Dependent and independent variables

For this assignment, please answer the questions below and submit your responses.

Part 1: Identifying independent (IV) and dependent variables (DV).

1. Jury decisions are influenced by the attractiveness of the defendant.

What is the IV:

What is the DV:

2. A drug company is advertising a new drug that helps people recover from

jet lag faster. You are skeptical so you conduct an experiment to test their claim.

In your experiment, 100 people are flown from San Francisco to Tokyo. During

the flight, half the subjects are given the drug company’s new drug. The other half of the subjects are given a placebo (i.e., sugar pill) during the flight. Six hours after they land, all subjects are asked to rate how sleepy and disoriented they feel.

What is the IV:

What is the DV:

3. A psychology professor is interested in studying if students’ grades improve

if provided a study guide. In the research study, half of the class receives a

study guide and the other half do not. After the first exam, the professor examines all students’ scores.

What is the IV:

What is the DV:

Part 2: Operationally defining variables.

Remember that the variables that we make hypotheses about are often abstract

constructs. Designing research to examine the relationships between variables

involves the process of operationally defining those variables in terms of how they are manipulated or measured. Consider the following research description, identify the variables (both the IV and DV) and briefly describe how they are operationally defined (how are they measured)

4. The nonconscious mimicry of the behaviors of interacting partners is referred to as the chameleon effect. Chartrand and Bargh (1999) performed a study to examine how mimicry within an interaction influenced the quality of the interaction and liking between partners. They had pairs of participants describe

what they saw in photographs. One of the participants in each pair was a confederate (working with the researchers). Half of the confederates were

instructed to mirror the behaviors of their partner, while the other half engaged in neutral mannerisms. Following the picture description interaction, participants

completed questionnaires asking them to report how much they liked their partner (the confederate) and how smoothly the interaction had gone. The results showed that participants rated the interaction smoother and reported liking their partners more in the mimic condition than in the neutral condition