For Exercises 3.42 to 3.44, see pages 144–145; for 3.45, see page 146; for 3.46 and 3.47, see page 147; for 3.48 and 3.49, see page 150; for 3.50 and 3.51, see page 152; for 3.52, see page 153; for 3.53 and 3.54, see page 154; and for 3.55, see page 156.
3.53 Managers and stress.
Some companies employ consultants to train their managers in meditation in the hope that this practice will relieve stress and make the managers more effective on the job. An experiment that claimed to show that meditation reduces anxiety proceeded as follows. The experimenter interviewed the subjects and rated their level of anxiety. Then the subjects were randomly assigned to two groups. The experimenter taught one group how to meditate, and they meditated daily for a month. The other group was simply told to relax more. At the end of the month, the experimenter interviewed all the subjects again and rated their anxiety level. The meditation group now had less anxiety. Psychologists said that the results were suspect because the ratings were not blind—that is, the experimenter knew which treatment each subject received. Explain what this means and how lack of blindness could bias the reported results.
3.53
Because the experimenter measured their anxiety and also taught the group how to meditate, the experimenter could biasedly rate the group that meditated lower or higher in anxiety based on their expectation of whether the meditation would help or not. Also, separate from the experimenter’s possible bias, the subjects themselves could behave more or less anxiously during the final evaluation based on their interaction with the experimenter during the meditation instruction, which could also bias the results.