Abstract
Group size may have confounding effects on some dependent variables in experiments conducted in a collective setting. Three experiments revealed unexpected effects of group size on self-paced study and test time, although this was not the main purpose of the studies. Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that the study time of female subjects increases with the group size up to five subjects and then decreases as the group size increases to nine subjects (as used in Experiment 2). When we considered the first subject to finish studying within the group, we noted the same relationship. The phenomena were not found with the male subjects. The within-groups variability of the study time was much larger for the female than for the male subjects. Some of the findings from Experiments 1 and 2 were confirmed in Experiment 3, notwithstanding the much smaller number of subjects and a very different experimental setting. The test times were examined and, again, effects of group size were often obtained. We report these findings in order to make experimenters sensitive to possibly confounding effects from group size when carrying out experiments in a collective setting.
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Swerts, A., Peeters, R. & D’ydewalle, G. Group size: A possible distorting factor in learning experiments. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 21, 93–96 (1983). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329963
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329963