Psychological research concerning correction of stereotypes has mainly focused on how individuals adjust their negative attitude towards the out-group due to the apprehension of appearing prejudiced in front of out-grouprepresentatives. This study though, does not deal with estimations of the qualities of the out-group; it deals with estimations of the qualities of the in-group. Does Swedes correct their estimations of their own group when the experiment leader is of another ethnicity and has a different colour of skin? The participants were students at Halmstad Högskola and they were all born and raised in Sweden. Half the participants got to meet a Swedish born, white skinned experiment leader, whereas the other group got to meet an African born, dark skinned experiment leader.

Several studies have shown that people misjudge and fail to correctly combine probabilities. An explanation for these tendencies is the conjunction fallacy. Basically, the conjunction fallacy refers to violations of the conjunction rule, which states that the probability of a combination of two independent events (A & B) cannot exceed the probability of neither event (A or B). In connection with the growth of the Swedish gambling market and the fact that betting is an everyday-event containing well-defined probabilities, it is considered to be both up-to-date and relevant to study whether the conjunction fallacy also occurs in betting. Previous studies have shown that people fall victims of the conjunction error, however, only in controlled laboratory settings.

This research aim was to examine the relationship between the choice of lunch dish, level of education, gender and age of the participants. The understanding of diet and it´s influence on health was also of interest to the research, as was cooking interest and travel habits. The goal was to demonstrate how these factors affect the adult individuals in their choice of lunch. A questionnaire was filled in by 99 guests in a chosen restaurant. The results show that many of these factors influence the choice of dish, especially those related to gender.

The focus of the thesis is an information search technique called manual query expansion, which aims to improve the retrieval per-formance in a search system by adding terms to the search query. The study looks at the query expansions done by LIS students, and the eventual beneficial effects by using a search help during the search process. The empirical data have been collected thro-ugh an experiment, with an experiment group as well as a control group. The conclusion is that the students need more education in query expansion in order to be able to use it correctly. There are significant differences between the groups in several aspects, for example in the use of search terms, parentheses, and truncation.

Två experiment undersökte om en människa och ett djur som far lika illa väcker olika mycket empati. I Experiment 1 fick 108 personer läsa en berättelse där antingen en man, kvinna, hund eller katt farit illa och därefter skatta sin empati. Män hade låg empati för såväl människor som för djur. Kvinnor hade (1) mer empati än män oavsett offer, (2) mer empati för djur än för människor, samt (3) något mer empati för hund än för katt. I Experiment 2 fick 69 kvinnor läsa en berättelse där antingen ett barn eller en hundvalp farit illa.

Aquaponics is a food production system consisting of a consecutive cultivation of plants and aquatic animals, fish or shellfish, in recirculating water. The plants feed on the nutritious effluents from the fish tank and bacteria converts ammonia from the fish tank into nitrate that is absorbed by the plants. The plants receive nutrition and the fish gain purified water. The environmental impact of the production of fish meal and fish oil used in conventional fish feed includes a large consumption of fossil fuels with subsequent carbon dioxide emission. The aquaponic system can be made environmentally sustainable and self-supporting if supplemented with a vermicompost/vermiculture for the production of worm protein as a fish feed. Vegetable waste from the hydroponic part of the system can be reused as worm feed in the compost and the protein rich worms can be harvested, dried and grinded and brought back to the aquaculture as fish feed. As a first step in this direction, I have investigated the effect of recycling of vegetable waste in vermicomposts on the growth and number of earthworms (this was evaluated after harvesting). The hypotheses were that earthworms can be cultivated in the vegetable waste and that by adding manure to the vermicompost it is possible to obtain a nutrient content adequate to support a continuous worm harvest, in other words create a vermiculture. Eisenia fetida and Dendrobaena veneta were grown in 20 L bins containing peat mixed with either poultry or cattle manure. The proportions were 70% peat and 30 % manure. Discarded plant parts from lettuce cultivation was added to the vermicomposts (35 g per week) and water was supplied with 0.8 L per week.

