Activación del complemento

The explicit attitudes experimental design was more complex than the implicit in large part due to the necessary masking of the experimental purpose and the incorporation of a face-to- face interaction with an ASE-accented speaker, which was vital in evaluating attitudes towards a specific person rather than an ASE accent in general. The experiment was a pretest-prime- distracter-stimuli-posttest design. The pretest, or baseline, rated six speakers of three regional American accents on ten adjectives using a 7-point Likert scale. The prime was the television clips described above. The distracter was comprehension questions about the primes. The test stimuli was a debriefing read by a Southern-accented RA. The posttest, or evaluation, was a 7- point Likert scale semantic differential rating of the RA set within a larger evaluation of the experiment. Two conditions were created. In Condition A, participants heard the television clips that had the less intelligent character played with a Southern accent (stereotypical condition). In

represent more of a mediating influence as it may explain how or why a relationship between variables and outcomes occurs.

38

Condition B, participants heard the clips with the more intelligent Southern-accented character (counterstereotypical condition).

Masking the study’s purpose was vital to the explicit attitudes results due to the susceptibility of these measures to change if the participant was conscious of what was being measured. The key design feature of the experiment, then, was the masking of the stimuli. I based this design feature on a set of successful psychology experiments looking at effects of the race of an experimenter on participant behavior (McConnell & Leibold 2001). Participants in McConnell and Leibold’s study interacted with a White experimenter whose shift was

supposedly ending three quarters of the way through the experiment. When the White

experimenter left, a Black experimenter replaced her. Interactions between the participant and both experimenters were recorded on video and analyzed in addition to both implicit and explicit attitudes measures. McConnell and Leibold discuss a multitude of results, but most importantly for the present study, they found that the White experimenter received more positive behavior than the Black experimenter while successfully masking the purpose of the study.

In my experiment, the researcher set up the experiment and read the participant a scripted19 overview of the experiment’s instructions. The participant was told they were participating in a media study looking at differences in perception and comprehension when media was presented in audio only, visual only, and audio-visual form. All participants were told they were in the audio only condition to explain the lack of visual stimuli in the recordings. They were told they would complete all the parts of the experiment, then receive more information about the experiment before being asked to fill out an evaluation of the experiment under the guise of the experiment being new to the lab and the lab wanting feedback about what was successful and what needed improvement. As in McConnell and Leibold’s protocol, the

researcher explained that she had to step out for a meeting. She explained further that if she had not returned by the time the participant finished the experiment, a research assistant (who was reading at a separate table in the room) would debrief them on the purpose of the study and set up the evaluation. The RA was, in fact, a native Southern-accented male hired as a compatriot in the study.

As in the implicit design, the experiment had two conditions. Again, only difference between the conditions was the television audio clips. The experiment began with the baseline in

39

which the participant rated speakers with different American regional accents on semantic differential rating scales of traits associated with status and solidarity. Participants were told they were rating actors they might hear in the clips in the interest of rating the voices in a neutral context. The prime was three television audio clips discussed in detail in Section 2.3.1. Each clip had a more and a less intelligent character. The experimental conditions varied by the accent of the characters. The less intelligent character had an ASE accent in the stereotypical condition; the more intelligent character has an ASE accent in the counterstereotypical condition.

Comprehension and perception questions after each clip serve as the distracter task. The

distraction component as included to (1) elicit qualitative feedback that may clarify quantitative patterns and (2) serve as the decoy measure of the experiment to mask the true purpose of the study. These questions were mostly open-ended and had no right or wrong answer. The set of distracter questions also included the perceived realism measure discussed in Section 2.3.4. Following the last set of distracter questions, the participant was told they were finished with the experiment. They exited the experimental area and were met by the ASE-accented RA. The interaction with the Southern-accented RA provided the exposure stimuli for the critical posttest portion of the experiment. This interaction came in the form of a scripted debriefing explaining more about the supposed purpose of the experiment. The RA then set up an evaluation of the experiment on the computer. Among many other questions, the evaluation contained another semantic differential rating, this time focusing on the RA, as the posttest measure. The RA texted the researcher once the participant began the evaluation. The experimenter returned to the room and paid the participant once the evaluation was finished. See Figure 2.3 below for visual representations of the participant and researcher views of the experiment.

40 Figure 2.3: View of the experiment from the perspective of the participant (left) and researcher (right).

This methodology allows for both the comparison of attitudes before and after stimuli and the comparison of posttest data between conditions. These results test short-term effects of exposure to linguistics stereotypes (and counterstereotypes) on television.