PSY1105 Psychology Assignment-Macquarie University Australia.

PSY1105 Research Report
We have described a study in the tutorials for this unit and have collected some data for that study.You are to write up the study as if you were on the research team that conducted it, according to APA Guidelines for writing research reports (as found in the APA Publication Manual).
This document will provide a broad guide, but the details you need have been provided in tutorials and it will be necessary to go back through your notes and include the more precise details.
PSY1105 Psychology Assignment-Macquarie University Australia.

Research Question:
Is there a role for higher education in mitigating conspiracist ideation, by promoting analytical thinking?

Aim:
Our aim is to examine the relative effectiveness of British undergraduate university majors in mitigating levels of conspiracist ideation by promoting analytical thinking.

Starter References:

• Brotherton, R., French, C.C., & Pickering, A.D. (2013). Measuring belief in conspiracy theories: The generic conspiracist beliefs scale. Frontiers in Psychology: Personality and Social Psychology, 4(279). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00279.
• Douglas, K.M., Sutton, R. M. , Cichocka, A. (2017). The psychology of conspiracy theories. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 538-542. doi:10.1177/0963721417718261.
• Lin, S. (2014). Science and non-science undergraduate students’ critical thinking and argumentation performance in reading a science news report. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education ,12(5), 1023-1046. doi:10.1007/s10763-013-9451-7.
• Swami, V., Voracek, M., Stieger, S., Tran, U.S., & Furnham, A. (2014). Analytic thinking reduces belief in conspiracy theories. Cognition, 133(3),572-585. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.08.006.

You must find at least three more papers to discuss, through independent research.

Hypotheses:
H1: Science majors will have a lower mean GCB score relative to non-science majors.
H2: Science majors will have a lower mean GCB score relative to humanities majors.
H3: Science majors will have a lower mean GCB score relative to ‘other’ majors.

Methods:
Participants:

• 1014 participants recruited via an online platform for hosting studies called Prolific
• Demographic characteristics:
  • Age ranged from 18 to 75 years old, the mean age was 31.3 years, with a standard deviation of 13.4 years
  • Regarding sex, 533 indicated they were ‘male’, 446 indicated ‘female’, and 35 answered ‘other’.

Materials:
• What is the GCB scale? What is it measuring?

Procedure:
• How did the participants “flow” through the study? What did they have to do?

PSY1105 Psychology Assignment-Macquarie University Australia.

Study Design:
• Quasi-experimental, between-subjects design (i.e. comparing people in pre-existing groups)
• Independent variable: university major
o 3 levels: science, humanities, other
• Dependent variable: GCB score

Results:
• Provide descriptive statistics. How many people ended up in each group? What were the means and standard deviations of each group?
• Provide results of hypothesis testing, i.e. 3 x independent samples t-tests

Discussion:
• Were your hypotheses supported or not?
• How does that align with previous literature?
• What were the strengths and limitations of our study?
• What is a future study we could do to continue our investigation into this topic?
• What are the implications of our findings in a day-to-day sense?

PSY1105 Psychology Assignment-Macquarie University Australia.

Resources for Following APA Style:
• Tutorials throughout the semester
• APA Publication Manual (7th Edition)
• Access ‘Academic Writer’ via the library for an online resource for APA Style
• Purdue Online Writing Lab

Raw STATA Output:
You must not include raw output in a research report. The data you need is presented here, but you need to pull out the important details and write it up in sentences, as per the demonstration in the statistics lectures and tutorials.