Lost Letter Technique and Pychology PDF

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Notes on how this technique was used to describe the...

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Lost Letter Technique

Bibliography Information: Stanley Milgram, Leon Mann and Susan Harter. (2001). Americas Opinion For Public Research. The Lost Letter Technique. 1 (1), 1-5.

Introduction: In the lost letter article the hypothesis is clearly stated. The introduction clearly states the proposal for assessing community orientations towards political groups and other institutions and how this affects the rate letter return rate. The article shows the dispersion of articles throughout city streets and other locations, with a large number of unmailed letters. The letters are enclosed in envelopes, have addresses and are stamped but have not been posted yet. When a person comes across the letter on the street, it appears to be lost, and they have the choice of mailing, disregarding or destroying the letter.

Procedure: The study procedure is clearly outlined in the article. The focus of the technique is to experiment the rate of response to a particular organisation or political group. The purpose of this experiment, is that the programmers are trying to measure whether certain people will return letters to certain places, depending on their beliefs or opinions of the company on the letter.

Findings: Findings during the experiment showed that 48% of the 400 dispersed letters had a successful return rate. But this wasn’t the information that supported there hypothesis, 72% of the letters returned, deemed having a medical research organisation related letter, while a majority of the letters named (personal ) had a 71% success rate of return. But letters that had political nazi and communist party letters had a return rate of 25%. Around the globe scientist are testing the lost letter technique to prove and create a more supportive and statistical idea of how this theory has shaped our society and the major affects it has on decision making.

Conclusion: To clearly clarify this use of technique has helped me understand how much you rely on specific beliefs and opinions certain people have in order to get your letter returned. Some of the major outcomes are that below half of the letters go returned to there location. This clearly pinpoints the willingness from specific people to lend a help in hand to society whenever they need it. The author does use scientific terminology to highlight specific points in the text shown in certain parts of the introduction where he states how the experiment will be conducted and results will be shown. The author shows quite a lot of support throughout his approach towards the experiment as well which is quite surprising, for tis specific use of psychological technique ( his references and supportive context ).

Personal Comments: : To clearly clarify and understand this method totally relies on certain people to stumble onto these letters. If the experiment was conducted again the results for sure, wouldn’t be the same. This is due to everyone’s beliefs, opinions and understandings of certain groups or organisations. If these statistics where used professional they would be clarified as biased and fake as the experimental average wouldn’t be exactly the same. My hypothesis was correct though, as I would’ve thought that not only would some people just blankly ignore the letters, but to open the letters and view the message inside. This could affect the rate of return as soon people might just clearly disperse of the letter ....