Denna studies syfte var dels att undersöka om experiment som hemuppgift underlättar för tvåspråkiga elever att förstå naturvetenskap dels att undersöka om dessa upplever att no-hemuppgiftens utformning påverkar deras möjligheter att bättre klara av hemuppgiften. Elever i årskurs 5 intervjuades vid två tillfällen, före och efter att de fått experimentera dels i hemmet med någon vuxen dels i skolan med andra elever i smågrupper. Undersökningen visar att en majoritet av eleverna föredrar att få experiment som hemuppgift framför en faktatext som behandlar experimenten som de gjort i skolan. Så gott som samtliga av de intervjuade eleverna uttryckte glädje över att få göra experimenten hemma. Eleverna visade vid det andra intervjutillfället ökad förståelse för de naturvetenskapliga begrepp, som behandlades i undersökningen.

The purpose of this essay is to study how parents of children with disabilities young people make their choice of support and service LSS. The study takes its lead from questions designed to determine which interventions parents use for their children. What parents think about today's choice and if satisfactory, or if they have other wishes. It is also about how parents experience the freedom of choice and participation in the selection of interventions. Furthermore how the parent discuss the topic of choice from childhood and parental perspective.

Experimentets art och roll i naturvetenskaplig undervisning är ett fundamentalt och omfattande ämne. I föreliggande litteraturstudie görs ett försök att sätta in frågan i ett historiskt, pedagogiskt och vetenskapligt sammanhang. Innan experimentets roll diskuteras, ställs dock frågan vad naturvetenskap är, varför och hur det skall undervisas, och vad som kännetecknar praktiskt arbete och experimentell verksamhet i skolan. Med denna bakgrund refereras några forskares och lärares erfarenheter och åsikter. Det visar sig, föga överraskande, att formerna för och avsikterna med experiment i undervisningen är skiftande.

This paper aims to investigate if the underlying effects of the marketing phenomena clutter can be explained by negative priming. Although a lot of research has been made in the field of marketing, many people still claim "all marketing is good marketing", which we intended to challenge. In order to do this a tailored experiment analyzing the effects of clutter was created. The experiment consisted of two activities with the objective to manipulate the participants by making them avoid distracters. To maintain high ecological validity throughout the experiment actual brands were used as distracters.

The thesis aims to increase our understanding about parents reasoning about the elementary school choice by studying which factors parents perceive as important during the decision making process and also by giving meaning to Pierre Bourdieu?s concept of capital through the parents perspective. The empirical material comes from seven BNIM-interviews made with parents, which has been analyzed according to the thematic field analysis.The results show that the parents are not especially concerned about making an active school choice. Stability, closeness, friends, rumors, development and adaptability to the reality are the factors that are perceived as the most important in the decision making process. The school choice has a limited meaning as an investment in social capital, from Bourdieu?s perspective.

This essay is a qualitative study on quasimarkets in the field of home-help service. The main purpose of the study was to describe and analyze the function of costumers choice from elderly persons point of view. The quasimarket in home-help service of Solna stad has served as an example. The questions raised in the study concerned the elderly costumers opinion of the information about the different producers, what had influence on their choice, their attitude towards the freedom of choice, and their ability to act as consumers on a quasimarket.The method used was qualitative semi structured interviews. A majority of the elderly consumers appreciated the possibility to choose producer of home-help service.

A plant's defensive ability against herbivore attack can be influenced by many different factors, one of them being domestication. During human selection to improve the yield of plants, the resistance against herbivore attack can have been lowered, due to a trade-off for use of resources between these traits in the plants. In this thesis I investigated the effect of domestication on resistance against herbivorous insects in cotton plants. I used different varieties and species of wild and domesticated cotton in three different experiments. A feeding assay was conducted, the mortality, development time and pupal weight of larvae of the Egyptian cotton leaf worm Spodoptera littoralis was studied. In a second experiment the preference of the root-feeding beetle Agriotes spp.

I studien undersöktes effekten av bakgrundljud på prestationen i en räkneuppgift. Två experiment genomfördes för att testa effekten av tre bakgrundstal: irrelevanta tal, yrkesbeteckningar och tal uppspelade baklänges. Dessutom ingick en kontrollbetingelse utan bakgrundstal. Hypotesen var att de irrelevanta talen skulle störa prestationen mest. Experiment 1 visade ingen effekt av bakgrundsljuden och stödde alltså inte hypotesen.

Advertisers of today are facing a great challenge in a landscape where it becomes even more difficult to break through the clutter and convince consumers to buy their products. In order to succeed, they need to come up with new ways of communicating with their customers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if micro-blogging could be considered an effective media choice in order to enhance the perception of brand associations and traditional communication effects. The subject is of interest as brands are putting increasingly more resources into this communication channel. However, at the current date the marketing effects of micro-blogging is unexplored in academic research.