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Senior Psychology Experiment Essay

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Psychology Experiment Essay It is inevitable to stop people from creating their own perspectives, but is it possible to change those perspectives or not? The issue that we deiced to study tries to answer the question: Do you believe only what you want to believe? My group and I realized that during this time, especially with the presidential debates, it was important to find an answer to this question. We wanted to prove whether people react to new information in a biased manner, when it conflicts with their previous beliefs. In other words, are all people programmed to be narrow minded? To look further into this topic, we developed an experiment that will try to prove that people are prejudice towards new information. We believe that if people read something that contradicts their original beliefs on a topic, then they will defend their position regardless of the factual information presented because people develop personal biases towards what they want to believe in.
In order to prove that people believe only what they want to believe, we have devised a survey which forces people to react in their biased manner. We decided that in order to receive strong reactions from people we needed to choose a controversial topic. During the course of our experiment we will interview 60 people. Of the 60 people 30 of them will be given the article that states marijuana is not a gate way drug. The other 30 people will be given the article that states marijuana is a gate way drug. Of each of the 30 people groups, we find out how many people support the article and how many oppose the article. Our control groups will be composed of people who have the same beliefs as the article before reading it.

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