Praise Vs. Critisim

Research Question: Do people work harder with praise or criticism?

Questions: Do people try less when they get criticised?

Do they work harder when they get praised?

Does criticism change how they think?

Background Information:

Praising someone can build someone's self-esteem, criticism can motivate you to do things that they said you couldn't. Beyond anecdotal evidence, a university study found out that criticism from opposing fans make players play better. We must be cautious about criticizing someone who’s already feeling beaten down.

Some research shows that people can get better from poor performance when competitor comment on their failures. While criticism from teammates can lead people into performing worse, external criticism can be a trigger that boosts performance as people try to prove the opponents wrong. The kind of compliments you give to a child may influence their general work behavior, even though they’re all positive. Hypothesis: I think that the people who are criticized will work harder to prove that they can do it and that they are not useless. And the people who are praised will not change because they think that they are already doing great and they won't try to be better because they are afraid to fail.

Experiment: In my experiment I had 60 kids in the age of 10-12. I split them in 3 groups, 2 of them were experimental and 1 group controlled. I tried to find people who had low self esteem and high self esteem and split them equally between the groups to see what would happen. These are some of the questions in the test:What is 5x6?When was the roman empire at its peak?What is cubism?Double blinded: At the beginning I told the teacher to judge some kids. Then the Teacher gave a test to the kids, when they were done someone corrected them. After they got back the test the teacher judged the kids who I told her to do, she also told them that they will do a similar test in a week.

The next time they did the test you could see that the people who got criticised got higher score than they did before. And the people who got praised didn't try as hard because they were scared to fail. I did the experiment twice and it came to almost the same results.

Drawing Conclusion

After doing my research I saw that most of the people who were praised didn't try as hard and even though it was around the same test with the same information they thought they already knew the information even though they forgot it. And the people who got criticised tried harder even though they knew they would have to spend less time playing or being with friends. The people who got criticised were trying to prove the teachers wrong and that they could do better. My hypothesis was correct, that when you are criticised you try to work harder. In this experiment it could have ended up thet the people who were criticised just gave up and that the people praised thought that the should keep going. If for an example one person who was criticised was friends with a person in the controlled group, they could have told them what had happened and they both wouldn't have tried and then we wouldn't have known what would happen if we said almost nothing. Some people might have already known this information very well so maybe they wouldn't have studied because they thought they already new what they were supposed to know.

This experiment was not very dangerous but some people's feelings might have gotten hurt. We shouldn’t criticise people too much because that can tear them down and then they will have no self confidence, and will end up feeling like they are a disappointment. If they feel like that (a disappointment) and that they aren't good at anything, they won't try to improve themselves into doing better in school for example and that is not good for the society. Society needs good educated people to bring the world up and get the world going without making a lot of mistakes and for example fixing global warming or at least trying to make it less worse. You should try not to criticize too much.

Causation or correlation

My experiment was causation because something triggered the people who were criticized to keep working.JournalNow I will tell you about a bias that could have ruined my experiment, the bias is bandwagon bias. Bandwagon bias is when, for an example someone is sad because they got a bad grade and someone joins in because they are sad for them. Here is a myth in media, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, yes apples are filled with vitamin c and fiber both are very important in long time health. But those thing are not the only ones you need to survive. Take medication if you need it because there is a better chance that you will survive, because unfortunately apples won't protect you from everything.

Media Literacy

Most media messages are organized to gain profit and/or power?A lot of the media messages are to make you want to buy something but half of the time it is information to make. And sometimes information is fake because the information is not on the right side of what they are trying to sell or there opinion.What creative techniques are used to attract my attention? Well I like to see something that has colour, examples make it easier to understand so I feel like examples are great. It also attracts me if there are more sites that say the same thing and were there are sites bibliographied to make sure the information isn't fake.Organization and visual design?