![]() But they can directly measure how long people spend eating a piece of chocolate, and they assume people that are happier will spend longer eating the sweet treat. Wait, why are they using savoring, and not happiness? Because savoring experiences has been shown to predict peoples happiness, and if they ask people whether they’re happy that means they have to trust people to rate their own experiences. One of the ways they used to measure happiness was by timing how long people spent savoring a piece of chocolate. Researchers at the University of Liège wanted to understand whether thinking about money impacts peoples happiness. We can use a real world example to think about what that might look like. And there’ll be a lot of things you can’t ask about on your survey that might impact their happiness.Īn alternative strategy would be to do an experiment where you can try and more fully control for all those outside factors. ![]() You can’t know if people are being honest in some cases, or whether they’re doing a good job of assessing their own happiness, or whether they’re having a particularly Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. But there’s still a lot you can’t control. You’ve adopted a definition of what you mean by the concept of happiness and developed a survey to get results that will tell you how happy people are along with other questions you think might be interesting. Let’s go back to the happiness study we started to develop earlier. Because the treatment and control group are similar on other characteristics, you can assume that the only meaningful difference between them is the treatment you give them, so any difference in the outcome is the result of that treatment. That way, you can eliminate or minimize the impact of those things when you look at the results. For instance, you’d want a mix of women and men, liberals and conservatives, young and old, in your two groups. The two groups should be similar on any demographics or characteristics that would affect your outcome of interest. The core idea of an experiment is that you have two groups: the treatment and the control group. ![]() ![]() With an experiment you’re not just seeing what people think (“what percentage of people support clean energy policies?”) but testing the impact of a treatment that you’ve identified (“does seeing that a politician of the same party supports clean energy make voters more likely to voice support”). As the researcher you get to create the setting and the conditions for an experiment. The advantage of using an experiment is control. That’s not because social scientists don’t like experiments, but because humans don’t like being experimented on.
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