History And Measurement Flashcards
What is the first evidence of psychology before it was formalised as a scietific field of study?
4th Century BC
What was the lexical hypothesis that early personality researchers developed?
The idea that
personality is encoded in language through traits
What was the person-situation debate?
What is responsible for behaviour - persoanlity traits or behaviour?
What did early intelligence ressearchers Francis Galton and Karl Pearson investigate?
- Psychological attributes can be measured and analysed
– Psychological characteristics are inherited
– Many statistics we use today - Correlations, p-values, Chi-square test
What did Charles Spearman (1904) research?
Factor analysis, reliability, general factor of ability
What did Alfred Binet (1905) research?
The intoduction of the IQ test.
How do we operationalise psychological constructs as they’re not directly observable?
We observe patterns of behaviour or
performance and make assumptions about
hidden psychological characteristics that could
be causing them.
What does measurement typically require that is difficult for psychological measurements?
A ‘ground truth’ or real fixed quantity that we can derive measurement units from.
What must we do to measure in psychology?
Create our own measures, psychological measurement depends on making inferences rather than direct observations
What does it mean to measure something well?
Our measurements should be consistent over time and doesn’t change with context.
What are the advantages to individuals making observations about individual differences?
Individuals are the only ones who have direct access to internal psychological
characteristics.
What are the advantages of other individuals making observations about individual differences?
Other individuals may be better judges of how we appear and how our internal experiences compare to others
Where does error in psychological measurement come from?
– Impacts of stochastic (random) and systematic processes that deviate scores away from the ‘true’ patterns (e.g., social desirability bias)
– Interpretive disagreements about the scale among creators and users (e.g., cultural / age differences in questionnaire language)
What is bias?
Bias is anything that systematically distorts how accurately a test captures its target construct.
What is the key difference between errors (i.e., bias) and noise?
Error / bias refers to mistakes in something objective (i.e., systematic distortion
away from our true value)
* Noise refers to aggregations of errors (both stochastic and systematic) that produce
temporary deviations from overall patterns
