What would be the control group in my experiment?

In my experiment I will pretend to steal an accomplice’s belongings in front of there friends while the accomplice is away and I will assess the reactions of the others… what would be the dependent, independent, and extraneous variables. And what would be the control group? My hypothesis is “If people see us pretending to steel, they will not do anything”.|||I'm not quite sure about your hypothesis. How would anyone know if someone is "pretending to steal"? Your idea sounds similar to research that has been done to see if the number of friends affects whether or not one of those friends will help out if they see their friends belongings being stolen (the concept of Diffusion of Responsibility). If this were the case, then your hypothesis would be, "The fewer friends that are present at the time of the pretend robbery, the more likely they would help"





From the description you provide, you don't really have an experiment yet. You need to have a control group. In order to have that, you need to define "...in front of their friends." You would have an experiment if you pretended to steal belongings in front of a) 1 friend and b) 2 friends. I would bet that the "reaction" (another term you would have to be more specific about) would be greater if there was only one friend present.





So:





Independent variable: number of friends present at the time of the robbery





Dependent variable: "reaction" of the friends (whether the friend(s) went after the robber, whether they called for help, etc.)





Extraneous variables: if you are going to try to do this in a natural setting then there would be a lot of variables that you couldn't control that might affect the results of your study. For example, the number of people besides the friend(s) who are also present who might try to help out as well (that could ruin the experiment), or the weather at the time (if it's raining then the friends might not be paying attention to the robbery) .





Hope this helps!





Michael


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