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Social Approach Evaluation Answers

The document provides sample answers for evaluating three social psychology studies: the subway Samaritans study by Piliavin, the obedience study by Milgram, and the personal space study by Perry. For each study, strengths include high control/validity and collection of both qualitative and quantitative data. Weaknesses include potential ethical issues from deception and lack of informed consent, small non-representative samples, and low ecological validity.

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Mohammed Alshawafi 2
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103 views4 pages

Social Approach Evaluation Answers

The document provides sample answers for evaluating three social psychology studies: the subway Samaritans study by Piliavin, the obedience study by Milgram, and the personal space study by Perry. For each study, strengths include high control/validity and collection of both qualitative and quantitative data. Weaknesses include potential ethical issues from deception and lack of informed consent, small non-representative samples, and low ecological validity.

Uploaded by

Mohammed Alshawafi 2
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© © All Rights Reserved
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SOCIAL APPROACH

EVALUATION SAMPLE ANSWERS

1) Evaluate the study by Piliavin (subway Samaritans) in terms of two strengths


and two weaknesses. At least one of your evaluative points must be about ethics.
(10 marks)
The aim of the study by Piliavin is to test the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis
in the natural setting of the New York Subway. One strength of the study is that it
was a field experiment and as it was conducted in the natural setting of the New
York subway with passengers travelling from Harlem to Bronx station and back, it
has high ecological validity. Furthermore, within the procedures, the passengers
were observed to see if they help a victim who they believed to be drunk or ill,
which is something they can experience in their daily lives, hence suggesting the
study has high mundane realism, which allows the findings to be applicable to real
world situations. Another strength of the study is that it collected both quantitative
and qualitative data. Quantitative data is data that is objective and numerical and
allows for comparisons to be made, and was collected by two covert observers who
recorded the number of passengers who helped, as well as the time it took for them
to help in both the drunk and ill victim trials. The results showed that in 62/65 trials,
people immediately helped the ill victim, whereas for the drunk trials, immediate
help was only provided in 19/38 trials, suggesting that people are more likely to
help an ill person than a drunk person. The qualitative data was collected by
recording comments made by passengers, such as females who said “I am not
strong enough to help”, or “it is for men to help”, perhaps explaining why 90%
overall helpers were male. However, the study also has a few weaknesses, for
example, many ethical guidelines were broken. The participants were deceived into
believing this was a real emergency situation and the victim was actually drunk or
ill and had collapsed. This may have led to potential psychological harm which they
were not protected from as they may have felt uncomfortable in this situation or
perhaps guilty for not helping. The fact that they did not even know they were part
of an experiment means they had not provided informed consent either, which was
therefore broken. Lastly, once the trial concluded, they were not debriefed about
having taken part in an experiment, which could potentially lead to long term
psychological harm. A second weakness of the study is that there may have been
some confounding variables that may have been difficult to control due to the fact
that it was conducted in a natural environment, for example, some passengers may
have been repeated in the trials more than once which would have raised suspicion
about the victim’s behaviour in their minds, leading to potential demand
characteristics which would reduce the validity of the findings.

2) Evaluate the study by Milgram (obedience) in terms of two strengths and two
weaknesses. At least one of your evaluative points must be about volunteer
sampling. (10 marks)
The aim of the study by Milgram is to test how high an electric shock a participant
would administer to an innocent man when ordered to by an experimenter in his
lab. One strength of the study is that it was a lab experiment and conducted in a
highly controlled environment. High levels of controls ensure that the procedure is
standardized for all participants and can be easily replicated to test for reliability.
For example, all participants were allocated the role of the teacher, and the stooge
the learner, through a rigged procedure. The responses of the learner were
controlled and standardized so that he would respond with a ratio of three wrong
to one right answer, and would start pounding on the wall indicating extreme pain
at 300v. Another strength of the study is that it used a volunteer sampling
technique by having participants respond to a newspaper ad. The advantage of this
sampling method is that the researcher is able to get specifically who they require
for their study. They are able to recruit participants of certain features, for example,
in this study, Milgram did not want undergraduates, and wanted to conduct the
study on males of the New Haven Area. Through volunteer sampling, this was made
possible. However, a weakness of volunteer sampling could be that it may be time
consuming and expensive. Placing an ad in the newspaper may be expensive, and
each participant had to be paid $4.50 for their participation as an incentive for them
to volunteer. Furthermore, Milgram would have to wait for participants to respond
to the ad in order for them to be part of the study which could have taken time.
Another weakness of the study is that the sample size was relatively small of only
40 males, all from the New Haven Area as previously mentioned. The sample did
not include undergraduates or teenagers, and therefore, it is not a representative
sample as it doesn’t include females either, nor people of other areas or cultures,
hence, it is difficult to generalize or apply the findings of the participants to a wider
range of people.

3) Evaluate the study by Perry (personal space) in terms of two strengths and
two weaknesses. At least one of your evaluative points must be about reliability.
(10 marks)
The aim of the study by Perry was to investigate the differential effect of oxytocin
in personal space preferences for individuals scoring high or low in the trait of
empathy. One strength of the study is that it was a lab experiment and conducted
in a highly controlled environment. High levels of controls allows for the procedure
to be standardized and therefore, easy to replicate in order to test for reliability.
For example, all participants were administered the same amount of oxytocin with
3 drops in each nostril, self administered under the supervision of the researcher.
All participants in experiment 1 were shown the same CID design with the same
slides, a total of 96 times, in the same standardized manner. The pair of images
shown to the participants in experiment 2 were also the same. Another strength of
the study is that quantitative data was collected which is objective and numerical
and allows for comparisons to be made. For example, participants in the high
empathy condition with oxytocin had the least preferred interpersonal distance
with all four protagonists, especially the friend, and the participants in the low
empathy condition with oxytocin had the most preferred interpersonal distance
with the protagonists, particularly with the stranger. This shows that different
empathy levels play a crucial role in our preferred interpersonal distances. One
weakness of the study is that as it was conducted in the highly controlled and
artificial setting of a lab, it lacks ecological validity. Furthermore, the task of rating
one’s preferred interpersonal distance with imagined interactions with others
based off a computer screen is not something people expect in their everyday lives,
and therefore, lacks mundane realism, which may reduce the application of the
findings to real world situations. Lastly, another weakness of the study is that the
sample size is relatively small of only 54 participants who were all male, and from
the same university in Israel. This suggests that the sample is not representative of
a wider population, and the findings cannot be applied to a larger group of people,
particularly women, or individuals outside this university.

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