The ever-popular show, “MythBusters”, creates scenarios that are tested to either be plausible or not. The experiment for this episode was supposed to test if the amount of alcohol consumed from anyone would affect their judgement in how they viewed the opposite gender. The first round was the three participants rating the opposite gender on a 1-10 scale based on attractiveness. The same three were supposed to get buzzed and do the same procedure. Lastly, they got drunk and repeated accordingly.
I believe that there were more weaknesses to this test rather than strengths, which led to somewhat of a failed experiment in my eyes. The first flaw was the minimal number of participants for what would seem like a popular test for many individuals. With only three people, the results are more likely to get skewed one way rather than what was expected. Even adding another female participant would have made for better results, since there were two males and one female initially.
It was also noted that in the beginning that each attempted test brought a new group of photos for each participant. This brought another flaw because even though each group was considered “matched” in terms of attractiveness, the participant might not think the same way as whoever chose those photos. If the same group of people were shown each turn, the results might reflect a better outcome.
A strength from the test was how the scaling for rating each person was a general system used daily and most people can make a fair judgment using those numbers. The other strength goes along with the rating system, but because there was no prior description as what qualified as attractiveness, the rates for each person was solely based on the participant selecting a number. This made for fair assumptions no matter how drunk a participant was at each point in the experiment.
At the end, the experiment was deemed plausible based on initial hypothesis. After reviewing the case, it was not approached from a good angle and therefore not designed in a good way. The weaknesses outweigh the strengths in my opinion and makes for a poorly executed plan. Analyzing how beer effects a person’s mind and visualization of any person is a quality thought. Since the majority of the results reflected some sort of inflation in overall rating of groups of people, the hypothesis was accepted.
WilliamsCollegeBlog 
Hi William!
I completely agree with your analysis of the video, and I wrote down many of the same first impressions as you did.
The first thing I noted was the lack of participants. Having only three people complete a study makes it difficult to generalize the results, therefore forfeiting external validity. Similar to this issue, is that the few participants that were part of the study were also the researchers who designed the study. This means they knew what they were looking for in the results, which could easily affect their behavior in the study, thus skewing their results, and again hurting their external validity. To solve this the researchers should consider gathering a random sample of individuals over the age of 21 to complete this study.
Another issue we both caught was the questionable inter rater reliability. The researchers do not specify who exactly rated this faces as equally attractive, and exactly how high was the inter rater reliability was. This is extremely vital because as you thoughtfully pointed out, not everyone has the same ideas of attractiveness. If the raters barely agreed with each other on the consistency of attractiveness across conditions, then the participants are less likely agree as well. The researchers should be more open with their methods and reasoning.
I agree that overall this video did have more weakness than strengths, and you were very attentive to the flaws in their study, which shows you are aware of what can make a study and its results stronger and more meaningful.
Emily
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