Chapter 6 Design a study

6.1 Introduction

It is frequently claimed that Germans basically have no sense of humour (as reported, for example, by The Economist, the BBC and US-based Public Radio International). Your team’s task will be to design a study that investigates this claim. Note that we’re interested in the study design. You don’t have to run the study!9

6.2 Your task

Design a study that investigates the claim that Germans have no sense of humour (you might want to interpret this as “less sense of humour”, as it could be argued that discovering even one laughing German would falsify that claim10).

Please submit your final design as a Word document (with the extension .docx) under the “Quizzes and Assignments” section on Moodle. Your team name must be the name of the file (e.g. Athens.docx). Please submit only one document per team.

Please add the names of all those who contributed to the design to the Word document. The assignment submission link is labelled “Humour study design”. The deadline for submission is Monday, 18 October at 5pm. This assignment will not contribute to your overall mark. Formative assignments not submitted by the deadline incur no penalty.

Please note that while the assignment will not contribute to your overall mark, we will award a prize (think certificate and chocolate) to the team that proposes the best design! We will also showcase the best designs. Our evaluation criteria will be:

  • Clarity and quality of explanations, including
    • Variables and constants,
    • Operationalisation and
    • Dealing with potential confounds.
  • You should identify the type of claim and discuss issues of validity (see Chapter 3 in Beth’s book; you can ignore statistical validity).
  • Creativity
  • Probability of giving interpretable results.

6.3 Meet your team

You can download this file with team allocations to find out which team you’re on.11 Everyone who is on your team will be in the same lab group as you. The file is sorted by lab group, then city team, and then first name.

Step 1: Make sure you can communicate with each other. It probably makes sense to initially send an e-mail to everyone in the group. Alternatively, you can use Microsoft Teams to create a team for your group and use this to communicate (see Appendix D.1). Alternatively, you could set up a WhatsApp group, a Signal group, a Facebook group or use whatever tool is currently en vogue. Please make sure that everyone in your group does use the tool in question though.

Step 2: Next, please find a day and time to meet up to work on your design. Tools that can help finding a suitable day and time for a group meeting are Strawpoll and Doodle.12 These tools make it much easier to identify the day and time that work best overall.

Step 3: Meet up to work on the design. You might want to take notes to keep track of ideas. You could do this using an online Word document that you can all edit. How to share an online Word document is explained in Appendix F.

6.4 Examples of German humour

For your entertainment, here are two examples from a German TV show specialising in pranks. The channel has 1.33 million subscribers on YouTube and both videos have over three million views, suggesting that at least Germans find them funny. No knowledge of German is required to understand what is going on in the videos. (The videos only work in the HTML version of the HHG, not the PDF.)

The original (which unfortunately disappeared about a week ago; I’ll leave it here in case it magically reappears):

 

A lower-quality copy:

 

6.5 Humour study design outcomes

Demonstrators were randomly allocated to four pairs. Each pair was randomly allocated 10 submissions and was asked to choose the four best submissions among the ten allocated to them. The resulting 16 submissions made it to the second round. All demonstrators and lecturers independently rated these 16 submissions on a scale from 1 (worst) to 20 (best). The winning submissions were determined by calculating the mean rating.

Here are the first three places with their mean ratings in parentheses:

1st place: Dubai (14.6)

2nd place: Jakarta (14.3)

3rd place: Johannesburg (14.1)

Honourable mention: Tokyo (13.9)

Again, congratulations to these teams!

In this file, you can find demonstrator feedback comments on all 40 submissions.

In this zip file, you can find Jan’s feedback comments on the submissions that made it to Round 2 (please see Section 10.2 for information on how to unzip a zip file).

  1. However, we’re also not going to stop you from running the study if you would like to.↩︎

  2. Falsifiability is one of key concepts in Karl Popper’s works. Karl Popper was a philosopher of science from Vienna. I consider it one of the curious coincidences in the history of science that Karl Popper and Konrad Lorenz were childhood friends. They took different paths later in life though: In 1937, Karl, of Jewish descent, emigrated to New Zealand. In 1938, Konrad on the other hand became a member of the Nazi Party and was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941. But imagine coming to Vienna in the 1930s before the Nazis took over: You could have visited an elderly Sigmund Freud at his home in Berggasse 19 (another coincidence: Karl Popper’s parents were friends with Freud’s sister Rosa). Charlotte and Karl Bühler taught at the University of Vienna—interestingly, Karl Bühler was Karl Popper’s PhD advisor! There was also Kurt Gödel and the Vienna Circle. However, when the Nazis came to power, this centre of intellectual life was destroyed: Popper eventually settled in the UK, Freud emigrated to the UK as well (and died in 1939), and the Bühlers and Gödel emigrated to the US. By the way, in the US, Gödel and Einstein became close friends. Einstein was one of the witnesses at Gödel’s US citizenship exam where—to Einstein’s shock—Gödel started to explain to the judge that he could prove that an inconsistency in the US constitution could allow the US to become a dictatorship. Well, after the Trump presidency and the 2021 Capitol attack, this suddenly seems a lot less absurd…↩︎

  3. As a nod to the Netflix series Money Heist your team name will be the name of a city.↩︎

  4. For Doodle, click on “Create a Doodle” in the upper right corner. When you’re asked to enter a name and e-mail address, just enter a random e-mail address if you don’t want Doodle to know your e-mail address.↩︎