week 7

McGlone and Tofighbakhsh (3, 4, 8)

3. Describe the author's two major hypothesis. 1. People would misattribute the processing fluency produced by an aphorism's rhyming form to heightened conviction about the statement's accuracy, relative to a semantically equivalent non-rhyming version of the aphorism. 2. The prediction that this misattribution would be attenuate when people were prompted to attribute processing fluency to its actual source. Specifically, the researchers expected that people advised to distinguish aphorisms' poetic qualities from their propositional content would be less prone to exhibit the "rhyme as reason" effect.

4. Describe what you would be asked to do as a participant in the study. For the study I would be randomly assigned to to one of the aphorism lists and an instruction condition. I would read each aphorism carefully and then rate the degree to which I perceived the aphorism as "an accurate description of human behavior," on a scale from 1 to 9.  Once I completed the accuracy ratings, I would be asked to answer the yes or no question: "In your opinion, do aphorisms that rhyme describe human behavior more accurately than those that do not rhyme." Lastly, after responding to the question, I would be debriefed about the true purpose of the experiment. 
8. Describe the pattern of results obtained (a) in the warning condition and (b) in the control condition. Did the results support the authors' original hypothesis? Can people separate rhyme from reason?

Analysis of the accuracy readings indicated that, overall, there were no reliable difference in mean rating between extant rhyming and non-rhyming aphorisms or original and modified versions. However, participants in the control-instructions condition generated slightly higher ratings overall than those in the warning condition. As was predicted, participants who were not cautioned to distinguish aphorisms semantic content from their poetic qualities asigned higher accuracy ratings to the original writing aphorisms than their modified counterparts.

In contrast, participants in the warning condition exhibited a markedly different pattern of accuracy rating. The original writing aphorisms were assigned reliable lower accuracy ratings in this condition than in the control condition.

As a result, bringing the distinction between an aphorism’s poetic qualities and semantic content to the participants’ attention had the desired effect of preventing their tendency to conflate fluency with perceived accuracy.  However, the researchers found no evidence that this tendency in the control condition stemmed from the explicit belief that rhyming aphorisms are more accurate than nonrhyming ones. For example, when asked if they held such as leave all participants in both conditions responded “no.”