Martin Linddstorm You Love Your Iphone Critical Analysis

In the article, “You Love Your iPhone. Literally.”, author Martin Lindstorm, suggests that people have the same love for their iPhones as they do for a significant other. In Lindstorm’s experiment, he exposed 16 participants between the ages of 18 and 25 to separately watch and listen to a ringing and vibrating phone. He would then watch to see what parts of their brains would activate. Lindstorm found that if a person saw a visual of an iPhone vibrating, not only would that person’s visual cortex activate, but their audio cortex would activate too. Then on the other hand if a person heard the audio of an iPhone ringing their audio cortex, along with their visual cortex, would activate. The last piece of data that Lindstorm collected was that
He used correlational research to prove his hypothesis, and correlational research does not give an explanation to why the independent variable causes the dependent variable to happen. In correlational research the experimenter is basically watching things change and seeing whether or not they relate. The experimenter should then use this evidence to predict a relationship between two things, and then perform a research experiment to see if they actually do relate. In Lindstorm’s experiment he did see that people love their iPhones, but he did not manipulate an independent variable while keeping everything else constant. If he would have done that, he would have been using experimental research, which gives better evidence to support why two things might relate. Lindstrom did not use experimental research because too many things were changing in his experiment. Sometimes people would hear an iPhone, and then other times they would just see it vibrating. Furthermore, nothing was held constant. There was nothing that could be used to compare the independent variable to, to see if there actually was a
The internal validity of it, and the external validity of it. Internal validity is if everything is held constant, then the only explanation for a change would be the independent variable. External validity is if the experiment can be replicated and generalized to a different set of people. If this experiment were to be carried out, I think the internal validity of it would be pretty high. As for external validity, I think there could be problems in this area. If someone else were to replicate the experiment, and use a different set of people in a different part of the world, I do not think that it would replicate or generalize. One reason it will not generalize is because this experiment is about people who use iPhones, so this experiment cannot be used on people who do not have iPhones. Also, there could be people that are in abusive relationships or people that have a phone that goes off every five minutes because of work. I do not think the person in an abusive relationship would have activation of the insular cortex when they see a picture of an iPhone with an incoming call form Babe, for example. Then the person that has the phone that will not quit ringing or vibrating might just hate their phone because of it. They might want to get rid of it all together so they will never be bothered again. I do not think activation of the insular cortex would be seen with this person either. Because