Unit 1 - Foundations of Psychology and Research Flashcards
What are the four goals of psychology?
- Describe Behaviors
- Explain Behaviors
- Predict Behaviors
- Control Behaviors
What is hindsight bias?
Tendency to reflect and believe the outcome, ex. “I knew it all along!”
What is overconfidence?
More confident than correct
What is perceived order in random events?
Makes sense of everything, ex. coin flips/dice rolls
What is a theory?
Explains behavior or events by offering ideas that organize observations
What is a hypothesis?
Predictions, specify what would support/disconfirm a theory, if…then
What is falsifiability?
Can it be proven false?
What is an operational definition?
Exact procedures
What is a case study?
In-depth analyses of individuals/groups, non-experimental
What is a naturalistic observation?
Recording natural behavior
What is social-desirability bias?
Answering to please others
What is self-report bias?
When people don’t accurately report/remember behaviors
What is a case study?
In-depth analyses of individuals/groups, non-experimental
What is sampling bias?
Flawed sampling, unrepresentative
What is a random sample?
Fairly represents a population, with an equal chance of inclusion
What is a correlation coefficient?
Shows how closely 2 things relate, prediction (-: relate inversely, +: relate)
What is a scatterplot?
Helps show clusters with 2 variable values
What is a directionality problem?
Cannot tell us which variable is the cause/effect
What is an illusionary correlation?
If we believe that dreams forecast events, we may notice more confirming than disconfirming factors (perceiving where a relationship does not exist)
What is regression towards the mean?
The tendency for extreme/unusual events to regress towards the average
What is an experiment?
Enables researchers to isolate 1+ plans, proves cause and effect
What are random assignment groups?
Randomly assigned unbiased, picked with a random assignment, or numbered off
What is a single-blind procedure?
Uniformed, all aware except participants
What is a double blind procedure?
Placebo Effect
Experimental effects by observation alone
Ind. variable
manipulated, effect is studied
dep. variable
measured outcome, will change when ind. is manipulated
cofounding variable
may influence studied events, extraneous
experimenter bias
unintentional influence from researchers to confirm beliefs
correlation coefficient meanings
+1.0 ^^, 0.0 –, -1.0 ^-
spurious correlations
seem related but are not
scientific method in 5 basic steps
create hypothesis, design the study, collect the data, analyze the results, report findings
quantitative research
numerical data sets
qualitative research
narrative data, interviews
informed consent
giving potential participants enough info about the study to help them decide
debriefing
post-study explanation, including purpose/deceptions
mean
average
mode
most frequent score
range
highest - lowest =
median
middle # in order
positively skewed
high outlier will shift the mean to the right
p-value
did IV change the DV? less than .05, sig.
if the number is less than .05 but the effect is small…
results are unlikely to be generalizable
5 major ethics guidelines
informed consent, minimal risk to subjects, anonymity, justified use of deception, debrief subjects
