Hello, everybody! For my first PSYCH 100 post, I would like to focus on the aspect of Behaviorism, when mental events are triggered by external stimuli which leads to certain behaviors. Behaviorism and Behavioral Psychology studies have always been big things in my life. In my high school years, I was an active member of the Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Science for five years. Which means, I was always conducting new experiments, testing my knowledge, and trying to prove my hypotheses. There is a wide variety of sections one can enter, but my favorite was always Behavioral Psychology. I have done multiple projects in this category, but my favorite was when I tested to see if nonsensical material made one more intelligent.
In order to test this, I had my two groups: the experimental group and the control group. The experimental group was given three nonsensical poems which really needed to be analyzed well to get somewhat understanding of them. The poems I used were “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town” by E.E. Cummings, “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll, and “The Eagle” by someone I do not remember of the top of my head. I had my test subjects read these three poems then answer a simple questionnaire to assure they actually read the poems. After the questionnaire, I gave each person a list of letter chains with certain patterns (ex: XXAHTY; or XAXYUJ; or HFJYXX; or YHWXOX). After two minutes of studying the list of 20 letter chains, I took away the list then gave them an alternate list of 50 letter chains then told them to circle or high light the 20 letter chains they remembered from the original list. The control group performed the same experiment except they did not receive any nonsensical poems.
After the experiment was complete, the results were more people correctly identified more letter chains after they read the nonsensical poems.
Relating this back to Behaviorism, the only thing I can think of why these results came out the way they did is when people were reading these very confusing poems, their brains must have been working extra hard in order to try to comprehend them; therefore, allowing the test subjects to remember more letter chains. In this case, the confusing poems were the “external stimuli” which lead to the test subjects being able to memorize more letter chain sequences.
Wow! This study sounds really interesting. I agree with your conclusion that the study participants must have been thinking and concentrating harder on the nonsensical poems and therefore had a better time recalling the chain of letters. Maybe another way to prove this would be to read these silly poems aloud to the test subjects and then recite the chain letters to see if the same results were produced.