From Theory to Design: The Role of Creativity in Designing Experiments

Source: Laboratories of Gary Lewandowski, Dave Strohmetz, and Natalie Ciarocco—Monmouth University

Research studies come into being when a researcher speculates about human thought, emotions, or behavior, and has a theory that offers a potential explanation. Often the researcher’s theory is firmly situated in everyday common experiences that may not naturally lend themselves to direct empirical study.

For example, researchers speculated that perception of a person on Facebook is influenced by the appearances and comments of the person’s Facebook friends.¹ It is difficult to test this theory using real-life Facebook profiles. Instead, researchers must use their creativity to design a study—in this case, using fake profiles that look highly realistic—to test their theory.

This video demonstrates how researchers test a central tenet of a popular social psychology theory. Specifically, this video shows a test of whether engaging in a self-expanding activity leads a person to feel a greater sense of self-efficacy.²

Psychological studies often use higher sample sizes than studies in other sciences. A large number of participants helps to ensure that the population under study is better represented, i.e., the margin of error accompanied by studying human behavior is sufficiently accounted for. In this video, we demonstrate this experiment using just 2 participants, one for each condition. However, as represented in the results, we used a total of 100 (50 for each condition) participants to reach the experiment’s conclusions.

Appendix 1. Survey of self-efficacy given to participants.

Define key variables.
1. Create an operational definition (i.e., a clear description of exactly what a researcher means by a concept) of self-expanding activity.
  1. For the purposes of this experiment, a self-expanding activity is any activity that is novel, challenging, and interesting.<

Data were collected from 50 participants per condition—100 participants overall. These numbers reflect the mean reported self-efficacy levels for participants in each condition. This large number of participants helps to ensure that the results are reliable. If this research were conducted using just two participants, it is likely that the results would have been much different, and not reflective of the greater population.

After collecting data from the 100 participants, a t-test

This two-group experiment exemplifies how researchers can devise creative ways to manipulate theory-based experiences. The creative solution shown in this video was necessary to adequately meet the required conditions of novelty, challenge, and interest. As a result, the study design was able to test the prediction from the self-expansion theory that these activities would increase self-efficacy.

A similar study creatively manipulated self-expansion in marrie

Walther, J. B., Van Der Heide, B., Kim, S., Westerman, D., & Tong, S. The role of friends' appearance and behavior on evaluations of individuals on Facebook: Are we known by the company we keep? Human Communication Research. 34 28-49 (2008).
Mattingly, B. A., & Lewandowski, G. J. The power of one: Benefits of individual self-expansion. The Journal Of Positive Psychology. 8 (1), 12-22. doi:10.1080/17439760.2012.746999 (2013).
Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. Couples' shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 78(2), 273-284. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.273 (2000).
Sherman, G. D., Haidt, J., & Coan, J. A. Viewing cute images increases behavioral carefulness. Emotion. 9, 282-286 (2009).

Transcript

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