Project 9- Week 15

Rise to your Ability – The Scavenger Hunt

help the homeless

My study is focused on homeless people and the types of homelessness. I am trying to figure out,how much people are motivated by rewards based on the 3 types of homelessness.My thesis states,”Homeless people that are motivated by some type of reward would show better determination to better themselves”. My results support my thesis because the people that played my game were motivated by the prize that I plan to give to the person that wins the game. Therefore it shows that people would do whatever it takes in order to win. They want to be on top so they can receive that reward that can benefit them. The reward is what determined there behavior and how well they performed each task. If there were no reward then it’s proven that they would not put so much effort into completing each task well.

My experiment solves a major problem in psychology because there are studies that talks down on homeless people. They believe that homeless people decline in behavior rather than incline. They believe that once a person becomes homeless then, they learn to depend on people for survival rather than themselves. But by this experiment it shows that just like everyone else homeless people are motivated by something. To perfect a skill there must be some type of reward place to motive someone to do something. For example, people would not work if they were not getting paid. They are motivated to work because of the money that they are getting rewarded. Solving this problem can further advance the field because people will start to reach out for homeless people. Also homeless people will also try to reach out to other homeless people as well. When one homeless person makes it out of homelessness, they might come back to try to help others out of homelessness. Also people love to observe others. If they see one person making a better living for themselves then they will build more hope to one day better themselves as well.

My work is mostly different to other works in this field. When I did my research before designing this experiment. It was hard to find good things that come out of a person that is homeless. A lot of the studies were negative. For my study a potential problem may be to get homeless people to sign up for my game. Getting a person from the category of homelessness of new entry and episodic will be easy to get. But chronic homelessness would be much harder because they been homeless for so long that they already lost hope for a better future. Also if the subjects don’t know the area they live in that can be another problem. An implication of my study will be that the homeless people would not take the game serious enough. Another implication would be that the task that was given onto them may not develop the skill that’s intended. I tested this game on my friends and it turned out great. But my friends doesn’t have the issue that homeless people has. Therefore the results may not be the same as the results that my friends earned. By this, it can cause a lot of issue with my experiment because the point of my experiment is to help homeless people develop skills that can help them out of homelessness or help better themselves.

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About Robert O. Duncan

I'm an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Sciences at City University of New York, with joint appointments in Neuroscience and Cognitive Neuroscience. I also have an appointment as a Visiting Scholar at New York University. My research interests include cognitive neuroscience, functional magnetic resonance imaging, glaucoma, neurodegenerative disorders, attention, learning, memory, educational technology, pedagogy, and developing games for education.

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