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Unpriming or Strategizing?: A Critique of Sparrow and Wegner

When asked to randomly select answer choices on easy multiple choice questions, people select more correct answers than expected by chance. Sparrow and Wegner showed that this tendency was eliminated if participants answered questions correctly before answering randomly. They argued that answering a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Zuckerman, Miron, Silberman, Jordan, Pham, Hoang, Zahn, Ista
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3914830/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24505293
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087512
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author Zuckerman, Miron
Silberman, Jordan
Pham, Hoang
Zahn, Ista
author_facet Zuckerman, Miron
Silberman, Jordan
Pham, Hoang
Zahn, Ista
author_sort Zuckerman, Miron
collection PubMed
description When asked to randomly select answer choices on easy multiple choice questions, people select more correct answers than expected by chance. Sparrow and Wegner showed that this tendency was eliminated if participants answered questions correctly before answering randomly. They argued that answering a question correctly unprimes the tendency to choose the correct answer, thereby reducing the correct response rate close to the chance level of.5. An alternative explanation, consistent with these results, is that answering questions correctly provides a baseline, which allows participants to strategize, i.e., to match and mismatch equal numbers of their purportedly random responses to the baseline response. Three studies showed that the presence of a baseline, even when unpriming is not feasible, led to lower correct response rates than those obtained in a condition in which no baseline was available. Furthermore, the presence of a baseline led to more nonrandom sequences of correct and incorrect responses. One specific sequence–alternating correct and incorrect answers–mediated the relation between the presence of a baseline and lower correct response rate. These findings suggest that strategizing, not unpriming, accounts for Sparrow and Wegner’s results.
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spelling pubmed-39148302014-02-06 Unpriming or Strategizing?: A Critique of Sparrow and Wegner Zuckerman, Miron Silberman, Jordan Pham, Hoang Zahn, Ista PLoS One Research Article When asked to randomly select answer choices on easy multiple choice questions, people select more correct answers than expected by chance. Sparrow and Wegner showed that this tendency was eliminated if participants answered questions correctly before answering randomly. They argued that answering a question correctly unprimes the tendency to choose the correct answer, thereby reducing the correct response rate close to the chance level of.5. An alternative explanation, consistent with these results, is that answering questions correctly provides a baseline, which allows participants to strategize, i.e., to match and mismatch equal numbers of their purportedly random responses to the baseline response. Three studies showed that the presence of a baseline, even when unpriming is not feasible, led to lower correct response rates than those obtained in a condition in which no baseline was available. Furthermore, the presence of a baseline led to more nonrandom sequences of correct and incorrect responses. One specific sequence–alternating correct and incorrect answers–mediated the relation between the presence of a baseline and lower correct response rate. These findings suggest that strategizing, not unpriming, accounts for Sparrow and Wegner’s results. Public Library of Science 2014-02-05 /pmc/articles/PMC3914830/ /pubmed/24505293 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087512 Text en © 2014 Zuckerman et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Zuckerman, Miron
Silberman, Jordan
Pham, Hoang
Zahn, Ista
Unpriming or Strategizing?: A Critique of Sparrow and Wegner
title Unpriming or Strategizing?: A Critique of Sparrow and Wegner
title_full Unpriming or Strategizing?: A Critique of Sparrow and Wegner
title_fullStr Unpriming or Strategizing?: A Critique of Sparrow and Wegner
title_full_unstemmed Unpriming or Strategizing?: A Critique of Sparrow and Wegner
title_short Unpriming or Strategizing?: A Critique of Sparrow and Wegner
title_sort unpriming or strategizing?: a critique of sparrow and wegner
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3914830/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24505293
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087512
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