Dr White Wants to Look at the Impact of Failure

Dr. White wants to look at the impact of failure on self-esteem. He designs an experiment where half of the participants are led to believe that they have failed on an ambiguous task, while the other half of the participants are told that they have succeeded. Dr. White then has the people in his study complete a questionnaire measuring self-esteem and he looks to see if there are any differences in self-esteem between the success and failure groups. In this example, self-esteem would be considered the

A) dependent variable
B) independent variable
C) placebo variable
D) confounding variable