Question 3.105

3.105 Employee meditation.

You see a news report of an experiment that claims to show that a meditation technique increased job satisfaction of employees. The experimenter interviewed the employees and assessed their levels of job satisfaction. The subjects then learned how to meditate and did so regularly for a month. The experimenter reinterviewed them at the end of the month and assessed their job satisfaction levels again.

  1. There was no control group in this experiment. Why is this a blunder? What lurking variables might be confounded with the effect of meditation?
  2. The experimenter who diagnosed the effect of the treatment knew that the subjects had been meditating. Explain how this knowledge could bias the experimental conclusions.
  3. Briefly discuss a proper experimental design, with controls and blind diagnosis, to assess the effect of meditation on job satisfaction.

3.105

(a) The placebo effect could be at work because no control group was used. Also, job conditions could have changed drastically over the past month. (b) If the experimenter is biased toward meditation either way, the evaluation likely is not objective. (c) Important factors include using a control group that doesn't receive the meditation and making sure the evaluator doesn't know which employees meditated or not.