A researcher is interested in the effects of monetary incentives on task performance. She recruits 60 undergraduate business students and offers to pay them each $5 for a 1 hour research session. She then randomly assigns these students to either a control group or an incentive group. Participants in both groups try to solve as many anagrams (word puzzles) as they can in 10 minutes. Before the anagram test, participants in the incentive group are told: “On average participants have been able to correctly complete 20 anagrams; you will receive $1 for each anagram more than this average that you are able to correctly complete.” Participants in the control group are not offered this monetary incentive. Instead, they are simply told: “Do your best to correctly complete as many anagrams as you can.” The incentive group correctly solved an average of 29 anagrams and the control group correctly solved an average of only 20 anagrams. The researcher concluded that monetary incentives improved performance over instructions to do your best.
what is the independent variable?
what are the levels of the independent variable?
what is the dependent variable?
identify one confounding variable?
1 answer