Real-Life Decision Making
You are a comparative psychologist working on feeding and appetite studies.
You are interested in whether the time of day an animal is fed, or the temperature
of the room where it is fed, affects an animal's appetite.
You are using rats for your experiment. You wonder: is the appetite of
a rat affected by things other than the type of food you choose to feed it?
Unfortunately, your research funding is extremely limited, so you need
to make some decisions on how to keep the cost of your experiment down. "You
always have limited resources and so you have to design a test that will use
the least amount of resources," says Cathy Rankin, a psychologist.
In your experiment, you want to know if the time of day you feed the rats
or if feeding the rats in a very hot room can affect the animals'
appetites.
For the experiment, you use 50 rats. For the first phase, you watch the
rats at normal room temperature, feeding at their usual time. This is your
control group.
For the second phase of the experiment, you could raise the room temperature
and watch the 50 rats feed. You could follow this with a third phase in which
you have the rats feeding at an unusual hour.
Or to drastically reduce costs, you could combine the second phase so that
the 50 rats eat in a hot room and at an unusual hour. This would save you
the cost of one whole phase of the experiment.
What do you do?