Demand characteristics

• Participants are not passive within experiments and are likely to be spending much of their time trying to make sense of the new situation they find themselves in
• participant reactivity is a significant extraneous in experimental research and one that is hard to control
• participants will try work out what’s going on using certain clues to help them which are called the demand characteristics of an experiment
• participants may look for clues to tell them how they should behave in the experimental situation
• please-U effect: may act in a way that they think is expected and over-perform to please the researcher
• screw-U effect: may deliberately underperform to sabotage the results of the study