Greenspoon effect
The Greenspoon effect is a term used in psychology and describes the influence of confirmatory reactions by the experimenter on the respondent's response behavior: positively reinforced answers are given more frequently than those that are not reinforced.
The Greenspoon Experiment
In 1955 J. Greenspoon carried out an experiment on verbal operant conditioning , i.e. learning effects through linguistic amplifiers. The experiment used a task in which the subjects were asked to say as many words as possible within 25 minutes. The use of nouns in the plural was reinforced by the sound of "mmm-hmm". In the experiment, this minimal amplification already led to an increase in the frequency of the amplified response. The Greenspoon effect was confirmed by several variations of the original experiment.
meaning
The Greenspoon effect clearly shows that the behavior of the investigator influences the behavior of the test subjects and thus the dependent variables . It is an aspect of the experimenter effect .
See also
literature
- J. Greenspoon: The reinforcing effect of two spoken sounds on the frequency of two responses . In: American Journal of Psychology . No. 68 , 1955, pp. 409–416 ( online [PDF; 231 kB ]).