Unit 2
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.
Hi Tommy, my name is Maria from Pd 5 Psych, I just want to ask you a question. If your doing an experiment but in its natural environment, wouldn't that be consider both Naturalistic Observation and Experimental Observation, or is it only be Naturalistic Observation due to it being experiment on their environment?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI have a question about the correaltion method. If positive correa;tion means they go in the same direction and negative correaltion means they go in opposite directions, then does that mean that the correlation between something can be zero? In that case, does zero mean that the two subjects have no relation to each other at all?
ReplyDelete