The Authors of Your Text Describe the History Behind a Clever

question 205

Multiple Choice

The authors of your text describe the history behind a clever experiment conducted by Richard Nisbett and Tim Wilson (1977) .Lacking inspiration when trying to design the experiment,the researchers decided that noise outside their office door was distracting them.In a flash of insight,they decided to use noise as a distraction in their experiment,and predicted that distracting noises would influence participants' judgments,even though they didn't know they were distracted by the noise.Results of the actual experiment showed that although participants' ratings of a film were not affected by distracting noises,participants erroneously thought they were.This anecdote provided by your authors demonstrates that

• A)researchers and participants sometimes share incorrect causal theories.
• B)people often know more about the causes of their behaviors than they can explain to researchers.
• C)Richard Nisbett knows how to operate a power saw.
• D)noise is not distracting enough in social psychology experiments.