Sex DIfferences - Halari et al replication

This experiment performed by the males and females in the Tuesday 4pm psychology lab, was done as a replication of the Halari et al experiment in London in 2005. The hypothesis in the original experiment was that women will, on average, gain a higher verbal fluency score than men and men will, on average, perform more accurately than women on mental rotation. The results obtained from Halari et al’s (2005) clearly prove this hypothesis correct. The results also rejected the null hypothesis which says that men and women will not differ with respect to verbal and spatial performance. Our replication experiment also proved the hypothesis of Halari et al’s (2005) experiment correct and rejected the null experiment.

Our experiment followed a certain methodology. In the mental rotation task, each participant was to answer 50 questions which contained the stimuli; each of which showed 2 shapes rotated and the participants were to judge whether they are identical or not. As expected males had a higher accuracy level in this this task compared to females. In the verbal fluency task, the participants were given 3 categories; fruits, vegetables and animals. They had the instruction to write down as many items from the relevant categories as possible. As expected females had a higher accuracy level than the males in this task. In the methodology used in our experiment did contain some weaknesses that may have influenced the results. Our experiment was as free from bias as possible in order to make the results accurate and reliable. For the mental rotation task, every participant received a different set of stimuli, so that the participants could not copy each other. This produced reliable results. However this methodlogy contains a debility. The stimuli ranged from sets of easily distinguishable shapes to much harder ones. Since the stimuli was randomly chosen for each participant it is possible that one participant may have received all the hard ones (females) and