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Research instruments critically considered.Week 1: introduction.
Psychology as a sci ence.
Psychology is often defined as the scientific study of human behaviour. It is quite an elusive
subject matter.
From the beginning humans began very interested in how the world behaves. The earliest
explanation of how we work were metaphysical. These explanations go against how physical
laws work.
- Animism: Natural phenomena are presumed to be alive or have intentions and effect
human behaviour.
- Mythology
- Religion
- Astrology: the moving of celestial beings affect human personalities/behaviour.
Philosophy nowadays can be defined as: the study of knowledge, behaviour, and the nature
of reality by making use of logic, intuition and empirical observations. Logic and intuition
were very central to philosophy from the very beginning. Empirical observations didn’t really
catch on till the mid 60’s. Empiricism is that the best way to understand the world is through
observation. It got really popular from the end of the 80s.
Philosophy gets a great deal from its roots from the physiology and physical sciences. The
experimental methods came one of the building blocks for Philosophy.
The nature of scientific reason.
There are four canons of science:
- Determinism: There is order in the world. All events and behaviours in the world
have meaningful and systematic causes.
- Empiricism: Knowledge through observation
- Parsimony: Simplicity is key. If there are two explanations for a event that are
equally good at explaining this event, you should choose the one with the least
assumptions.
- Testability: Theories should be confirmable and disconfirmable.
Human beings are good at identifying patterns but bad at identifying change. In philosophy
we tend to see clausal relations where they do not exist.
Riddles and scientific reason:
- Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using
reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be
obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic.
- Prior assumptions can be dangerous
- Alternative and null hypotheses paralleled in the Yes/No questions.
- Data that don’t fit expectations can be key.
- The value of persistence, persistence is really important because they problems are
, very complex.
- An expectation for complex answers, some of the best theories are very simple in its
assumptions and in its framework but are able to explain a lot of data.
- Science can be frustrating.
Different ways in which we get information about the world:
- Authority
- Intuition
- Logic
- Observation
The lesson to learn here is that these four ways of knowing are presented in the opposite
order of there important in scientific reason.
Being a good consumer of psychological research
- Is there evidence?
- What was the sample?
- Who paid for all this?
- Who is reporting the research?
- Does it make sensational claims?
- Correlation or causation?
- Look for the original source
Summary
Psychology is a science because of its use of the scientific method.
Empirical evidence is central to all science.
Scientific theories have to be parsimonious and testable.
Week 1 - Reading
Chapter 1 – How do we know?
Barnum description = Most people readily confuse statements that are true of people in
general with statements that are true of them in particular.
A brief history of Human knowledge.
The earliest explanations for human behaviour are metaphysical. Metaphysical
explanations go against physical laws, they attribute behaviour or experiences to
nonphysical forces.
- One category of metaphysical explanations is animism: the believe that natural
phenomena are alive and influence behaviour. For example people believed that
possessing part of certain animals would endow the owner with some of the
psychological properties of the animal in question. Also, they believed that the wind,
sun and rain had wills or temperaments
- A second category is mythology and religion. These make the assumptions that
deities (who exist in some kind of spiritual rather than physical plane) play an
important role in human behaviour.
Religious explanations for behaviour are typically more sophisticated and
comprehensive than animistic explanations, but they share the basic assumptions
, that nonphysical forces determine much of what people do.
- A third category is astrology. The believe that human behaviour is determined by the
activity of celestial bodies. Astrology does adopt some scientific practices.
Metaphysical systems were eventually abandoned by scientists in favour of explanations
based on an entirely different approach to knowledge.
Philosophy is one of the earliest systems to compete with metaphysical systems.
Philosophy refers to the study of knowledge, behaviour, and the nature of reality by make
use of logic, intuition, and empirical observations. The early philosophers often used less
scientific ways of thinking, their ideas had to be consistent with the bible. As philosophy
matured practitioners increasingly came to rely on logic and empirical observation.
The focus of logic has its roots with Greek philosophers. The focus on empirical observation
only seemed to catch on after it got a big jump starts from Descartes in the 1600s. In the 19th
century philosophers followed a principle of positivism: it should be based only on
observations that can be made with absolute certainty. After that the idea of empiricism, the
idea that the best way to learn about the world is to make observations took firm hold in
philosophy.
Psychology owes it current emphasis on systematic observation to its root in the physical
science, especially physiology. Physiology is the study of the functions of and interrelations
between different parts of the brain and body. They uses the experimental method: they
method by which levels of one or more independent variables are systematically
manipulated or measured in order to gauge their effects on one or more dependent
variables.
Experimental psychology was invented in Germany sometime around the mid-to late 1800s.
Fundamental principles that are more of less accepted on faith are often referred to as
canons. At least four such fundamental canons appear to be accepted by almost all
scientist:
- Determinism: This is the doctrine that the universe is orderly – the idea that all
events have meaningful, systematic causes.People find it easier to think in terms of
causality than not. People often perceive connections where they do not truly exist,
this plays an important role in the development and maintenance of stereotypes.
Illusory correlation = the false association that people often form between
membership in a statistical minority group and rare (and typically negative)
behaviours.
- Empiricism: Scientists assume that the best way to figuring out orderly principles is
to make observations.
- Parsimony: All scientists agree that if we are faced with two competing theories that
do an equally good job of handling a set of empirical observations, we should prefer
the simpler or more parsimonious of the two. The canon of parsimony says that we
should be extremely frugal in developing (or choosing between) theories, by steering
away from unnecessary concepts.
- Testability: scientific theories should be testable using currently available research
techniques Testability is closely related to empiricism, but also to the philosophy of
falsifiability. The idea behind falsifiability is that scientists should go a step beyond
putting their theories to some kind of test by actively seeking out tests that could
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