NUT 7017 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Deductive Reasoning, Cognitive Neuroscience, Dependent And Independent Variables
I. Question
A. Diffuse question: How people resolve moral dilemmas?
B. The specific question(s) addressed in the research: How humans evaluate
others’ suffering relative to their own suffering?
C. The connection between the two: By finding out how humans evaluate
others’ pain relative to their own pain, we can compare the result to the
pervious hypothesis, and gain new insights.
II. Alternative Hypotheses
A. The main hypothesis: When people are involved in trade off profits, they
would evaluate the cost of their own pain as higher than others’.
B. Other alternatives: When they feel a degree of responsibility for that pain,
they would evaluate the cost of others’ pain as higher than their own./Because
of empathy, people would value others’ pain similarly to how they value their
own pain.
II. Logic & Design
A. Dependent and independent variables: DV is the choices people made for
each situation. IV is the recipient of the shocks (self vs. other). And they also
varied whether the choice involved paying to decrease pain or profiting by
increasing the pain.
B. Operational definitions of variables of interest: This experiment puts people
in a situation in which they should trade off their own profits against the pain
they received or other people received. If people are willing to loose their own
profits to reduce others’ pain, it means that they evaluate other’s pain more
than they own pain. And vice versa.
C. Deductive logic statements for the question specifying how an experimental
outcome will follow from particular alternative answers to the question: If
When people are involved in trade off profits, they would evaluate the cost of
their own pain as higher than others’ is true, then decider should be more
likely to harm receivers to get more money and reduce their own pain. If the
hypothesis of people’s responsibility to the pain is true, the decider should be
less likely to harm receivers to get more money and choose to reduce other
people’s pain.
IV. Method
A. Realization of each independent and dependent variable:
1. Subjects: Participants are healthy volunteers recruited from University
College London psychology department and the institute of Cognitive
neuroscience subject pools.
Yijin huang
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Document Summary
Logic & design: dependent and independent variables: dv is the choices people made for each situation. Iv is the recipient of the shocks (self vs. other). If people are willing to loose their own profits to reduce others" pain, it means that they evaluate other"s pain more than they own pain. If the hypothesis of people"s responsibility to the pain is true, the decider should be less likely to harm receivers to get more money and choose to reduce other people"s pain. Method: realization of each independent and dependent variable, subjects: participants are healthy volunteers recruited from university. College london psychology department and the institute of cognitive neuroscience subject pools: stimuli or questionnaires: they received questionnaires about prior experience of psychological experiments, drug use, and illness, and they also completed test of pain threshold. It will help to rule out the interference factors for the independent variables: procedure:
