please check the word doc for instructions and the pdfs for the two articles
Your task in this assignment is to read a journal article and its associated press coverage, write your own report on the research, evaluate how well the news article described the findings, and discuss any practical applications for the research. start to read the journal article carefully. Don’t look at the popular press article yet. As you are reading the journal article, do so with a critical eye and take notes as you go so that you can remember your thoughts when you write your report. Start with the abstract so you can get a broad overview of the goals and findings of the paper. Then move on to the introduction and literature review, so that you understand the researchers’ hypotheses and the supporting literature that they have used in order to build their arguments. Ask yourself: “Does this sound like a plausible line of thought?” A good paper should lead you step-by-step through the authors’ theory and set up the rationale for the studies to follow. Take a bit of time to think about and jot down how you might test the hypotheses under study. What kinds of data would you want to collect, and how would you know if your hypotheses are confirmed or disconfirmed? Would you perform an experiment? Would you look for correlational data? Would you observe participants from afar? Find archival data? If you are running an experiment, what would be your independent and dependent variables? Thinking in this way can help you to better evaluate the methods that the authors of the paper used in their studies. Next, read the methods for the first study. How well does it test the question and hypotheses that the authors have laid out in the up-front section of the paper? Are you convinced by the ways in which the authors constructed the study to test the hypotheses? For example, do the independent and dependent Adapted from E.F. Williams, University of Florida variables accurately reflect the constructs described in the front end of the paper? Why or why not? For example, are their interventions so heavy-handed that they would be obvious or leading to participants? Are they confusing? Or, do they seem like they are a good reflection of reality and the questions at hand? Remember to support your answers to these questions with solid arguments and specific descriptions from the paper. As an unrelated and completely made-up example, saying, “The study about vegan food would never work,” is not a great answer. Why specifically would the study not work? In comparison, consider a response like, “In Study 1, participants were asked to evaluate how they would judge the morals of someone spending extra money to buy vegan meals for their family. The authors found that consumers who spent extra to buy vegan food were judged more negatively than consumers who bought meals containing meat and dairy. The authors argue that this is evidence of innate prejudice against individuals who practice veganism. However, an alternate explanation is that participants were not evaluating the expense of the meals but rather a perceived deficit in nutritional value, which could have also driven negative evaluations. In subsequent studies, care should be taken to separate financial judgments and healthfulness judgments.” Here the student describes a potential alternate explanation for the finding and how it might be addressed. In sum, remember to say “Why?” and “So what?” As you progress to the results and discussion for each study, concentrate more heavily upon the patterns in the data and less on the actual statistics. Do they confirm the hypotheses? What questions are you left with at the end of the study? Are these questions addressed in subsequent studies? Keep in mind that no study is perfect, particularly on its own. All of the studies should work together to form a clear picture of whether or not the research question is supported. Finally, you will reach the general discussion of the paper, which is its conclusion. At the end of the paper, are you satisfied with the explanations the authors have provided? What open questions remain? What broader applications are for this research? Reading the popular press article After you’ve read the journal article, move on to the popular press report. Now that you’ve analyzed the journal article carefully, how well did the media describe the findings? Do they get the main story right? Do they do a good job at describing the details of what participants did and what was found, or are important details missing? Do they describe the nature of the data correctly (e.g. talking about correlational relationships as though they were causal)? Are the implications of the findings accurately portrayed, or are the conclusions overstated or understated? If you were to read just the journal article or just the popular press article, how convinced would you be of the findings and conclusions, and would your impressions be accurate? Writing Overview of your report The first part of the report will be your summary of the journal article. Pretend you are describing the findings to the general public – they have not read the journal article and they are not well-versed in scientific methodology. Try to make it accessible and interesting to read, as though you were seeking to present these findings to your boss or to a media audience. Ask yourself these types of questions: What was the main question of the research and what were the hypotheses under study? How did the researchers test their ideas? What did they