NViasko- I came across some research in my text book that found women tend to be more conformist than men, so just to be sure I think I'll go half and half. Jasundie, did you take into account gender at all? I googled Muzafer Sherif but it didn't come up with much. you must have had a different book to me! I kind of want to stick to what I know when emulating/adapting to make my own exp, if that makes sense?
When I said two conditions I meant one sheet of paper with low estimates, and one sheet of paper with high estimates. My hypothesis was that participants in each condition (ie low estimates and high estimates on the answer sheet) should differ in their mean estimates as a consequence of conforming to what they see on the paper. However, I think my proposal is flawed, because I'd have to use different people, because I couldn't exactly get them to write their estimates down again using a different sheet of paper, could I?!
Like you say, it's more reliable to use repeated measures to control participant variables, which is why my idea is appearing to me more and more naff by the minute, lol. Am I making sense here btw?
Jasundie- From what I can gather yours is very 'ambiguous/unambiguous' based. When I mentioned 'Jenness' the only similairities in my propsed experiment was the jar of beans (or pennies, which I'd prefer to use!), it was irrespective of the ambiguous/unambiguous issues.
Finally, Nviasko- Can I ask why you think putting a different object (ie stones) in the second jar would be desirable? I would have thought keeping the object the same for both jars would control any variables, ie stones are bigger so easier to count? ETA: Actually, just realised this is the point- to make it very unambiguous- doh!
Apologies for the very waffly and unstructured post- my brain hurts, I've definitely had too long a break from college this summer! (why do they give us so long?!)