Edexcel A Level Psychology Paper 3 June 2023 question paper 9PS0/03

Eye contact study

Eye contact could be used as a non-verbal cue to help interpret an individual’s behaviour. A longing gaze could be considered as liking someone, but too long a gaze could lead to discomfort. If the eye contact is too brief, there could also be feelings of discomfort due to suspicions about the individual’s motives.

Researchers therefore wanted to investigate the length of time that people consider eye contact to be the most comfortable. They recruited 515 visitors to a Science Museum from 56 nations who had an age range of 11–79 years old, with 240 male and 275 female participants.

The researchers asked participants to watch a series of video clips of an actor making eye contact with them for various durations, ranging from 0.1 seconds to 10 seconds. Throughout the course of the study, the researchers used eight different actors, who were all white British, with half of them male and half female. Each participant only saw a single actor who was the same sex as themselves. After watching each video clip, the participant had to say if the duration of eye contact made them feel comfortable.

(Source: adapted from Binetti et al. (2016))

Identify the dependent variable (DV) in the eye contact study.

The data was collected by the researchers and the results are shown in Table 1.

Explain one conclusion you can make using the data in Table 1.

Table 2 shows the percentage (%) of males and females that felt comfortable with an eye contact duration of 5 seconds.

Using the data in Table 2, draw a bar chart to represent the male and female data for eye contact with a duration of 5 seconds.

Title

Explain one improvement that could have been made to the eye contact study.

Helping behaviour study

Researchers wanted to see whether being in close proximity to luxury goods would influence helping behaviour.

80 participants (40 males and 40 females) were either seen to be exiting a luxury shop in a prestigious area of Paris (20 males and 20 females) or were passers-by on an ordinary street in Paris with no shops (20 males and 20 females).

A female confederate was instructed to use crutches and carry a bottle of water in one hand and a packet of sweets in the other hand. When a participant was approximately five metres away, the confederate was required to ‘accidentally’ drop her bottle of water and packet of sweets and try to pick them up.

The participants, who were estimated to be aged between 20–70 years old, were judged to have helped the confederate when they offered to pick up the items or picked them up without asking. The confederate recorded the participant’s sex, estimated age, whether they helped or not, and the location (outside the luxury store or on the ordinary street with no shops).

(Source: adapted from Lamy et al. (2016))

The researchers in the helping behaviour study used opportunity sampling to recruit the participants for their study.

Explain one strength and one weakness of using opportunity sampling for the helping behaviour study.

Strength

Weakness

Table 3 shows the data collected by the confederates regarding the age of the participants for the helping behaviour study.

Explain one conclusion you can make using the data in Table 3.

Table 4 shows the data collected regarding the participants’ location.

Explain one conclusion you can make using the data in Table 4.

Table 5 shows the data collected regarding the participants’ gender.

The researchers in the helping behaviour study decided to carry out a chi-squared test on their data from Table 5. They found an observed/calculated value of 1.27 for a one-tailed (directional) test at the 5% level of significance when df=1.

Explain what this shows in terms of the helping behaviour of the participants in the study.

State two reasons why the researchers in the helping behaviour study used a chi-squared test to analyse their data in Table 5.

The researchers collected quantitative data when recording whether the participant would help the confederate or not for the helping behaviour study.

Explain one weakness of using quantitative data for the helping behaviour study.

The researchers used a field experiment for the helping behaviour study.

Explain one weakness of using a field experiment for the helping behaviour study.

Anti-littering study

Researchers wanted to understand how norms would be enforced or maintained in real-world contexts. They wanted to see how people would respond to someone violating a social norm in different city locations.

The researchers chose to use littering and selected two city locations to run their study. The cities chosen were New York City in the USA and Bern in Switzerland. The study was conducted at a busy tram/subway stop in each city at the same time of day.

There were two independent variables in the study to investigate littering:

• Place – they compared New York City (a very large city in the USA) to Bern (a small city in Switzerland)

• Disorder – they compared an empty bin with no surrounding litter (clean) with a full bin with lots of surrounding litter (littered).

In all conditions, a confederate walked towards the bin and threw an empty plastic bottle that missed the bin and fell on the floor. The confederate did not pick up the bottle and continued walking.

The researchers observed the reaction of people close by and recorded whether they:

• gave direct sanction (for example, verbally confronting the confederate)

• picked up the litter themselves (norm maintenance)

• had no reaction.

(Source: adapted from Berger and Hevenstone (2016))

The results of the participants’ reaction to the confederate in the anti-littering study are shown in Table 6.

Explain one practical application of the anti-littering study using the data from Table 6.

Using research evidence, explain how far learning theories could account for the findings of the anti-littering study.

Evaluate Rosenhan (1973) and Sherif et al. (1954/1961) in terms of their practical issues in design and implementation.

Ada was reading a book about a woman who became a police officer and solved an important crime. She enjoyed reading the book so much that she read it all in a single day. Ada’s mum has always really enjoyed reading books and Ada had always had excellent reports from school about her reading development.

Ada’s friend Daniel does not enjoy reading and never has. He told Ada that he preferred to play video games, particularly games about sport. Daniel’s dad enjoys reading and playing video games. When he was younger, Daniel had been asked to read more by his school and was always given extra support for his reading development.

Evaluate the extent to which human behaviour, such as the ability to read, can be explained by biological psychology.

You must make reference to the context in your answer.

Assess the ethical issues in psychological research using humans and animals.