HPS204/774: Human Social Behaviour- Malaysian and Australian University- Lab Report Assignment Help

Internal Code: 1GIGB

Lab Report Assignment Help:

Task: Abstract The current study aims to investigate the correspondence bias particularly between Malaysian and Australian University students. 80 students aging between 18-25 years were asked to participate from both the cultures. Equal number of female and male participation was guaranteed. Questionnaires and Audiotape conversations, which involved a process of one person asking a series of 12 questions to the other person in a 2(role: questioner/answerer) x 2 (culture: Australia/Malaysia) ANOVA, and this was used to carry out the experiment between the two participants. Questioners were supposed to have more knowledge than the answerers. No significant interaction of role by culture was observed,indicating no difference in correspondence bias by the two cultures. Moreover, the insignificant main effect of culture shows that there was no significant difference in the estimates of the questioner’s and answerer’s knowledge by culture. Introduction Imagine you are at a mall with your friends, shopping for groceries. A stranger starts fighting with one of the fellow team members of the working staff. Why would you think the person is acting in such a way? The answer to this question is attributions, which means inference of the reason which resulted in such an event or why you or anyone else is reacting in such a way (Heider, 1958). Did the customer fight because he got into trouble because of the staff member? Because he/she was misbehaved by the staff member? Because he/she is arrogant and does not know how to behave properly? Because the customer likes demeaning others? There are often two categories of attributions- internal and external (Heider, 1958). When attributing someone’s behavior people tend to explain behavior in terms of internal or dispositional attributes rather than external or situational attributes. This type of bias is called correspondence bias (book and Koenig). The two common paradigms in correspondence bias are attitude attribution paradigm, (Jones and Harris, 1967) in which participants read essays either praising or sneering Fidel Castro, the Prime Minister of Cuba, and then formed their attributions towards the writer (Koenig and Dean, 2010). And the second type of paradigm is quiz role paradigm (Ross, Amabile and Steinmetz, 1977) in which participants who are unknown to each other are randomly assigned as questioner, answerer and observer.  Method Participants 80 students each from Malaysian Universities and Australian Universities were involved in the experiment. From both the cultures half were females and half were males. All the students aged between 18 and 25. While, mean age for Malaysian students was 21.90 and SD was 3.25, whereas mean age for Australian students was 20.41 and SD was 2.50. All of them were recruited via paid English language Facebook Advertisements, which targeted 18-25 year old university students in Malaysia and Australia. Materials The two main materials used in the experiment were Questionnaires and Audiotapes. Participants estimated the questioner’s and the answerer’s general knowledge on a scale of 0-100, where 0 = no general knowledge and 100 = extremely high level of general knowledge, after listening to the audio recording of one person asking questions and another person answering them. Then, items assessing their gender, age and nationality were completed by the participants. Fifty questions were selected from The History of the World Quiz Book by McArdle (2018), which were characterized as easy, medium or difficult by two individuals from Malaysia and two from Australia and they were also asked to identify if any questions appeared to be culturally biased towards Malaysians or Australians. 12 questions, which appeared to culturally unbiased, with varying difficulty were chosen for the Audiotape script. Two members digitally recorded the questioner and answerer script in English. The questioner asked the selected questions and the answerer responded correctly on questions 1, 4, and 7. The questioner told whether the answer was correct, if not provided the correct answer to the answerer. Procedure The study was approved by Deakin University Human Resource Ethics Committee before the data collection started. The study was internet based and the participants were recruited via paid Facebook advertisements, which targeted 18-25 year old university students in Australia and Malaysia. When participants clicked on the advert for this study, they were asked to read the information statement about the study participant, which explained the purpose of the study and that participation was completely voluntary. The interested participants were directed to a webpage, where they were required to listen to a 2 minute audiotaped conversation in which twelve questions were asked by one person to another. Then the participants completed the online questionnairein which they estimated the general knowledge of the questioner and the answerer and also answered to some demographic items. On completion of the questionnaire, by clicking on a button labelled ‘submit data’ participants provided their consent for the data to be used. The final data was safely stored on Deakin University’s server, which only the Research team could access. Results No gender differences in scores were shown by preliminary analyses, therefore analyses were distorted across gender. Main effect of correspondence bias (role) was revealed by a 2 (role: questioner/answerer) x 2 (culture: Australia/Malaysia) ANOVA, F (1,158) = 156.73, p< .01. This reveals that, among participants, questioners were supposed to have more knowledge than the answerers. No significant interaction of role by culture was observed, indicating no difference in correspondence bias by the two cultures. Moreover, the insignificant main effect of culture shows that there was no significant difference in the estimates of the questioner’s and answerer’s knowledge by culture.