Chapter 2 Research Methods I The Beauty and Necessity of Good Research Design a Why we need research designs i Prefrontal lobotomy surgical procedure that severs fibers connecting the frontal lobes of the brain from the underlying thalamus b How can we be fooled i Intuitive thinking Quick and reflexive gut hunches 1 Meeting people ii Analytical thinking slow and reflective 1 Solving problems ii Heuristic mental shortcut or rule of thumb that helps us to stream our thinking and make sense of our world II The Scientific Method Toolbox of Skills a Naturalistic Observation watching behavior in real world settings without trying to manipulate the situation i External validity extent to which we can generalize findings to real world settings ii Internal validity extent to which we can draw cause and effect inferences from a study b Case Study research design that examines one person or a small number of people in depth other over an extended time period i Helpful in providing existence proof demonstration that a given psychological phenomenon can occur ii Able to study rare or unusual phenomena s that are difficult to re create in a lab iii Can be misleading can lead to wrong conclusions b Report Measures and Surveys i Random Selections procedure that ensures every person in a population has an equal chance of being chosen to participate ii Reliability consistency of measurement iii Validity extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure iv Disadvantages 1 Not enough insight 2 Response set tendencies to distort their answers to questions in a socially desirable way that paints them in a positive light 3 Malingering the tendency to make ourselves appear psychologically disturbed with the aim of achieving a clear cut personal goal ii Rating 1 Halo effect the tendency of ratings of one positive characteristic to spill over to influence that ratings of other positive characteristics b Correlational design research design that examines the extent to which two variables are associated i Scatterplot a grouping of points on a two dimensional graph ii Illusory correlation the perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exist b Experimental Designs i What makes a study an experiment 1 ii Experiment research design characterized by random assignment of participants to conditions manipulation of an independent variable 2 Random assignment randomly sorting participants into groups a Experimental group b Control group 2 Variables a Independent manipulated b Dependent measured c Operational definition a working definition of what a researcher is measuring Disadvantages 1 Placebo effect improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement a Patient must remain blind unaware of whether what is in the experimental or control group 2 Nocebo effect is harm resulting from the mere expectation of harm 3 Experimenter Expectancy Effect when a researchers hypotheses lead them to unintentionally bias a study s outcome a Double blind studies help 2 Demand characteristics cues that participants pickup from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the researcher s hypotheses III Ethical Issues in Research Design a Informed consent researchers must tell subjects what they are getting into before asking them to participate b Protection from Harm and discomfort c Deception and debriefing IV Statistics The Language of Psychological Research a Statistics the application of mathematics to describing and analyzing data i Descriptive statistics numerical characterization that describe data 1 Central tendency measure of the central scores in data set or where the group tends to cluster a Mean average b Median middle score c Mode most frequent 2 Variability measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are a Range difference between highest and lowest b Standard deviation how far each data point is from the mean ii Inferential statistics allow us to determine how much we can generalize findings from our sample to the full population