Goals of the scientific methodThe scientific methodThe structure of scientific theoriesWhat makes for a good scientific theory?Where do scientific theories come from?PSYC 201Psychology and scienceGoals of the scientific methodOrganization and description: Collect information about a given topic or question. Among the pieces of information that be useful…- What exactly is the behavior or topic that one is interested in? - When does it occur? - How often does it occur? - Does it happen to everybody or just to certain types of people?Ex. Workplace violence. What pieces of information should we record about this behavior?- How many cases are there a year?- What do these cases have in common? - Is there a common profile of the killers? Age, Gender, type of job, etc - Is there a common profile of the victims? Supervisors, co-workers, males or femalesQuestion: Who are we supposed to be describing; groups of people or individuals? Prediction : Is it possible to know the circumstances in which the behavior will occur again. Are there things that one can measure which predict it's occurrence in the future. This information might be valuable.Ex. Workplace violence- Do the working conditions of postal employees predict the behavior? - Is there some combination of employer style and employee personality that predicts the behavior? - Is it possible to predict which employees are most likely to act in this way? If it is, then it may be possible to intervene.Explanation (understanding): It’s useful to know that a particular behavior is going to occur in a particular situation, but it’s often more useful to be able to explain why it occurred. Is it possible to determine the cause of the behavior? It may be possible to prevent some kind of negative behavior from occurring again.If you understand why a behavior occurs it may be possible to do something to prevent it from happening.ex. Is there a theory in psychology that can account for the behavior? Learned helplessness, models of stress and coping.In general, the only kind of study that can get at whether one variable causes a change in another variable is an experiment. In an experiment the researcher changes the conditions in one particular way, while they hold everything else constant. The variable being changed or manipulated is the independent variable. The variables being held constant are called control variables. The researcher obtains scores for the variable they’re trying to explain. This variable is called the dependent variable. When the conditions are changed in just one way and then at a later point the researcher observes a change in the variable they’re interested in, the only possible explanation for the change in the dependent variable is the change in the independent variable. The researcher can say that the independent variable caused a change in the dependent variable.Intervention (creating change)- Can a researcher use the information about the behavior they’re studying to change the behavior in a particular way. - Ex. Are there particular changes in the work environment that could be put in place toreduce the incidence of workplace violence?The scientific method- Not a specific formula or recipe for producing information. It’s a set of tools, it’s a strategy for producing and evaluating information.- It’s more of a frame of mind than a recipe.- One way to get a sense of what the scientific method is, is to contrast it with non-scientific approaches.1. General approach:Nonscientific: intuitive. People’s everyday decision making is prone to a number of different biases. Availability heuristic. People don’t know that their decisions are based on incorrect information.Ex. Not in book. Are there more words that begin with the letter R or words that have the letter R as the third letter? More with R as the third letter! The Availability Heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973). It’s easier to think of words that begin with R so we assume that there are more of them.Non-scientific – Authoritative: Believing something because another person says it’s the truth.Ex. Spontaneous generation. Debate in France in the 1860s over the issue of spontaneous generation. French scientist Felix Pouchet believed that under the right conditions life could appear from dead matter – spontaneously. (a piece of cheese left in arefrigerator) Louis Pasteur did not believe this was possible, but that a living thing could only come from other living things. Both Pouchet and Pasteur were good scientists and both had data to support their positions. If anything, Pouchet’s data were a little bit better.The question was decided by a committee set up by the French Academy of Science. The people on the committee voted on who was right. And that became the official position ofFrench science. If you wanted to be taken seriously as a scientist at that time, the committee decided what you should believe. If you didn’t believe that, you weren’t a considered to be a scientist, at least officially. Is this how scientific questions should be decided? Scientific approach: Empirical. Decisions are based on direct, recorded observations. Intuition may be a very valuable source of new ideas, but these ideas are then tested.2. Observation:Nonscientific: Casual, uncontrolledScientific: Systematic, controlledIs it possible to be sure why a particular event is occurring? Does caffeine have an effect on memory. Could you tell from just making observations of people? What if you do an experiment. Big dose vs no dose. Big dose – remember fewer words from a list. But you find that the Big dose group has an average age of 74. The other group has an average age of 27. The experiment is systematic, but it not well controlled.Systematic: set up a standard condition to observe the behavior. Control: Eliminate other possible explanations for a differences in behavior.The variable you’re observing is called the dependent variable.The variable you’re manipulating is called the independent variable.Experimental condition: the presence of the explanation being examinedControl condition: the absence of the explanation being examined.Sometimes the independent variable is not being manipulated per se by the investigator. You could say that nature has done the manipulating. Here the independent variable might be an individual difference variable. For example you could look at whether age has an effect