Session 3: Intro to PsychologyPsychological Research

Terms and Objectives• Empirical Investigation• Context of discovery• Phenomenon• 4 Research Questions• Theories and hypotheses• Research Biases

• Context of justification• Scientific values• Objectivity safe-guards• Standardization• Operational definition• Blind• Double blind• Confounding variables

How Psychologists DO Research

• Scientific investigation requires collecting information first hand. This is known as Empirical investigation, or research that relies on sensory experience and observation as research data.

• This means you need to investigate by experience, not by faith, a hunch, luck, speculation or even common sense.

• To gather evidence empirically, one must collect information first hand, not from another source.

The Context of Discovery• All research done, begins with the

assumption of determinism.

• After this, it is assumed behavior and mental activities follow set patterns (relationships).

• Research itself has two stages:– 1. discovery– 2. justification

• The Context of Discovery is the initial stage where the researcher comes up with an idea or a new way of thinking about phenomena.

What Research Questions to Ask

• Research often begins with a question: Why or how does a psychological event or process occur?– Ex. What causes someone to be more loyal

than another.

• When answering this, researchers have 4 major concerns…– 1. the stimulus events– 2. the structure of behavior that links actions

to other actions– 3. the relationships between internal

psychological processes and external behavior patterns

– 4. Consequences the response has on the individuals social and physical environment.

Proposing Explanations

• Some research is conducted from a educated question, while others are based on theory.

• Hypotheses, must be tentative and testable explanations of relationships between two or more variables or events.

• Activity: Develop a testable hypothesis with a partner.

Overcoming Bias• Types of Bias…

– 1. External influences: bias that is developed by the culture that surrounds you. • Example: You are a conservative but you are surrounded by friends and

classmates that are liberal. Therefore your views begin to change.

– 2. Personal Bias: your personal beliefs keep you from acting objectively.• Example: Someone who is racially prejudiced, may not believe that someone

of a different race could be more qualified than someone of his own.

– 3. Observer Bias: when one’s prejudices or opinions act as filters to determine whether some events are noticed or seen as meaningful while others are not.• Example:if an observer knows that the researcher hypothesized that females

speak in more complex sentences, they may believe they hear females speaking that way during the study even if it's not really true

Bias Cont’d

– 4. Expectancy Bias: affects observations when the observer looks for and expects certain outcomes.• Example: A teacher awards a student with an A simply because

they expect that the student did good work, even if it is terrible.

– 5. Placebo Bias: occur when people believe a treatment is working when there is no objective basis for its success• Example: Adam Sander “I’m So Wasted”

Context of Justification• The second phase of research,

in which results are prepared for useful communication with other scientists.– Research must undergo an ordeal

of proof…run your experiment and then publish it so other can test it, locate patterns, link it to their research, etc.

– Skepticism, curiosity, and discipline all link psychological researchers to the scientific community.

Objectivity Safeguards• How to overcome bias…– 1. keep complete records– 2. standardization: the use of uniform, consistent

procedures in all phases of data collection (treat subjects the same way)

– 3. operational definition: A statement of the procedures or ways in which a researcher is going to measure behaviors or qualities. • For example, you wanted measure and define "life change".

You could do this by giving people the Social Readjustment Rating Scale and then define "life change" as the score on the social readjustment rating scale.

Safeguards Cont’d– 4. blind: subjects that are uninformed about the purpose of

research study or some key part of it. (The coke/pepsi taste test)

– 5. double blind: a control procedure in which both researchers and subjects are uninformed about the nature of the independent variable being administered.• This type of design is commonly used in drug evaluation studies, and

is used to prevent the researchers from acting differently to people in one group, or from giving the participant any information that could make them act and/or behave unnaturally.

• BEWARE OF: Confounding variables: changeable factors that could be confused with the independent variable

Example of a Confounding Variable

• For example, you want to study whether bottle-feeding (Cause) is related to an increased risk of diarrhea in infants (Effect). It would seem logical that bottle-fed infants are more prone to diarrhea since water and the bottle could get contaminated, milk could go bad, etc. But if you were to conduct this study, you would learn that bottle-fed infants are less likely to develop diarrhea than breast-fed infants. It would seem that bottle-feeding actually protected against the illness. But in truth, you would have missed a very important confounding variable - mother's education.

If you take mother's education into account, you would learn that better-educated mothers are more likely to bottle-feed their infants, who are also less likely to develop diarrhea due to better hygienic practices of the mothers. In other words, mother's education is related to both the Cause and the Effect. Not only did the Confounding Variable suppress the effect of bottle-feeding, it even appeared to reverse it - confounding results, indeed!