Semester long project proposal

1. Intentions. Our plan is to conduct and record a set of experiments about the effects
of the leaders mood and/or emotions on the group (the contagious
leader).

2. Research related to project.
We found lots of research on the effects of leaders on the group. Some examples are:

• The Contagious Leader: Impact of the Leader’s Mood on the Mood of Group Members, Group Affective Tone, and Group Processes
Thomas Sy
California State University, Long Beach Ste´ phane Coˆ te´
University of Toronto
Richard Saavedra
University of Michigan

• Charisma Is Contagious: The Effect of Leaders' Charisma on Observers' Affect1
Paul D. Cherulnik, 2 1 Kristina A. Donley 1 , Tay Sha R. Wiewel 1 Susan R. Miller 1
1 The University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma


3. Recourses needed and plan to acquire recourses.
We will need a tent, a video camera, people willing to participate in an experiment, a written agreement form for participants to sign and a mood test for them to take, blindfolds, and a large, preferably quiet space.
One of our team members has a video camera so that is already taken care of. Two of us have friends with tents that we can borrow. Further, our team will put the written agreement form together and we will use a mood test already used in psychology experiments to assess the moods of the participants. Also, we plan to buy the blindfolds and have the experiments take place in one of our yards. Our team’s biggest challenge will be recruiting participants for the experiment. We plan to ask friends, family members and other students to participate.

4. What do you plan to do?

• A date and time will be choosen for the experiments.

• There will be a set of experiments and for each experiment there will be five
• people, one leader and four people.

• Each experiment will be done seperatly so that the groups do not interact with each other.
• The groups will be told that the experiment is about memory.


• In the first experiment, we will radomnly select a leader and give him information on how to set up the tent effectively.

• We will give all of the participants a piece of paper to sign that states that they agree to participate in said experiment.

• All of the participates will take a mood test before and after each experiment.

• In each of the following experiments we will have vareing factors introduced such as telling the leader to act in a “Bad Apple” way or manipulating his/her mood with videos.

• We will video tape the process and post it on our blog along with our findings.



5. Financial needs for successful execution.
Very minimal, we may need to buy tapes and blindfolds.