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Summary Conducting Research in Psychology, ISBN: 9781544333328 Research Instruments Critically Considered (PSMIN02)
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Conducting research in psychology, B.W. Pelham, H.BlantonChapter 1: How do we know?
Barnum description: aptly named after the famous circus promoter P. T. Barnum. Like many psychics and
astrologers, Barnum knew that 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
Metaphysical systems
• The earliest explanations for human behaviour (and for the physical world as well) appear to have been
metaphysical or supernatural explanations. Metaphysical explanations are explanations that violate
what scientists now consider to be established physical ls, primarily by attributing behaviour or
experiences to nonphysical forces, such as spirits or deities.
• The earliest category of metaphysical explanations for human behaviour was probably animism, the
belief that natural phenomena are alive and influence behavior.
>> ex: For example, Plato apparently believed that the universe was literally alive and had a soul at its
center. According to at least some interpretations, Aristotle argued that gravity reflects the desire of
physical objects to return to “mother earth”
• The second category of metaphysical explanations includes mythology and religion. Mythological
and religious systems make the assumption that deities (who exist in a spiritual rather than
physical plane) play an important role in human behavior. Religious explanations for behavior are
typically much more sophisticated and comprehensive than animistic explanations, but they share
the basic assumption that nonphysical, even magical, forces determine much of what people do.
• A third very old category of metaphysical systems is astrology. Believes in horoscopes and in the
fact that human behavior is determined by the activity of celestial bodies
• Metaphysical systems, such as animism, mythology, and astrology, were eventually abandoned by
scientists in favour of explanations based on an entirely different approach to knowledge.
Philosophy
• One of the earliest systems of thought to compete with metaphysical systems was philosophy.
• philosophy refers to the study of knowledge, behavior, and the nature of reality by making use of logic,
intuition, and empirical observations. However, early philosophers often borrowed concepts from less
scientific ways of thinking.
• Positivism: based only on observations that can be made with absolute certainty.
• Empiricism: the idea that the best way to learn about the world is to make observations
Physiology and physical sciences
• Psychology probably owes its current emphasis on systematic observation to its roots in the physical
sciences, especially physiology. Psychology probably owes its current emphasis on systematic
observation to its roots in the physical sciences, especially physiology.
• Experimental method is a powerful way to answer research questions and experimental psychologists
owe a great deal of what is good about their discipline to the traditions and methods developed and
refined by physiologists and other physical scientists.
Experimental psychology
• In the past 140 years or so, psychology has become both decidedly experimental and decidedly
scientific.
• Scientists make some very important assumptions
The fours canons of science
Canons are fundamental principals that are more or less accepted on faith. At least four such fundamental
principles appear to be accepted by almost all scientists.
,Determinism: the idea that all events have meaningful, systematic causes. The doctrine that all events,
including human action, are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the will.
Base-rate information is information about the proportion of things in a target population.
Illusory correlation: common judgmental bias
• People tend to have bias judgments. People often perceive connections between things that aren’t really
connected also suggests that people may be a little too ready to see the world in terms of causes.
• Superstitious conditioning: false conditioning process
• The principle of determinism has a close corollary. This is the idea that science is about theories. A
theory is simply a statement about the causal relation between two or more variables.
Empiricism: the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses, to make
observations.
• Like astrophysicists and psychophysicists, psychologists assume that the best way to find out how the
world works is to make observations.
• making an observation is a good way to find things out about the world.
• Empiricism is probably the least controversial of the four canons of science
Parsimony
• 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. As the word “parsimony” is commonly used by nonscientists, it refers to extreme stinginess or
frugality. This is good to remember because the canon of parsimony says that we should be extremely
frugal in choosing between theories, by steering away from unnecessary concepts.
• The point of parsimony is that if something is good science you should be able to understand it.
• At the risk of undermining our basic argument about the canon of parsimony, it is worth noting that it
may not always be parsimonious to explain human and animal behavior using different theories. It
would be more parsimonious to explain them using a single theory
• The idea behind parsimony is that as long as we are at the business of simplifying and organising, we
might as well keep at it until we have made things as simple as possible.
Testability: theories are testable, they are confirmed or non-confirmed by using current available
research techniques
• The canon of testability is closely related to the canon of empiricism because the techniques that
scientists typically use to test their theories are empirical techniques.
• the concept of testability is even more closely associated with the more specific 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 prove their theories wrong
• Logical positivists believe that science and philosophy should be based solely on things that can be
observed with absolute certainty.
• Operational definitions are definitions of theoretical constructs that are stated in terms of concrete,
observable procedures.
• Operational definitions are found in many circumstances or events such as sports for example. ex: in
basketball the player has to propel the ball into the basket to win points. Those definitions help decide
winners and loser and set the perimeters of the game or sport.
• Those operational definitions are also seen in science to psychology. ex: depression: total number of
symptoms a person reports having experienced in a structured interview
• operational definitions are important because they make theories testable or disconfirmable.
Four ways of knowing about the world
,One of the best ways to learn about a person’s thinking style is to ask a difficult question and then ask the
person to explain how he or she arrived at the answer.
