Physical Performance Scores as a Function of Experimenter Sex and Experimenter Bias

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the main effects of the sex of the experimenter, the interaction effects of the sex of the experimenter and the sex of the S, and the experimenter bias effect upon 50-yd dash, shuttle run, and sit-up scores. The subjects were 48 male and 48 female junior high students. The experimenters were six male and six female upper-division college students. The subjects were randomly assigned for testing to sex of experimenter and experimenter bias effect. The experimenter bias condition resulted from the fact that the experimenters were led to believe that half of the Ss had particular characteristics that would cause them to score well on the tests while the other half had characteristics that should cause poor performance scores. The significant findings in the study were that male experimenters received much better scores from their Ss than did female experimenters on the sit-up test, that Ss scored better when tested by experimenters of the opposite sex on both the 50-yd dash and shuttle run test, and that experimenters obtained results in the direction of their expectations on the shuttle run test.