Ch. 2 Methodology: How Social Psychologists do Research Flashcards
Basic vs. Applied Research
BASIC RESEARCH – Studies that are designed to find the best answer to the question of why people behave as they do. These are conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity.
APPLIED RESEARCH – A scientific study within the field of psychology that focuses on solving problems. Its main purpose is to conduct scientific research and apply it to real-world situations. (curing illness & innovating new technologies)
Basic Dilemma of the Social Psychologist
BASIC DILEMMA – There is often a trade-off between internal and external validity—being able to randomly assign people to conditions and ensuring that no extraneous variables are influencing the results versus making sure that the results can be generalized to everyday life.
- The way to resolve this dilemma is not to try to do it all in a single experiment
Cover Story
COVER STORY – A plausible but false statement about the purpose of a research study given to participants to avoid disclosing to them the true hypothesis being investigated. Such deception may be practiced when the participants’ behavior in the study is apt to be affected by knowledge of the experiment’s true purpose
Cross-Cultural Research
CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH – Research conducted with members of different cultures, to see whether the psychological processes of interest are present in both cultures or whether they are specific to the culture in which people were raised.
- If people in one culture view the victim in a particular circumstance as a member of their social group but people in another culture perceive the victim as a member of a rival social group, you might find very different results in the two cultures—not because the psychological processes of helping behavior are different, but because people interpreted the situation differently.
Institutional Review Board (IRB), Informed Consent, Deception, and Debriefing
INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARDS (IRB) – federally-mandated, locally-administered groups charged with evaluating risks and benefits of human participant research at their institution. They must weigh the costs and benefits of deceptive experiments.
- DECEPTION – Misleading participants about the true purpose of a study or the events that will actually transpire. This is necessary to create a sense of realism in the experiment or to keep the participants from recognizing the true purpose of the experiment and consciously or unconsciously interfering with the results.
- DEBRIEFING – Explaining to participants, at the end of an experiment, the true purpose of the study and exactly what transpired. This is necessary to alleviate any trauma or confusion that may have resulted from the execution of the experiment.
- INFORMED CONSENT – researchers inform the participants about the experiment and the participants decide to take part or not.
Meta-Analysis
META-ANALYSIS – A statistical technique that averages the results of 2 or more studies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable
Hindsight Bias
HINDSIGHT BIAS – The tendency for people to exaggerate, after knowing that something occurred, how much they could have predicted it before itoccurred.
- The trick is to predict what will happen in an experiment before you know how it turned out.
Formulating Hypotheses
FORMULATING HYPOTHESIS – Experimentation begins with a hypothesis, which is a hunch or educated guess that some relationship might exist. What are the best sources of meaningful hypotheses?
- Challenging existing Theories – Many studies stem from a researcher’s dissatisfaction with existing theories and explanations.
- Refining Existing Theories – Theory refinement: A theory is developed; specific hypotheses derived from that theory are tested; based on the results obtained, the theory is revised and new hypotheses are formulated.
- Investigating our Observations – Researchers often observe something in their lives or the lives of others that they find curious and interesting, stimulating them to construct a theory about why this phenomenon occurred.
Diffusion of Responsibility (Latane & Darley)
DIFFUSION of RESPONSIBILITY (Latane & Darley 1968) – the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely it is that any given individual will intervene.
- Perhaps the bystanders would have been more likely to help had each thought he or she alone was witnessing the murder. How can we tell whether this hypothesis is true?
Observational Method: Research Design
OBSERVATIONAL METHOD – The technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior.
- If the goal is to describe what a particular group of people or type of behavior is like, the observational method is very helpful.
ETHNOGRAPHY – The Observational method by which researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions they might have.
- Ethnography is the chief method of cultural anthropology.
- As social psychology broadens its focus by studying social behavior in different cultures, ethnography is increasingly being used to describe different cultures and generate hypotheses about psychological principles.
ARCHIVAL ANALYSIS – The observational method in which the researcher examines the accumulated documents, or archives, of a culture (e.g., diaries, novels, magazines, and newspapers)
LIMITS to the METHOD – Social psychologists want to do more than just describe behavior; they want to predict and explain it. To do so, other methods are more appropriate.
Correlational Method: Research Design
CORRELATIONAL METHOD – The technique whereby two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them (i.e., how much one can be predicted from the other) is assessed.
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CORRELATION COEFFICIENT – A statistical technique that assesses how well you can predict one variable from another—for example, how well you can predict people’s weight from their height.
- Ranges from -1 (perfect negative correlation) to +1 (perfect positive correlation) with 0 representing no correlation at all.
SURVEYS – Research in which a representative sample of people are asked (often anonymously) questions about their attitudes or behavior.
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Advantages include:
- …allowing researchers to judge the relationship between variables that are difficult to observe (Ex: Attitudes and beliefs).
- …allowing researchers to study representative samples of the population using a RANDOM SELECTION process.
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RANDOM SELECTION – A way of ensuring that a sample of people is representative of a population by giving everyone in the population an equal chance of being selected for the sample (Ex: Picking names out of a hat.)
