Bailenson Reaction

Printing out my articles for the week, I was really excited to see the headline of Bailenson’s article. Starting to read through it, however, I realized I committed a pretty critical flaw. I immediately overestimated the impact of facial similarities and incorrectly predicted the outcome of the experiment. I expected the article to present a very strong causation that had significant influence over voting patterns. I realized however, that this was not the case, not what the research projected, and not what it proved. This was an important lesson for me as an observer as well as someone conducting research. In both scenarios, I cannot fall susceptible to an over emphasizing the importance or impact of variables. This would cause me to overlook and omit other variables in my research or project a false sense/strength of causation. Class discussion helped clarify some of the details of the research design, but overall I really enjoyed this article and found the research conclusions interesting and significant.