Chapter 1, 1.5-1.12 Flashcards
Critical thinking
making reasoned judgements
4 basic criteria for critical thinking
- There are very few “truths” that do not need to be subjected to testing.
- All evidence is not equal in quality
- Just because someone is considered to be an authority or have a lot of expertise does not make everything that person claims automatically true.
- Critical thinking requires an open mind
Scientific Approach
approach to research intending to reduce the likelihood of bias an error in the measurement of data.
Psychology’s 4 goals
- Description, observing a behavior and noting everything about it.
- Explanation, finding a theory (general explanation of a et of observations or facts) as to why something happens
- Prediction, determining what will happen in the future.
- Control, to change an undesired behavior into a desired one
Scientific Approach’s 5 steps
- Question, pursue an idea of interest
- Hypothesis, a tentative explanation for an observation
- Test, design depending on best way to answer question
- Conclusion, observe whether Hypothesis was correct and why or why not it was
- Report, let other researchers know
Replication
gives much more support to your research ( a good study can be easily replicated)
Naturalistic Observation
observing subjects in the natural environment
Observer Effect
subjects who know they’re being watched will behave differently
Participant Observation
Experimenter pretends to be a member of the subject group
Observer Bias
Disadvantage to Naturalistic Observation, when the observer has a an opinion on what they expect to see in the experiment
Lab Observation
allows for more control and replication, but also may lead to artificial behaviors
Case Study
Studying one individual with great detail (hard to apply to other cases)
Surveys
Asking a series of questions to a broad audience (weaknesses in truthful answering and proper questioning)
Representative Sample
randomly selecting a number of individuals from a population
Population
the entire group “under observation”
Correlation
measure of the relationship between two our more variables
Correlation coefficient
represents both the strength and the direction of the relationship (strongest = 1 or -1)
What does correlation prove
Not causation
Experiment
researchers deliberately manipulate their target cause while holding all else constant to see its effect on another variable
Operationalization
researchers specifically defining their variables so that they can be measured (I.e aggressive behavior is hard to quantify)
Independent Variable
the variable directly manipulated by researchers
Dependent Variable
the measured response of the participants
Confounding variables
variables that interfere with each other and their possible effects on variables of interest
Experimental group
group that receives the experimental manipulation