• When answering a question, we answer using one of the following ways, “methods of knowing”
• Intuition: the ability to understand something instinctively
• Logic, by using reasoning
• Authority figure: asking someone which was experience in the matter
• Empirical observation: test the topic and get the answer
• Different belief systems have different preferred methods of knowing
• There is no guarantee that one way of knowing will be superior to others across all possible situations
• Good thinkers rarely limit themselves to a single way of understanding the world.
SUMMARY
Human beings attempt to understand the physical and psychological world in many ways. Throughout
history humans have tried to understand their world by such means as animism, mythology, and
philosophy. By comparing these different ways of understanding the world, we can see how psychology
evolved out of such disciplines as philosophy and physiology. The four canons of science, that is the four
basic assumptions about the world that virtually all scientists take as a given, are determinism,
empiricism, parsimony, and testability. The four distinct “ways of knowing,” that is, four ways of trying
to figure out what the world is like, are intuition, logic, authority, and observation. Whereas political and
religious systems place great emphasis on authority and intuition as ways of knowing, scientific systems
place more stock in logic and observation. This explains, for instance, why scientific beliefs are revised
much more frequently than religious beliefs. Although the basic rules of science are highly stable, this
stable system of methods and procedures facilitates the revision of beliefs based on new observations and
discoveries.
Conducting research in psychology, B.W. Pelham, H.Blanton
Chapter 2: How do we find out? The logic, Art and ethics of scientific discovery
Descriptive law: what people ought to do, Prescriptive law: what people actually do
The logic of scientific discovery
Laws, theories, and hypotheses
• Psychologist seek out laws that allow them to make precise predictions of human behaviour.
• A law is a universal statement of the nature of things that allows reliable predictions of future events.
• Psychologists try to establish laws for the human behaviour but it doesn’t mean that they can always
predict the behaviour. But psychology is regarded as a science.
• A psychologist will not always be able to predict the specific actions, but a well-trained psychologist
should be able to make some predictions that untrained people would be unable to make. Predictions
will increase in certitude as the psychologist gets more relevant information on the situation and the
person in question
• Psychologist done only seek the establishment of laws but also test theories. The theories should
• First, they should be deterministic. Thus, they should be logical and orderly, emphasising the
systematic causal relations between variables.
• Next, they should be empirically grounded. This means that they should generate predictions about
readily observable events.
, • Next, they should be parsimonious. A good theory is a simple and concise statement that allows you
to predict a wide variety of conceptually similar behaviors
• Finally, a good theory should be testable.
•
• There is difference between laws and theories
The main difference between them is their breadth or universality
Law are comprehensive, fundamental statements about reality
Theories have boundary conditions, they are plenty of times when they do nit apply.
If the established theories is good, it won’t predict the behaviour in all situations, however it will
offer realisable prediction of aggression under reasonable and specific set of circumstances.
Theories can be correct a good deal of the time, but none is valid for everyone under every
possible circumstance.
• Equifinality: the notion that the same behaviour is often produced my many different causes
• A third category of research statements is hypotheses. To test a theory, a person should use that theory
to derive specific predictions that can be readily tested. Hypotheses are thus predictions about specific
events that are derived from one or more theories.
The science of observation
• Method of induction: making use of induction means making many observations under controlled
conditions and arriving at a general statement about how things are. Induction, then, is reasoning from
specific instances to general principles.
• In scientific circles, general conclusions drawn via induction usually come to be known as theories, and
these theories can often be tested against new observations that are made in a variety of new
situations.
• Induction was then criticised by Humes who spoke of “the problem of induction”: how do you know
when you’ve made enough observations to be sure that your law is true? According to Hume, you
never do. Induction is probabilistic
• People seem to be predisposed to explaining other people’s behavior in terms of these other people’s
enduring character traits. They have a tendency to favour dispositional (“He’s a lousy driver.”) over
situational (“He’s distracted.”) explanations. This tendency was labelled the fundamental attribution
error.
• Method of deduction: reasoning from the general to the specific. In science, deduction thus occurs
when a general statement (a theory) is used to develop predictions (hypotheses) that are then tested
against observations.
• It is possible to prove that a theory is false but it’s not possible to prove that it’s true. Of course, we can
never prove anything with absolute certainty, but we can sometimes show that a general idea is
supported under a wide variety of circumstances, and this is why scientist still test their theories.
Three approaches to hypothesis testing
• Positive test bias: tendency for people who are evaluating hypotheses to attempt to confirm rather than
to disconfirm these hypotheses, it’s a bias towards confirmation. Once we get an idea in our heads,
most of us tend to engage in hypothesis-confirming behaviors that may falsely convince us that the
idea is correct.
• Psychologists and other scientists also show biases when trying to prove a hypothesis
• The three general approachers that scientists adopt when testing a hypothesis are validation,
falsification and qualification
Validation: approach to hypothesis testing in which researchers attempt to gather evidence that
supports or confirms a theory or hypothesis. In the past years research stated that psychology has
been plagued by the worst form of validation—the publication of results that must not be real
because they simply do not replicate. Some even refer to this as a “replication crisis”
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