Write your answer to each of the listed questions, by hitting “Reply” in your email, and typing the answers into the body of the email, writing your answer immediately below each question.Your answers may be as long or as short as you need them to be.

Alternative to Research Participation 6

Starmans, C., & Bloom, P. (2016).When the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak;

Developmental differences in Judgments about inner moral conflict.Psychological Science, 27, 1498 – 1506.

Welcome to your assignment!Attached to this email you should find a .pdf copy of the article listed above.Your assignment is to read that article, and to answer the following questions to the best of your ability.This assignment is graded pass/fail; if you pass, you will receive one credit towards your PSY 101 research participation requirement.Also, if you are completing this assignment because you have been “locked” from signing up for other studies, passing will earn you an “unlock,” so that you can sign up for other studies.There is no penalty if you fail, but you do not get the research participation credit.Here are your instructions.

1. Read the attached article.
2. Write your answer to each of the listed questions, by hitting “Reply” in your email, and typing the answers into the body of the email, writing your answer immediately below each question.Your answers may be as long or as short as you need them to be.
3. Use complete sentences, and write in paragraph form.
4. Do not copy the work of anyone else, or share the work you do.Each of these assignments is stored electronically, and will be checked for plagiarism.
5. You have 48 hours from the time this email is sent to return your answers.That 48 hours will be based on the time stamp on your email (the 48 hour requirement will be waived if the IT department reports a disruption in email service during those 48 hours).
6. It may take up to 72 hours to get your assignment graded, depending on volume.

   Here are your questions!

   Question 1.The first part of the paper after the abstract is the Introduction.Most students are familiar with this part of the paper, because it is a review of other, previously published papers on the same topic – a literature review, as it were.In this paper, the authors are investigating different theories about how and when people make moral choices – including when they have mixed emotions about doing so.In the introduction, there are four different ages at which the authors claim other scientists have found that young children are aware of at least some of the issues involved in making moral decisions.Give any three of the four, including the age at which children are able to show that particular type of moral awareness.

   Question 2.The next section of the paper is the Methods section.This section should include information on exactly who the participants were, what materials were used to conduct the experiment, and the Procedure – a section explaining how the study was run, in enough detail that you could (if you wanted) run the study yourself, exactly as the authors did, without having to contact the authors for more information.This part of Experiment 1 introduces a technical term you may or may not have heard of before: counterbalancing.Counterbalancing means that every participant in the study gets the same stimuli (in this case, the pictures and stories), but that the authors used random assignment for each participant, to see which stimulus they got first, so that the same number of participants got picture/story 1 first as got picture/story 2 first.For this question, explain why you think counterbalancing matters to the study design; why is balancing the number of participants who got each order a better idea (scientifically) than showing everyone the same picture/story first?

   Question 3.Sticking with Experiment 1 for a moment, notice at the end of the Methods section that the adults and the children were treated differently in one way (hint: it involved “matching” on something).What was this difference?Do the authors say anything about the adults being treated differently from the students, in any of the Discussion sections (including the General Discussion) of the paper?If they do try to explain this difference, tell their explanation; if they do not try to explain this difference, explain any effect you think this different treatment between the adults and children might have had on the paper.

   Question 4.The Results section is where the statistics are reported in a scientific paper.The purpose of statistics is to summarize the data, so that we don’t need to try to read through a spreadsheet of numbers when we read about a study.Sometimes statistics are complicated mathematical tools; other times, figures will suffice.In this case, the primary results of the four experiments are shown in a bar graph (Figure 2, on page 1500).Looking at the bar graph, explain which experiments the children and adults showed the same behavior, and which they showed different behavior.In one sentence for each of those experiments, explain the type of moral behavior in each of the experiments.I’ll get you started with an example answer for Experiment 1; you fill in the information for the other three experiments.

   Example Answer:In experiment 1, the adults (orange bar) showed a preference for the

   “conflicted” character; the children (dark blue/green bar) showed a preference for the “unconflicted” character.According to the authors, this means adults thought the morally superior person was the one who had a hard time doing the right thing, but children thought that the person who just wanted to the right thing were more morally superior.

   Question 5.The last content area of a scientific paper is the General Discussion or Conclusion section.In a paper with multiple experiments, this is where the authors deliver the “take home” message of their paper.In this case, there are two.The first is that the authors say “Across four experiments, adults were consistently more likely than preschoolers to judge that a person who experienced inner conflict was more moral than a person who was not conflicted.”But look at the orange bar (adults) and the dark blue/green bar (children) in experiment 3.Yes, the bar of the adults is more toward the “conflicted” side of the figure than is the bar of the children – but only because the adult bar is about 50/50 for conflicted/unconflicted, where the bar for the children is heavily in favor of the unconflicted.So the adults didn’t show a preference for the conflicted person – it’s just that their 50/50 answer is more to the left of the figure than is that of the children. This suggests the authors were oversimplifying in the quote above – and oversimplifying in favor of their hypothesis!

   Now look at the second paragraph of the General Discussion; do the authors show some more oversimplification here, compared to the data in Figure 2?Explain why you think this is so, or not so.