The bitter sweet smell of success

THE EFFECTS OF OLFACTORY STIMULI ON SCHOLASTIC PERFORMANCE

Burhan Akpinar

The research described in this paper was carried out to determine the effects of olfactory stimuli (provided by natural essence oils of lemon) on achievement in English of fourth grade pupils in a school in Turkey. Pupils were randomly assigned to an experimental group (n:29) or a control group (n:29). Both groups were taught English lessons twice a week for a period of four weeks as part of the normal curriculum. In the experimental group, lessons were provided in an aromatic atmosphere. In the control group, lessons were provided in a normal classroom environment. Following treatment, the experimental group outperformed the control group on an achievement test in English. A month after the termination of treatment, the performance of both groups on the achievement test had deteriorated, but the experimental group still outperformed the control group.

Irish Journal of Education , vol 36, 2005

The Weirdest People in the World?

Aside from its catchy title, this paper seems pretty relevant for those do experimental psychology and behavioural economics:

The Weirdest People in the World?
Joseph Henrich, Steve J. Heine, Ara Norenzayan
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, selfconcepts and related motivation and the heritability of IQ.

Experiments in psychology and economics

Experiments are very common in psychology and increasingly so in economics particularly in areas like behavioural economics and neuroeconomics which would hardly exist without them. The abstracts of papers in such fields often make quite grand claims for the implications of their results. Leaving aside the question of ecological validity - whether you are going to behave the same in the real world as when lying prostrate in an MRI scanner - there is an important question of how culturally general one's results are.
A favourite task in experiments is the Ultimatum Game. It turns out that a characteristic finding in experiments conducted in the US (that the first movers irrationally offer too much and the second movers irrationally reject what they regard as too little) is not replicated in one study in the Peruvian Amazon. The Machiguenga tribe behave much more like economists would predict which is somewhat ironic since they have probably managed to avoid any exposure to the dismal science.