Dijksterius and Knippenberg reported in their paper “The Relation Between Perception and Behaviour, or How to Win a Game of Trivial Pursuit” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in volume 74, number 4, pages 865 – 877, 1998, an interesting experiment.
Half of the subjects were asked to take 5 minutes to imagine what it means to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. They then got 55.6% of 42 Trivia Pursiit questions right. The other group that was asked to think about soccer hooligans got only 42.6% of the questions right.
The “professor” group did not know more than the “hooligan” group. They were simply in a “smart” frame of mind. Perhaps being in a “smart” frame of mind help people concentrate? Think harder? Be more confident?
This and other similar studies were discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller “blink”. I once told my students about this study but did not try to measure the result.
2 comments:
We should do something like that with our service learning students. Maybe it could be part of a team-building exercise before we head up to Hubei?
Yes, let us do that.
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