Design a follow-up study to Aggression Priming. As youwork on this discussion, try to think about what other variablemight influence Aggression Priming. Give a hypothesis for what youexpect to occur for your new independent variable.

Let me give you a few example, though try to get creative withyour group. Look at prior research and see if you can use some oftheir work as a follow-up to your study. Have fun with it! Okay,consider some ideas I was thinking about for a follow-up study(Personally, I would recommend the second or third idea, as thereis a lot of research you could draw on about these topics, whichwould make Paper III much easier to write).

First, you can alter the way that you manipulate aggressionawareness. For example, some people can get the advertisements(aggression versus financial ads) while others get a game format(complete crossword puzzles / word searches that use eitheraggressive-related or finance-related words). Alternatively, youcan give some participants aggression-related images (like guns andgore) while others get neutral images (like dollar signs or bills)while other participants get words (the actual words guns/gore forsome versus words about money/dollars for others). Here, one IVwould be type of topic (aggressive versus financial) while yourother IV would be type of medium (images versus words).  

Second, source credibility is a good topic to explore. Have someparticipants read about Larry “the well-educated and respecteddoctor” while others read about Larry “the former prisoner whonever graduated high school). Then, some participants get thefinancial ads while others get aggressive ads. Will the socialstatus of Larry interact with the ads?.

A third idea might involve altering frustration. Give people atask and then tell some they did terrible and others they didwonderful. Does this feedback influence their assessments of Larrydepending on whether they see aggressive versus financial ads?

Finally, you can look at some participant characteristics if youlike. You can measure the participants’ likelihood to have ahostile attribution bias (the tendency to perceive others as actingaggressively, even when they aren’t). Or you can focus on whetheror not the participant plays a lot of violent video games (versusfew violent video games) to see if those who play such games areimpacted more by the aggressive ads then those who do not playthose games. You could see if participant gender interacts with thetype of ad. Just remember that if you choose a participantcharacteristic, you cannot draw cause-effect conclusions (since youcannot randomly assign someone to be high versus low in hostileattribution bias or to be a man versus a woman). That is why Iwould prefer that you manipulate some feature of the study so youcan randomly assign people to one of the four differentconditions.