Throughout the past 3 years that I have been at McGill, I have participated in at least two studies every semester. Some were quite boring, others were interesting, but there was one particular one that I participated in last semester which was different from the others. The study was titled: “The Coat of Arms Paradigm: Exploring the effects of collective autonomy on group cohesion and motivation”.

About the study:

We were split into two groups and each had to go to a different room. Each group had to collectively create a coat of arms that symbolized the core values and traits that we thought we shared as a group. We were assigned to the third condition which was “a no autonomy forced change condition” in which we were told that the other group would decide if we could use the coat of arms we designed and made us use a different coat of arms than the one which we selected. In the next part of our study, my group played the game Group Quest, which was created off of the War Craft 3 map editor. We were told that the choices we made when designing our coat of arms would affect our in game character’s abilities. After completing the main Group Quest, we were told that we could continue to play bonus levels of Group Quest as a group, play a puzzle game with other group members of use our phone. Our group decided to play the puzzle game. We then finally completed a questionnaire which asked us to create our own coat of arms.

The researchers’ goal of the study was to investigate how perceiving our social groups as having collective autonomy in choosing how to define its group identity would affect how we formed our group identity. Furthermore, the researchers wanted to see how perceiving our group identity to have been collectively autonomous in this process may have affected out subsequent motivation to behave in a way that is congruent with our group identity. They hypothesized that when we perceive that we have collective autonomy in defining our group’s identity, we will optimally be motivated to engage in behaviours that are linked to our group identity.

My Reflection:

This study involves a lot of secret in terms of disclosing the true nature of the study in order to use deception. When this was revealed to all group members, I was quite skeptical about whether or not this act of deceiving was acceptable. However, the researcher did a good job in explaining that this deception was necessary for us to believe that our group identity was meaningful and tied to how we would behave with our other group members and for us to take our experimental manipulations seriously.

This was one of the most engaging studies that I have participated in as it allowed the participants a lot of freedom in terms of choosing what they wanted to do within their group. I realized that in order for psychological group studies that are aimed at observing the dynamics of a group to be successful, it is necessary to have an ice breaker activity t the beginning. This ensures that all members of a group are comfortable with each other and behave in character rather than not being themselves.