- Ex: in the 1930s, the Literary Digest poll was given to people to see which presidential candidate they would vote for. They randomly chose names from telephone books and car registrations and the results had FDR losing in a landslide. Unfortunately, In the depths of the Great Depression, many people could not afford telephones or cars. Those who had them were doing well financially; most well-to-do voters were Republican and overwhelmingly favored Alf Landon. Wrong! FDR won in a landslide. The poll was woefully NON-random as a result of the sources from which they selected the participants.
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Problems include:
- …the accuracy of the responses. (Ex: Asking survey participants to predict how they might behave in some hypothetical situation or to explain why they behaved as they did in the past is an invitation to inaccuracy. Often people simply don’t know the answer—but they think they do.
- Richard Nisbett and Tim Wilson (1977) demonstrated this “telling more than you can know” phenomenon in a number of studies in which people often made inaccurate reports about why they responded the way they did. Their reports about the causes of their responses pertained more to their theories and beliefs about what should have influenced them than to what actually influenced them.
LIMITS of the METHOD – The major shortcoming of the correlational method is that it tells us only that two variables are related, not whether they are CAUSAL. If a researcher finds that there is a correlation between two variables, it means that there are three possible causal relationships between these variables: A causes B, B causes A, or a third thing causes both A & B.
Experimental Method: Research Design
EXPERIMENTAL METHOD – The method in which the researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable (the one thought to have a causal effect on people’s responses).
- The only method that determines causal relationships.
- The experimental method is the preferred choice in most social psychological research, due to its ability to reveal causal inferences.
- INDEPENDENT VARIABLE – The variable a researcher manipulates to see if it has an effect on some other variable.
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DEPENDENT VARIABLE – The variable a researcher measures to see if it is influenced by the independent variable.
- The researcher hypothesizes that the dependent variable will depend on the level of the independent variable.
Latané and Darley (1968) – succeeded in identifying one important determinant of whether people help: the number of bystanders that people think are present.
- As they manipulated the INDEPENDENT VARIABLE (# of bystanders) in the experiment, they measured the DEPENDENT VARIABLE (# of bystanders who sought help) and determined that the more bystanders there are, the less likely they are to seek help – known as the “Diffusion of Responsibility”.
INTERNAL VALIDITY – Keeping everything but the independent variable the same in an experiment – Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable – accomplished by:
- Controlling all extraneous variables
- Randomly assigning people to different experimental conditions.
- When INTERNAL VALIDITY is HIGH, the experimenter is in a position to judge whether the independent variable CAUSES the dependent variable.
- This is the hallmark of the experimental method that sets it apart from the observational and correlational methods
- With high INTERNAL VALIDITY, we can be sure of the causal connection between the number of bystanders (INDEPENDENT VARIABLE) and helping (DEPENDENT VARIABLE) because Latané and Darley made sure that everything about the situation was the same in the different conditions except for the independent variable—the number of bystanders.
- To ensure that the measurement of the DEPENDENT VARIABLE is NOT affected by idiosyncrasies of the participants, researchers use RANDOM ASSIGNMENT TO CONDITION – A process ensuring that all participants have an equal chance of taking part in any condition of an experiment; through random assignment, researchers can be relatively certain that differences in the participants’ personalities or backgrounds are distributed evenly across conditions.
- This RANDOM ASSIGNMENT is the most important part of the experimental method.
PROBABILITY LEVEL (p-value) – tells how likely it is that the results of an experiment occurred by chance and not due to the influence of the independent variable.
- i.e. p = .05 means that there must be less than a 5% chance that the results found are actually due to random chance rather than due to the influence of the INDEPENDENT VARIABLE in order to be considered STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT.
- The convention in science is to consider results SIGNIFICANT (trustworthy) ONLY if the probability is less than 5 in 100 (5% or .05) that the results might be due to chance rather than due to the independent variable being studied.
- If p = .05, then we can be 1.00 - .05 = .95 = 95% confident that our result is due to the influence of the INDEPENDENT VARIABLE.
- If p = .01, then we can be 1.00 - .01 = .99 = 99% confident that our result is due to the influence of the INDEPENDENT VARIABLE.
EXTERNAL VALIDITY – The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people. Two types:
- GENERALIZABILITY ACROSS SITUATIONS – the extent to which we can generalize from the situation in an experiment to real-life situations.
- GENERALIZABILITY ACROSS PEOPLE – the extent to which we can generalize from the people who participated in the experiment to people in general.
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PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM – The extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life.
- Experiments are set up to maximize the sense of realism.
- COVER STORY – A description of the purpose of a study, given to participants, that is different from its true purpose and is used to maintain psychological realism.
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FIELD EXPERIMENTS – Experiments conducted in natural settings rather than in the laboratory. The experiment is still planned and controlled, but it is in the natural setting rather than the lab. Thus, the participants are immersed in reality.
- One of the best ways to increase external validity.
- There is almost always a trade-off between internal and external validity, between control and realism.
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REPLICATIONS (Repeating the study with different participants and settings) are the ultimate test of an experiment’s external validity. Only by conducting studies in different settings, with different populations, can we determine how generalizable the results are.
- And a META-ANALYSIS (the averaging of multiple studies’ findings) can help us sort out the meaning of multiple studies that may not have exactly the same findings.
