Edexcel A Level Psychology Paper 3 June 2024 question paper 9PS0/03

Pets and social media study

Researchers wanted to investigate the perceptions of people with pets on social media websites.

Some people use social media websites/apps to look for new friends and others to connect with existing friends. Researchers wanted to investigate how women perceive men on social media websites in relation to a pet being in the profile picture.

The researchers devised a questionnaire to assess how men were perceived in two pictures by women. One picture was a man alone and the other was the same man holding a cat. Women aged 18–24 were asked a number of questions regarding personality characteristics of the man in the two pictures. The women rated the man in the two different pictures for extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

• Extraversion (categorised by active, sociable, talkative behaviour) included statements such as ‘the man would be outgoing’.

• Agreeableness (categorised by cooperative, compliant, good‑natured behaviour) included statements such as ‘the man would sympathise with others’ feelings’.

• Conscientiousness (categorised by careful, thorough, organised behaviour) included statements such as ‘the man would pay attention to details’.

Each participant rated the man on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree), as shown in Figure 1.

(Source: adapted from Kogan and Volsche (2020))

The researchers compared the mean scores given by the participants for the two pictures for the different personality characteristics.

The results of the personality ratings for the two pictures are shown in Table 1.

Explain two conclusions you can make using the data in Table 1.

In a later question, the participants were asked about how likely they would be to add the man as a friend on their social media profile.

The likelihood of adding the man as a friend on their social media profile was rated on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 indicated ‘they would not consider it’ and 10 indicated ‘absolutely yes’.

Once the researchers had the data, they decided to conduct a Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test to determine whether there was a difference in the likelihood of adding the man as a friend on their social media profile in the two pictures.

Complete Table 2 and calculate the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test for the pets and social media study.

Explain one strength and one weakness of using a questionnaire in the pets and social media study.

Strength

Weakness

Laptop versus longhand study

Researchers wanted to investigate the effectiveness of different forms of note-taking on achievement.

The researchers noticed that students were more often using laptops to record lecture notes compared to the traditional longhand pen and paper method. As such, they wanted to compare how effective each form of note-taking was for a group of participants.

37 university students from an American university were recruited for the study and were required to attend a lecture as part of their university course on educational psychology. The pre‑recorded lecture lasted 23 minutes and consisted of text and images to remember and took place in their usual lecture hall.

The participants were split into two groups.

• Group A – Laptop note-taking (N=20)

• Group B – Longhand note-taking (N=17)

Both groups saw the same lecture separately and were given a filler/distracter task. The filler/distracter task involved vocabulary multiple choice questions to ensure any information from the lecture had entered their long‑term memory.

After the filler/distracter task, participants were given 15 minutes to review their notes and were then tested on the lecture material. Testing of the groups involved 37 multiple choice questions based on the lecture material, which included assessment on ‘image’ and ‘text‑related’ information.

(Source: adapted from Luo et al. (2018))

Describe how the researchers of the laptop versus longhand study could have used a stratified sampling technique to recruit the participants.

The mean results for the test are shown in Table 3.

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

The researchers in the laptop versus longhand study carried out a Mann Whitney U test to see if there was a difference in the overall performance of the groups of participants. They used a two‑tailed (non-directional) test with a 1% level of significance and their observed/calculated value was 84.

Explain what this shows in terms of the overall performance of the groups in the laptop versus longhand study.

The researchers in the laptop versus longhand study used a field experiment.

Explain one strength of using a field experiment for the laptop versus longhand study.

Explain two improvements that could have been made to the laptop versus longhand study.

Screen advertising and children study

Researchers wanted to investigate the effect of screen advertising on what food or drink children consumed.

They conducted a meta‑analysis on studies conducted from 1980 to 2018 on children aged between 2–18 years old in terms of how different forms of screen advertising affected what they consumed.

Screen advertising included TV and internet sites or internet adverts when playing games. They included all languages and countries in their inclusion criteria for the study, but excluded adults, non‑screen advertising, and studies prior to 1980.

The researchers compared the findings from studies about food advertising to non‑food advertising, such as for toys. 11 studies about food advertising on TV and 5 studies for internet‑based food advertising were included in their analysis.

The researchers looked at two different methodologies:

• Experimental evidence, where children watched adverts embedded in TV or the internet and were offered food immediately afterwards, with studies varying the types of food available.

• Non‑experimental evidence, through studies using various surveys/ questionnaires to consider the impact of screen advertising on body mass index (BMI).

For the experimental evidence, it was found that food advertising increased the immediate dietary intake of the children, where they consumed on average 60 calories more than children exposed to non‑food advertising. In the non‑experimental evidence, there was a significant positive association between the amount of food advertising children were exposed to and their body mass index (BMI).

The study concluded that exposure to unhealthy food advertising on TV and the internet increased the calorie consumption and body mass index (BMI) in children.

(Source: adapted from Russell et al. (2018))

Explain one weakness of using a meta‑analysis for the screen advertising and children study.

Using research evidence, explain how far learning theories can account for the findings of the screen advertising and children study.

Evaluate Baddeley (1966b) and Rosenhan (1973) in terms of their scientific status.

Carli and Anthony are at their sixth form college and they are looking at social media pictures of Carli’s recent 18th birthday party on Carli’s mobile phone.

The pictures show that Carli’s cake said ‘Happy 18th Birthday’ with no candles and there was a dry ice machine and no balloons. Carli was wearing jeans and a t‑shirt. Anthony is confused as he thought the cake had Carli’s name and 18 candles on it and thought there were pink balloons and that Carli wore a dress.

Carli laughs at Anthony, so he gets annoyed and he aggressively knocks the phone out of her hand and runs out of the classroom to the school field.

Evaluate the extent to which cognitive psychology can explain human behaviour, such as the situation regarding Carli and Anthony.

You must make reference to the context in your answer.

Assess the use of psychology in social control.