Hello,
I am designing an experiment in economics that will have subjects do a real effort task. The task will be to find pairs of identical letters in a text.
This type of task has already been used in other experiments in economics, yet I am unable to find what text is usually given to subjects - I suppose there must be a "standard text" to permit greater comparability between studies, but I can't find anything.
Do you know what material is generally used for tasks where subjects have to find pairs of identical letters in a text, please ?
Thank you.
Hi Matthieu,
You raised an interesting question. Although my work in experimental economics does not include the specific task you mentioned (i.e., finding identical letters in a text), the point I find most fascinating is your comment that: "I suppose there must be a "standard text" to permit greater comparability between studies,...". My impression is that if standards like these exist, they occur because of researchers following the lead of another scholar who has carefully crafted a superior procedure or protocol rather than scholars somehow getting together to set a standard.
At the risk of over generalization, it seems that refinement is common as scholars in economics explore similar issues/topics. If this applies in the area of your study, then it would tend to explain why your search has not been successful.
I hope this helps. Even if my conjecture does not apply in this case, or in others, it still piqued my interest.
Rob
I suppose it applies to my area of study, but I figured I could still ask anyway. I will probably end up selecting some texts myself and hope that the content of the text doesn't bias the experiment in any way. With any luck they'll be so focused on the task that they won't even notice the content. It's not easy to find a real-effort task that is completely neutral...
Thanks for your answer !
Matthieu
I agree that there isn't (and probably never will be) a 'completely neutral' real-effort task. So long as you have no reason to expect that this task will somehow be affected by your experimental treatments, this shouldn't be too much of an issue though.
Just in case that you haven't heard of it, there is a RET called 'slider task' by Gill & Prowse. It doesn't come without its own disadvantages. Just thought I'd mention it to you in case you are interested in an alternative RET: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1732324
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