#10 — Grounding/FOOK

Method

Participants

In our experiments, n students (y males, x females; average age z) from Communication courses at Cornell University participated in the study in exchange for course credit.

Materials & Procedure

At the start of each experiment, participants were given a brief overview about the premise of the experiment. They were told they would be participating in a study on short-term memory to prevent any expectations of the experiment from affecting the outcome. After this overview, each participant was asked to complete a consent form and a demographics form, the latter being used to collect statistics on age and gender.

The participants in each dyad were then separated; each participant was given an excerpt from a T.S. Eliot poem, "Burnt Norton", to read. Afterwards, they were asked to answer a short questionnaire that related to what they did and did not understand in the poem, and how they interpreted it. The final section of the questionnaire tested their recognition of public figures in a variety of fields as diverse as physics, art, entertainment, and crime. After each participant answered their questionnaire, the dyad was brought together either in an AIM
conversation or in a face-to-face setting and was asked to have a short conversation with each other about what they had read. After completing the conversation, the participants were again separated and asked to answer a second questionnaire. Many of the questions on this questionnaire corresponded directly to specific questions on the first questionnaire, but this time asked how they believed their partner in
the dyad had understood the poem. Similar to the first questionnaire, the second questionnaire included a public figure recognition section, which asked if a participant thought their partner would recognize the same people the participant was asked about in the first questionnaire.

Once both participants finished their questionnaires, they were brought together again for a short debriefing, during which they were told about the true premise of the experiment. Each participant received a copy of a standard debriefing document, as well as a copy of the consent form that they had signed before starting the experiment.

Coding

Once both questionnaires had been collected from all participants, the data from each dyad was entered into a spreadsheet and correlated. We plan to perform four types of correlations with these data:

1. For each participant, compare his/her first questionnaire and second questionnaire;


2. For each dyad, compare their first questionnaires;


3. For each dyad, compare their second questionnaires;


4. For each dyad, compare one’s first questionnaire to the other's second questionnaire, and vice versa.

Since many of the questions on the first questionnaire correspond to questions on the second questionnaire, these will be the focus of our numerical correlations. All of these corresponding questions have numerical values ranging from 1 to 7, except for the yes/no questions in the person recognition section. Our correlations will measure numerically how accurately participants intuited each other's knowledge and feelings, as well as how close each particpant's knowledge and feelings were to the knowledge and feelings of their dyad partner.