M1: Brief History & Science of Experimental Psychology Flashcards
He is generally credited with being the first experimental psychologist
Wilhelm Wundt
The birth of psychological science is usually dated in 1879 from the opening of his laboratory in ___________ ?
Leizpig, Germany
Characterizes any field of study that gives the appearance of being scientific but has no true scientific basis and has not been confirmed using the scientific method.
pseudoscience
What are the tools that Wundt employed to study human sensory experience?
- Observation
- Measurement
- Experimentation
One of Wundt’s first laboratory student was the American psychologist ____________ .
G. Stanley Hall
Hall went on to open the first psychology laboratory in the United States in 1883 at ___________
Johns Hopkins University
TRUE OR FALSE
Mental philosophers were primarily engaged in the study of the five senses through introspection and observation of their own mental processes and observing those of others.
TRUE
The type of cause-and-effect relationship we establish through experiments that have a time difference occurs in the relationship.
Temporal Relationship
Scottish philosopher ________ argued that we can never establish causality from temporal relationships.
David Hume
compelling but not always correct.
Spatial
**TRUE OR FALSE: **
Hume’s argues’ that just because one event precedes another, it does not necessarily mean that the first causes the second.
TRUE
If the XYZ set of antecedents always leads to a particular behavior, whereas other treatments do not, we can infer that XYZ causes the behavior.
Infer Cause and Effect
**TRUE OR FALSE: **
Inferences about cause-and-effect relationships are stated in the form of probabilities—never certainties.
TRUE
TRUE OR FALSE:
The treatment conditions come after the behavior
FALSE; it comes before
TRUE OR FALSE:
Temporal relationships are built into our experiments.
TRUE
The scientific techniques used to collect and evaluate psychological data
Methodology
The kind of everyday, nonscientific data gathering that shapes our expectations and beliefs and directs our behavior toward others
Commonsense Psychology
The science of behavior and mental processes
Psychology
Sources that seem credible and trustworthy—friends and relatives, people in authority, people we admire, reports from the media, books we have read, and so forth
Commonsense Psychologists
Our predictions, guesses, and explanations tend to feel much more correct than they are, and the more data we have available (accurate or not), the more confidence we have in our judgments about behavior
Overconfidence Bias
When we believe we know something, we tend to overlook instances that might disconfirm our beliefs, and we seek, instead, confirmatory instances of behavior.
Confirmation Bias
A controlled procedure in which at least two different treatment conditions are applied to subjects.
Psychology Experiment
Perceiving others by their traits can be useful for predicting their behavior, but it can also lead to overestimations of the likelihood that they will act in trait-consistent ways across a wide variety of different situations.
Nonscientific Inferences
An experimental design in which subjects receive only one kind of treatment
Between-Subject Design
Present all treatments to each subject and measure the effect of each treatment after it is presented.
Within Subject Design
TRUE OR FALSE:
For experimentation to produce valid conclusions, all explanations except the one(s) being tested should be clearly ruled out.
TRUE
Give 1 way to achieve control
- Random assignment of subjects to different treatment conditions (or sometimes by using a within-subjects design)
- Presenting a treatment condition in an identical manner to all subjects
- Keeping the environment, the procedures, and the measuring instruments constant for all subjects in the experiment so that the treatment conditions are the only things that are allowed to change. In this way can we be reasonably certain that changes in the treatments are the cause of observed differences in behavior.
TRUE OR FALSE:
The sources of our commonsense beliefs about behavior can be reliable, and the explanations and predictions that we derive from them are likely to be perfect.
FALSE; it can be unreliable and imperfect
TRUE OR FALSE:
Perceivers can be remarkably inaccurate about the personality of strangers when they are able to observe even thin slices of nonverbal behavior.
FALSE; can be remarkably accurate
TRUE OR FALSE:
The procedures in the psychology experiment are carefully controlled so that we can be sure we are measuring what we intend to measure.
True
