1.3: Defining Psychological Science: The Experimental Method Flashcards
Basic Research
Performed to learn about something.
It is curiosity-driven and used to expand upon knowledge. It doesn’t have an immediate objective.
Example: A study assessing the impacts of caffeine consumption on the brain. As you can see from the example, the goal is not to solve a problem it is only to increase knowledge about a particular topic.
Applied Research
Answers specific questions and is used to solve a problem or do something of practical use.
Example: trying to find a cure for obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The Scientific Method
First, the researcher would make a theory to try and explain the behavior that we are observing.
This theory would then produce a hypothesis, or an educated guess/testable prediction.
However, theories could bias our observations. Think about it: if you want to prove your theory correct, you would try and make it so the results prove it.
To avoid this bias, psychologists use something called an operational definition.
Operational Definition
Statements of the exact procedures used in the study, which would eventually allow other researchers to replicate the research.
Example:
How would you describe human intelligence?
A. You may have said how smart someone is, measured by their grades, but this is a biased definition. The operational definition would be what an intelligence test (such as an IQ test) measures.
Types of Variables
Independent Variable, Dependent Variable, Confounding Variables, & Control Variables.
Independent Variable
The variable that changes in an experiment.
Dependent Variable
The effect of the change in the experiment. This is what gets measured.
Confounding Variable
An outside influence that changes the effect of the dependent and independent variables.
The confounding variable includes a new outside variable not present in the original experiment.
In our ice cream example, let’s look at the weather, which could be the reason for the correlation. Ice cream is more often sold when it is hot outside, and people are more likely to commit crimes when it is hot outside because there is more social interaction. In the winter, people are less likely to buy ice cream, and there is also less social interaction.
Hawthorne Effect
If a researcher is observing people, those people would behave differently when they realize they are being watched, impacting the results of the naturalistic observation.
Control Variable
The variable that’s kept the same throughout an experiment.
For example, if a researcher wants to see how sleep affects performance on a test, the control variables could be the test, sleeping atmosphere, and the type of bed. These would all be kept the same throughout the research.
We need a control variable to prove why something happened without an alternate explanation. You can’t say the type of bed or the difficulty of the test impacted those results if the researcher kept those the same throughout the experiment.
Which type of research is the only one that can determine cause and effect?
Experiments.
Random Assignment
When participants are assigned to each experimental group with an equal chance of being chosen.
Random Sample
Each individual in the population has an equal chance of participating in an experiment.
Difference between Random Assignment and Random Sample
Random assignment is randomly selecting people to be in an experimental group while random sample is randomly selecting people from the population to be in the experiment as a whole.
Similarity between Random Assignment and Random Sample
Both random sampling and random assignment ultimately lead to the most accurate results.
