Research Method
- Hindsight Bias: the tendency to believe, after learning the outcome, that you knew all along.
- Overconfidence: we tend to think we know more than we do.
- The Barnum Effect: the tendency for people to accept very general or vague characterizations of themselves and take them to be accurate.
- Applied vs. Basic research
- Applied Research has clear, practical applications. YOU CAN USE IT!!!
- Basic Research expose questions that you may be curious about, but not intended to be immediately used.
- Hypothesis: expresses a relationship between two variables.
- Independent Variable: whatever is being manipulated in the experiment.
- Dependent Variable: what ever is being measured in the experiment.
- Operational Definition: explain what you mean in your hypothesis. how will the variables be measured in "real life" terms.
- Sampling: identify the population you want to study. The sample must be representative of the population you want to study.
- Experimental Method: looking to prove causal relationships. Cause = Effect
- Confounding Variable: anything that could cause a change in B, that is not A.
- Hawthorne Effect: just the fact that you know you are in an experiment can cause change.
- Correlation Method: expresses a relationship between two variable. Does not show causation.
- Positive Correlation: the variables go in the SAME direction.
- Negative Correlation: the variables go in opposite direction.
- Survey Method: most common type of study in psychology. Measure correlation. Cheap and fast. Need a good random sample.
- Naturalistic Observation: watch subjects in their natural environment. Do not manipulate the environment.
- Correlation Coefficient: a number that measures the strength of a relationship. Range is from -1 to +1. The relationship gets weaker the closer you get to zero.
- Case Studies: a detailed picture of one or a few subjects. Tells us a great story...but is just descriptive research. Does not even give us correlation data.
- Statistics: recording the results from out studies.
- Mean(most common), median(average), mode(middle)
- Descriptive Statistics: just describes set of data.
- Other Measures of Variability
- Standard Deviation: the variance of scores around the mean.
- The higher the variance is, the more spread out the distribution is.
