Demand Characteristics

It is sometimes hard to believe how powerful demand characteristics can be. The following exercises will allow you to measure the impact of demand characteristics. These can be done individually or a group of students can pool data that was collected by each of the students in the group.

In this first example, you are to ask people to rate how interesting a place would be to visit. The list of places with the rating scale is included as a web page that can be printed out for your convenience. You can print as many copies as you need. Demand characteristics will be invoked by giving half of your participants instructions that include a casual statement that "For some reason, people tend to rate cities as more interesting than states." The other half of your participants are told exactly the opposite ("For some reason, people tend to rate states as more interesting than cities."). The task should take people just a couple of minutes, so it should not be difficult to recruit friend to help you with this psychology project. There are 10 states and 10 cities listed on the form. The score you will use is the sum of the ratings for states minus the sum of the ratings for cities. When you get the sheets back from your participants, be sure to code them so that you know who was told that cities tend to be rated as more interesting to visit and who was told that states tend to be rated as more interesting to visit.
You might think that the demand characteristics are rather obvious when you tell participants what you expect, and that is true. Can demand characteristics be communicated without direct instructions? To test this, each student in the class should try to recruit two friends to help them collect data. Both friends are asked to have two of their friend fill out the form on rating Cities and States. However, instead of telling them to tell their participants that cities or states tend to be rated more interesting (depending on the condition), you ask them to collect the data by reading the names of the cities and states and get a rating from each person. However, one friend is told that cities tend to be rated as more interesting and the other friend is told that states tend to be rated as more interesting. Presumably, neither will pass that information on to the people they question, but they might well transmit some subtle demand characteristics. The effect should be smaller and more subtle than in project #1, so it will be important to pool the data from the entire class to be able to measure it.