Are boys more gullible than girls?

Hypothesis

• It's commonly accepted that girls are more aware, observant individuals. We want to see what our Gull-O-Matic says!

Method

Q: What do you think about Nelson Mandela being close to death? TrueQ: What do you think about Kevin Rudd decision to cut education funds?

Believable Q: Recent reports from just yesterday actually state the Queen of England

is in a fatal condition. The doctor has given her less than a year to live. What do you think? Sketchy

Q: What do you think about the discovery of life on Mars. Here is a scientist reenactment on the alien, which is roughly the size of a beetle? Borderline.

We showed them this picture: Q: Are you a fan of One Direction? What do you think of their decision to

change the genre of music to goth punk? RidiculousQ: New reports show that scientists have found a way to make clay come to life. They are currently keeping the creature in a max security prison.

Downright Impossible

To test this we took a random sample of 11 boys and 11 girls from Year 7 classes and asked them what they thought about some fake current events, which get less and less believable. We used a points system to analyse the results. 1 for the believable ones, 2 for sketchy, 3 for borderline, 5 for ridiculous and 7 for downright impossible.

These are the questions we used classified as believable, sketchy, borderline and ridiculous.

Results

QuestionQuestion DegreeDegree PointsPoints (11) Boys (11) Boys (11) Girls(11) Girls

00 True, For True, For ControlControl 00 00 00

11 Believable Believable 11 1111 1010

22 SketchySketchy 22 1111 1010

33 BorderlineBorderline 33 77 77

44 RidiculousRidiculous 55 88 77

55 Downright Downright ImpossibleImpossible 77 55 44

Boys scored 111 Gullibility Points Girls scored 99 Gullibility Points

Reflection/DiscussionGirls scored 12 less gullibility points than boys, making them less gullible according to our system. But, the results weren't actually that far apart. Boys seemed to believe the more ridiculous questions, and one globally aware girl worked it out on the second question which was extremely believable. In conclusion the year 7 girls of APC are, on average less gullible and more observant.