Do you think you're good at multitasking? Join the club. The club of self-delusion, that is: According to a series of studies summarized in this NPR story, over 70% of students think they are "above average" at multitasking.
What's worse is that they probably aren't even that good at it. Multitasking is inefficient and (when it comes to driving) it can be deadly. But people persist in doing it:
For quite a few years, researchers have been making the case that people who drive while using phones drive as badly as people who are legally drunk. But we persist in thinking we can handle it.
The study concluded that when it came to multitasking,
...demon multitaskers thought they were terrific at it, though the cold, hard data proved they weren't.
How did they test that hypothesis, after all?
....they tested the students' multitasking ability by asking them to solve math problems while remembering random strings of letters.
They found that the people who multitasked the most in real life — the impulsive risk-takers — were actually much worse at juggling tasks than people who rarely drove while phoning.
a) Sketch a scatterplot of the result that is being described in the last green sentence. Start by identifying the two main variables in the study, and then label each axis very precisely, according to the variables described.
The researchers were also interested in this hypothesis:
The Utah folks speculated that multitaskers would be more apt to test high for traits like risk-taking, sensation-seeking and impulsivity.
b) If you were going to test the hypothesis above (that multitaskers would be higher in traits like risk-taking), how would you do it? What data would you collect? Sketch a graph of the results that would support the hypothesis.
c) Let's say you did find that frequent multitaskers are actually higher risk-takers. Could you make the causal claim that being a risk-taker causes you to multitask? Why or why not? (Apply the directionality problem and the third variable problem to this example.)
