Week 6 - PSYC1001 Debrief for In-Class Experiment

Debrief: There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that superstitious people tend to

believe that they have some degree of control over events over which they objectively
have none. For example, some superstitious cricket fans do not leave their seat once the
game has started for fear that this would bring their team bad luck and cause a wicket
to fall. This study aimed to empirically investigate the relationship between level of
superstitious belief and perceived ability to control an ambiguously controllable outcome
in healthy participants.
In this study, you were asked to perform a contingency judgment task on the computer.
In one condition, you had to choose whether or not to press a button on the screen. This
action (i.e. either pressing or not pressing the button) resulted in the lightbulb on the
screen being illuminated, or not. Thus there were 4 different categories of trial:
presslight, pressno-light, no-presslight, no-pressno-light. After every 10 trials you
were asked to rate (by moving a slider displayed on the screen) how much control you
felt that your actions had on whether the light turned on. The actual amount of control
that pressing the button had on the light varied over the course of the experiment. This
was dubbed the active condition, as you were asked to press the button yourself and
rate the amount of control your own actions had on the light.
There was also a second condition in which you were informed about the results of an
imaginary friend (Bob) performing the task, and were asked to rate the amount of control
that Bobs actions had over the light. This was dubbed the passive condition, as you did
not press the button yourself, but were instead asked to rate the amount of control that
someone elses actions had on the light.
Finally, you were asked to complete some questionnaires relating to your level of
superstitious beliefs, depressive and anxious thoughts, etc. It is important to note
that none of these measures reflect a clinically relevant tool: that is, high or
low scores on these measures would, under no circumstances, reflect a
diagnosis of depression. Rather, they offer a measure of the normal range of these
psychological processes in the normal population. We also asked a number of
demographic questions relating to your age, gender, etc.
We are particularly interested in the superstitious beliefs measure. Our first hypothesis is
that an individuals levels of superstitious beliefs will be related to the amount of control
they perceive having over the light, such that people who score high on the superstition
scales will report having more control over the light than people who score low on the
superstition scales. Secondly, we hypothesize that this effect will be stronger in the
active condition than in the passive condition; that is, superstitious people will
overestimate their own ability to control an ambiguously controllable outcome more than
they will overestimate someone elses ability to control an ambiguously controllable
outcome.