After reading the experiment carried out by the researcher Judith Baxter, I thought that it was a clever way of discovering the specific ways boys and girls would behave to certain situations. I think that this experiment has some strengths but also some limitations too.
Firstly, this experiment allowed the students to imagine themselves being in a real life situation. This way, the students would behave, think and react the same way they would if they actually survived a plane crash and they were stranded in a desert. From the recorded conversation, the readers can find hints that tell them whether it is a boy group or a girl group. For example, in the conversation within group B, one of the boys mentioned that they could use the gun to shoot the pilot. This sounds like the type of humour boys would have, and would most likely convince the readers that group B is the boy group. Group B also had a leader, and according to other data collected by researchers, boys usually would nominate a leader to speak for the group and collect opinions from other people. And therefore, this experiment shows the behaviour of how a girl group and a boy group would react in a situation like this.
This experiment also had a number of limitations though. First of all, the age group of this experiment is limited, which only included teenagers. If adults participated in this experiment, the way they handle the situation would most likely have quite a large difference on the way the teenagers handled it. Adults and older people would most probably not create any sort of humour and would take this situation more seriously. Also in group A of Baxter’s experiment, there were some disagreements between the students and they started to sound frustrated. However, both male and female adults may not have any disputes and would probably handle the situation with more patience. Therefore, this experiment simply proved that most teenage boys and girls would have a different way of dealing with a situation like this, however amongst adults, there won’t be much of a difference between male and female.