The Bradshaw & Kinch 🙌🙌 Competition Study 🙌🙌

Aim: To study the effects of competition on mental performance.

Percentage difference between conditions will show us how competition affects mental performance, as, if competition has a positive impact, the mean percentage difference will be higher in the competition categories.

Hypothesis: The scores of the participants will be different depending on if they are competing with another participant else or not.

Variables

Independent

Type of Competition

no competition

competition against others

Competition against target

Dependent

The number of correctly answered questions

Materials

Verbal and Non-Verbal reasoning test

Not memory because we are testing for mental performance, which is tested better in a formal test (e.g. non-verbal/ verbal reasoning)

there must be separate, equally difficult tests, as we are using repeated measures

We will add a time limit so that people need to try to complete the test

We will measure the percentage difference between conditions

We may need to conduct pilot studies, so that we know, without time pressure of the effects of competition, which test is easier, as we are measuring the percentage difference, but some tests may just be more difficult than others, and so the difficulty of the tests would be a confounding variable.

Experimental Design

Repeated Measures

Participant variables controlled

Participants

Who?

16-17 year-olds, educated to A-level

How?

Oppurtunistic Sampling

Only option we can functionally use

Variations

If we complete the initial study efficiently enough, we can conduct more experiments with different variables, participants and materials.

Memory Test

With Reward

Hidden Target

Negative Reinforcement

(Milgram It)

Depending on sleep level

However, we will need to pick different