OCR AS Psychology: Core Studies - Griffiths (4)

Procedure/Instruction to Participants: All the participant's were asked to gamble on a fruit machine called 'Fruitskill' which played at 10p a go and each participant was given £3 to gamble on the fruit machine which gave them 30 'free' gambles. All of the participants were asked to stay on the machine for a minimum of 60 plays. This meant they had to break even and win back £3 from the money they had put in. If they managed to achieve 60 gambles with the £3 stake they had the choice to leave and take the winnings or carry on playing. In the 'thinking aloud' condition the 30 participants were told to verbalise every thought that passed their minds whilst they were playing.DV1: Objective Skill: To measure the gambler's objective skill levels, Griffiths recorded the gamblers' behaviour. Skill was defined as 'the ability of the individual to affect the outcome of the gambling positively (e.g. more gamblers with initial memory staked and/or more winnings with inital money staked)'

7 objective behaviours used to assess actual skill of participants:

Total Plays = Total number of plays during the session
Total time = Total time of play in mins during the session
Play rate = Total plays per min during session
End stake = Total winnings in number of 10p pieces at end of playing session
Wins = Total numbe of wins in session
Win rate (time) = Time between wins
Win rate (plays) = Plays between wins