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.
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?
ReplyDeleteYes, let us do that.
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