent variables in a 2 x 2 x 2 fully factorial design. There were two different mode conditions: in the “keep” condition, participants did not have the option to peek at options. In the “peek” condition, participants could either peek or keep on every trial. There were two different difficulty conditions: In the “easy” condition, options had a small standard deviation of 10, in the “hard” condition, options had a large standard deviation of 30. Finally, there were two different stability conditions: In the “stable” condition, options did not change over time. In the “dynamic” condition, the best and worst options changed places half-way through the experiment (trial 101).
Dependent variables: The critical dependent variable was the total number of points each participant earned in the study. A player with perfect performance would earn 1000 points, and a player with random performance would earn 0 points. We also measured the number of peeks participants in the peeks mode condition took across all 200 trials. Finally, we measured each participant’s impulsivity using Barratt’s impulsivity scale (Patton, Stanford & Barratt, 1995).
Here is how you should analyze and report your results for your results section. When writing your results, make sure to make it clear to the reader exactly which test(s) you are running and which variables you are running the test(s) on.
Download and analyse a portion of the data. You can use any statistics software that you’d like (excel, SPSS, R). The data are stored in a tab-delimited text file called “empra1.txt”. You can find the data at http://nathanieldphillips.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/empra1.txt. You can see a full description of the datafile at http://rpubs.com/YaRrr/empra_R
You should include either a graph or a table in your paper. Make sure you use APA guidelines when displaying a graph or table (that is, include a caption and refer to the table/graph in your main document)
Here are some examples of graphs you could include:
Here are some examples of tables you could include
You should include this test
Was there an effect of the experimental conditions on point totals? Use the column “total.points” as the dependent variable and the condition variables (condition.mode, condition.difficulty, and condition.stability) as the independent variables. You can either run a single regression analysis, or three separate t-tests. Also report the means for each group using a table or graph.
Include ONE of the following tests
For the corresponding test you conduct, make sure you include a hypothesis in your introduction!
Was there an effect of the experimental conditions on the number of times peeople peeked? For example, did people in the dynamic environment peek more than people in the stable environment? Did people in the hard difficulty environment peek more than people in the easy difficulty environment?
For participants in the “peek” condition, what was the relationship between the number of peeks they took and their point totals? Only looking at the data for participants in the “peek” condition, conduct a correlation (or regression, they are the same) with n.peeks as the independent variable, and total.points as the dependent variable. Make sure to not include the data from participants in the “keep” condition!!!
Was there an effect of impulsivity on the number of peeks people took? In our data, we measured impulsivity using Barratt’s Impulsivity Scale (Patton, Stanford & Barratt, 1995; see full reference below). The corresponding column in our dataset is called barratt.all. For those participants in the “peeks” condition mode, Conduct a correlation between barratt.all and total.points. Make sure to not include the data from participants in the “keep” condition!!!
Was there an effect of regret on the number of peeks people took? In our data, we measured regret using Schwarz’ maximisation scale (Schwartz et al., 2002; see full reference below). The corresponding column in our dataset is called reg.ch.all. For those participants in the “peeks” condition mode, Conduct a correlation between reg.ch.all and total.points. Make sure to not include the data from participants in the “keep” condition!!!
Did men and women peek at a different rate? Conduct a t-test comparing the number of peeks made by men and women. Be sure to only include data from the “peek” mode condition!!
Here are some questions you could answer in your discussion. Again, you do not necessarily need to answer each of these questions in this order. If you would like to structure your discussion in a different way, you are welcome to:
Include 5 to 10 references of papers directly relevant to our project in APA style. Only include papers you’ve read (most likely in our class but not necessarily) and make sure that you cite each reference at appropriate points in your paper!! (most likely in the introduction).