With a bit of delay here is some more information about the hot sauce experiment that you did!
This page contains two parts one on the hot sauce part and one on the foreign student essays.
My research is into mood and perceptions of social groups. And that is part of what you did during the hot sauce experiment!
I have found in previous research that men, when angry, show more (implicit) biases towards ethnic outgroups.
Basically, angry men like their own ethnic group (being British) more, and dislike an outgroup (non-british).
Another hypothesis I test is whether or not biases are stronger against outgroup men than against outgroup women.
(Simply because outgroup men form a larger threat than outgroup women).
Now, where does the hot sauce come in? Well, it has been used to measure aggression and I thought it
would be a nice measure for disliking groups/individuals.
I manipulated the vignette and 1/2 of you were led to believe that you were preparing the drink for
a Northumbria University student, the other 1/2 were led to believe that the next person was going to be from
Newcastle University. Similarly, 1/2 of you were led to beliece that you were allocating the sauce to a man,
the other 1/2 believed they were allocating the sauce to a woman.
So, as you might have guessed Northumbria students did not actually take part in this experiment!
In order, to make you believe they did take part, we had you taste a drink and presented you with a
vignette (also I was hoping that the sauce creates a knock-on effect for those students already writing
about an experience that made them angry). So, in order to make the experiment as realistic as possible,
you were made to believe that the next student would actually drink it, which was not the case.
You all received the same amount of 0.2 ml of hot sauce in 5 ml water. So if you added more than half of
the syringe into the "next person's drink" than you definitely added more than there was in yours!
This was the only way to test this realistically and I hope it doesn't offend you that I withheld information.
I have not had the time to analyze the data properly yet. But here are some very preliminary results:
Male Northumbria students did receive the most hot sauce, though only the comparison in amounts
between Northumbria men and Newcastle women was significant (p<0.05). The contrast between Northumbria
men and women was close to significance (p=0.075), while the comparison between Northumbria and
Newcastle men was not significant (p>0.25). Anger led men to add more hot sauce (p<0.01) but the
interaction of ‘student type’ x mood was not significant (p>0.1).
I'll post some graphs and further information here soon!