Forrest Metz and Wirt Piper Middle Tennessee State University Magical Darts Forrest Metz and Wirt Piper Middle Tennessee State University Introduction ●The definition of magical thinking has two components: the idea that things are similar to one another (or have contacted one another) maintains some kind of connection, and the idea the idea that a person’s thoughts can influence physical events ( Zunse and Jones’, 1989). ●Rozin, Millman, and Nemeroff (1986) investigated aspects of magical thinking. Rozin et al. (1986) asked participants to throw darts at a picture of Adolf Hitler. There were large effects of negative similarity, which was increased accuracy and there were also some effects of positive similarity, which was a decrease in dart throwing ability when the target was favored by the thrower. The research will be determining a political status and determining the participants’ dart throwing ability. ●The purpose of this research project is to investigate how magical thinking and the laws of similarity can affect the likelihood that people with two separate political views will hit two politicians rivaling the dart throwers political preference. ●We predicted that participants, who were conservatives, after throwing the darts, would hit the picture of Barack Obama more times than the picture of Sarah Palin. In contrast, we predicted that participants, who were liberals, after throwing the darts, would hit the picture of Sarah Palin more times than the picture of Barack Obama. Discussion ●The results confirmed our hypothesis that conservatives would hit the picture of Barack Obama with the darts more times than they hit the picture of Sarah Palin and liberals would hit the picture of Sarah Palin more times than they hit the picture of Barack Obama. ● The results showed that the interaction between the political affiliation of the participants and the two politicians was significant. ●In conclusion magical thinking had a large effect on positive similarity when conservatives threw darts at Sarah Palin and when liberals threw darts at Barack Obama because the number of hits was low. Also, magical thinking had a large effect on negative similarity when conservatives threw darts at Barack Obama and when liberals threw darts at Sarah Palin because the number of hits was high. References Carroll, R.T. (2009). Magical Thinking. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Retrieved from http://www.skepdic.com/magicalthinking.html. Rozin, P., Millman, L., & Nemeroff, C. (1986). Operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 703-712. doi:10.1037/0022/GENP.134.4.389-404 Method ●We randomly recruited 20 MTSU college students to participate in our experiment. The participants answered a political questionnaire to determine political affiliation. Next, the participants answered a dart throwing ability questionnaire to determine their dart throwing ability. ●Next, we placed a picture of Barack Obama on the center of the dartboard. We asked each participants to stand standard dart board distance away and throw 10 darts at the picture. We recorded each throw on whether it hit or missed the picture. We then placed a picture of Sarah Pain on the center of the dartboard and asked each participant to throw 10 darts at the picture. Results ●The independent variable of the study were the pictures of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. The dependent variable of the study was the number times the hit the picture of the political figure. ●The interaction between the political views and picture type was significant, F(1,16) = 10.52, MSE = 2.20, p < .01. Simple main effect analyses indicated that when the Barack Obama picture was placed on the dartboard conservatives hit the picture more times than the liberals. When the picture of Sarah Palin was placed on the dart board the conservatives less times than the liberals. Table of Means Obama Palin Conservative 4.3 2.7 Liberal 2.9 4.5