2x2 Within-Subjects Factorial Design

Participants There were 17 undergraduate psychology major students from the University of

California, Los Angeles that participated in the experiment. There were 15 females and two males whose ages ranged from 19 to 24 years old (M= 22.35, SD= ). Their education level ranged from sophomore to senior standing. The participants were all enrolled in a psychology research methods class where they received course credit for their participation.

GRADER, MUSIC, AND FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR 8

Design

This experiment used a 2x2 within-subjects factorial design. The first independent variable manipulated was mood which had two conditions, either happy or sad. A happy condition consisted of music

Through its use, we were able to pair each short answer in different orders for each subject across all of the four conditions (happy condition with a strict grader, happy condition with a lenient grader, sad condition with a strict grader, and sad

GRADER, MUSIC, AND FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR 10 condition with a lenient grader). The balanced Latin square helped reduce the risk of presenting participants with topics more than once across all form versions in our experiment. Once packets were organized based off the order provided by the balanced Latin Square, we then shuffled all of the packets and organized them alphabetically based on their versions. We used this order to randomly distribute the packets to the participants across the room. Participants were assigned to packets labeled as either forms A, B, C, or D. Each packet consisted of five pages; the first page was the cover page while the remaining four pages were short answer prompts. Participants were all instructed to fill out the cover page which included information based on demographics,