find? What do their findings mean for everyday life? This section should be about 30% of your report. Next, critique the journal article. In short, I want to know your evaluation of whether the research question was interesting and worthwhile, and whether the evidence presented convincingly confirms or disconfirms the hypotheses. Ask yourself questions like: Was the research question one that I would want to know the answer to? Did the hypotheses make sense given the supporting literature? Did the methods that were used provide a good investigation of the question and hypotheses at hand, or would you have done something different? Did the results confirm or disconfirm the hypotheses? What open questions remain? Do you think the principles of human cognition, affect, or behavior described by these findings would generalize outside the specific context studied or outside the lab? Again, remember to support your assertions with well-reasoned arguments and examples from the paper. This section should also be about 30% of your report. Next, evaluate the media report. Here I want to know whether the news article is an accurate reflection of what was found in the journal article. To help your analysis, you can use the questions above as a guide if you wish, but don’t feel that you have to restrict your analyses to these questions. How would you improve the news article if you were the one writing it? This section should also make up about 30% of your paper. For both the journal article and the news story, remember that almost of these pieces of work have some room for improvement (there are always tradeoffs to be made), so be sure to not just say, “It’s great exactly how it is!” For the last 10% of your paper, discuss any practical findings that you might consider for this research. As a consumer or a manager, how might you use this to improve your life or your customers’ perceptions of value? Of course, I expect that your report will be professionally written, logical in its arguments, well- supported by evidence, and free of grammatical/spelling errors. Report details Your report should be a maximum of 8 pages, double spaced, 12 pt. font, 1 inch margins. Failure to meet these specifications will result in a 10% reduction in your grade. The grading breakdown will be as follows: Critique of journal article 25% Critique of popular press article 25% Practical applications 15% Overall quality of writing / professionalism 10% Presentation 25% Waiting for Merlot Psychological Science 2014, Vol. 25(10) 1924 –1931 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0956797614546556 pss.sagepub.com Research Article So tedious is this day As is the night before some festival To an impatient child that hath new robes And may not wear them. —Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene ii, lines 28–31 (Shakespeare & Durband, 1597/1985) Think back to a time you waited in line. Was it a pleasurable experience, or did you feel a bit like Shakespeare’s impa- tient child? We contend that your experience likely depended on what you were waiting for. Specifically, we propose that waiting for an experience tends to be more enjoyable than waiting to receive a material good. Waiting to get into a Black Friday sale, for example, is likely to differ from wait- ing to get tickets to “Saturday Night Live,” even if your initial excitement about these two events is the same. We suspect that you would likely savor the amusing sketches you might see in the latter case, but experience a bit more impatience when waiting to get a coveted material possession, like an item of high-end clothing or the newest gadget. To be sure, waiting is often an aversive experience. As the literature on temporal discounting indicates, people have a marked preference for consuming things now rather than later (McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein, & Cohen, 2004). But Loewenstein (1987) showed that antic- ipation sometimes has its benefits, and he defined savor- ing as the positive utility derived from the anticipation of future consumption. In a well-known study, he found that participants were willing to pay more to kiss their favorite celebrity 3 days in the future than to experience the kiss immediately, an indication that people get plea- sure from anticipation. He argued that savoring is most likely when consumption is fleeting: In such cases, “anticipation (and sometimes memory) serves to extend 546556 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797614546556Kumar et al.Anticipation of Experiences and Possessions research-article2014 Corresponding Author: Thomas Gilovich, Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601 E-mail:
[email protected] Waiting for Merlot: Anticipatory Consumption of Experiential and Material Purchases Amit Kumar1, Matthew A. Killingsworth2,3, and Thomas Gilovich1 1Cornell University; 2University of California, Berkeley; and 3University of California, San Francisco Abstract Experiential purchases (money spent on doing) tend to provide more enduring happiness than material purchases (money spent on having). Although most research comparing these two types of purchases has focused on their downstream hedonic consequences, the present research investigated hedonic differences that occur before consumption. We argue that waiting for experiences tends to be more positive than waiting for possessions. Four studies demonstrate that people derive more happiness from the anticipation of experiential purchases and that waiting for an experience tends to be more