task4题目 Reading Part:

　　Experimenter Effect

　　One objective of any experiment is, of course, to obtain accurate results.Sometimes, however, problems occur that lead to in accurate results. One such problem is the experimenter effect. The experimenter effect occurs when are searcher ’s expectations affect the outcome of the experiment. The researcher expects a particular result from the experiment, and that expectation causes the researcher to act in ways that influence the behavior of the experiment participants, thereby invalidating the results of the experiment.

　　Listening Part:

　　Now listen to part of a lecture on this topic in a psychology class.

　　(male professor) For example, I recently read about a case in which a researcher was given two groups of monkeys and he was asked to train these monkeys to pick up a ball and put it in a box, and he was told to record how many hours it took to train each monkey to learn to do this.

　　Now, before he started the training, the researcher was told that one group o f monkeys was highly intelligent and the other group was less intelligent. In truth, there was no difference between them. All the monkeys were actually very similar in terms of intelligence. But the researcher didn’t know that. He thought on e group was smarter, so he expected that group would be easier to train.

　　So, what happened? Well, the research er trained the monkeys to perform the action, and it turned out that, on average, it took him two hours less time to train the supposedly smart monkeys than the supposedly less intelligent monkeys. Why? Well, it turns out that with the supposedly smart monkeys the researcher smiled at them a lot, gave them a lot of encouragement, talked to them a lot, worked hard to communicate with them. But with the monkeys he thought were less intelligent, he wasn’t this enthusiastic, he didn’t try this hard, wasn’t quite optimistic.

　　Question:

　　Explain how the example from the professor ’s lecture illustrates the experimenter effect.

　　答案解析：

　　1. Reading key

　　(1.1) Term: Experimenter Effect

　　(1.2) Definition: The experimenter effect is a problem that occurs when a researcher’s expectations affect the outcome of the experiment.

　　2. Listening key

　　(2.1) Researcher was asked to train two groups of monkeys to teach them how to pick up some balls and put them in a box

　　(2.2) The researcher was told one group of monkey was smarter than the other, although they are equally intelligent.

　　(2.3) Result: monkeys from the supposedly smarter group learn to finish the task in two hours less compare to the monkeys from the other group

　　(2.4) Why? The researcher expected the smarter group to be easier to train so he smiled to those monkeys and encouraged them a lot during the experiment. But he didn’t work as hard with the monkeys from the other group