How does height affect if other people listen to you?

Aim:

To see if height affects authority in teenagers.

Hypothesis:

We believe that people who are above 5 foot 9 inches have more authority with regards to who listens to them with other teenagers than those who are shorter than 5 foot 9 inches.

Introduction:

 We chose this aim because Seb kept thinking we were listening to him coming up with experiment ideas because he is taller than all of us so we are more inclined to listen to him rather than Annie who was trying to speak. We then decided to prove if what Seb said was true. Since we realised we were listening to him consciously, we didn’t take his height into consideration on that, we thought subconsciously people may listen to someone because they are taller and therefore look more like an authoritative figure hence the direction our hypothesis took, was that it was true.

After completing some research on our experiment of choice, we decided on a directional hypothesis because there is a lot of evidence suggesting heigh affects how other people see and react with someone, and there are many articles on heightism with regards to employment which has a link to our aim of seeing how height makes people see taller people as more authoritative.

Procedure:

 The procedure was to have one group with one tall boy and short girl, and then it would be repeated with a tall girl and short boy to control an extraneous variable of gender. To measure the participants authority, we got them to answer questions about a speech from each person to see how much they were paying attention because of authority. We used the technique of AC DB to deal with order effects, where every participant did two trials. In this counterbalancing technique, half the participants take part in condition A then C, and the other half take part in condition B then D.

This type of experiment was a laboratory experiment so we could control a high number of variables. We used counterbalancing to minimise order effects by using repeated measures. We made consent forms that each participants had to sign to let them know of their rights as a participant. We briefed them on the experiment’s information. The participants were then asked to listen to the person’s speech and then they were asked questions on it afterwards to see how much they remembered and then it was repeated using a different speech with the other person. After the experiment we debriefed participants.

Ethics:

We gave standardised instructions to all the participants in the beginning of the experiment and before we started, we created a consent form as shown to ensure the participants were clear of their rights during the experiment. In addition, after the experiment finished, we debriefed the participants on how we were going to use their data and what the experiment was truly about. However, we didn’t tell the participants what the experiment was about till after it was finished so some were disappointed that they were not told they were going to be tested on what the confederates said otherwise “we would have paid more attention”. This shows although we fooled the participants, it would have skewed our results if we didn’t, and no-one was harmed in the process.

Sampling:

We used opportunity sampling as our method of sampling. Opportunity sampling is when you ask people walking by you in the street to participate – for our experiment we asked people around school who were free at the time we were doing our experiment. This saves a lot of time, and it is simpler, it is also much less costly as we do not need to spend more money printing our advertisements in the newspaper if we did volunteer sampling method. The participants in our study were pupils that were in year 12 and 13 at Berkhamsted Sixth Form, none of which had any prior knowledge or information before the briefing or the consent form. In total, between the two groups we had 9 participants that volunteered.

Results:

Our results are qualitative as the participants were asked questions that we calculated the marks for. In the first condition, the mean percentage for the tall woman was 83%, whereas for the short man it was much lower (25%) suggesting that the participants paid more attention to the tall woman than the short man. On the second condition, the mean for the tall man was 58% and for the short woman it was 33% which is still much lower than the tall man showing the same outcome that was shown in the first condition. The range for condition 1 and 2 for both confederates was the same (50%).

Discussion:

I would firstly say that our results show that our hypothesis is true: taller individuals are more likely to be respected and what they say is more likely to be remembered by others compared to shorter people. However, in our conditions we had a small number of participants in condition 2 making it harder to compare the results and generalise them in all situations. However, there is a clear distinction between the results of differing heights, but again it could have been skewed due to some participants knowing the confederates and only listening or not listening because they are friends – this is a confounding variable we had that we could not control in the beginning because of our sampling method. Our results apply to our society because it can be used to help make big decisions. The government can use a taller spokesperson for a speech if they want people to engage more in what they are trying to do.

• Seb M
• Zaynab U
• Annie R
• Conrad S