The Effectiveness of Biased Questions On Students’ Attitudes Toward the ROTC

Abstract

In a culture of advertising and persuasion, research into the power of words has become more relevant. Our experiment attempts to establish the extent to which biased questions influence the attitudes of students toward the military and the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) in particular. As a second objective, if participants who received the biased questionnaire report a higher opinion of the ROTC, would that attitude be enough to motivate them to action? The aim of this study is to determine if participants presented with a questionnaire that has biased phrasing and word choice will report a more favorable attitude toward the campus Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) than participants presented with the same questionnaire that has neutral word choice. Participants who begin to leave the laboratory after completing the questionnaire will be presented with a display of ROTC pamphlets. A record will be kept of how many students from each group take a pamphlet. Results are preliminary at this time, but the prediction is that participants in the biased questionnaire group will report a higher opinion of the ROTC than those with the neutral questionnaire. However, the experimental group is not expected to be motivated to take more pamphlets than the control group.