Chapter 2 Research Methods Facilitated communication developed Australia brought to news by Douglass Binklen it was used as a treatment for children with autism so the children could communicate with their par ents through technology like a commuter The facilitator would sit next to the child who in return would sit in front of a computer or pad By placing a child with autism and the facilitator in adjoining cubicles and flashing dif ferent pictures to each of them on some trials researchers demonstrated that the facili tated communications emanated from the mind of the facilitator not the child Unbeknownst to facilitators their hands are effortlessly guiding the fingers of children toward the keyboard and the resulting words are coming from their minds not the chil dren s Ideomotor effect another person s ideas are unknowingly influencing their movements research design matter because without it a solution or treatment is only seen as ef fectible because of what is seen but not because of the research ex facilitated communi cation prefrontal lobotomy for schizophrenia doctors operated on the nerves heuristics mental shortcuts or rules of thumb cognitive misers we re mentally lazy and try to conserve our mental energies by simplifying the world our heuristics can cause us to sometimes oversimplify something Daniel Kahneman Amos Tversky pioneered the study of heuristics and cam up with representativeness heuristic availability heuristic representative heuristic we judge the probability of event by its superficial similarity to a proto type judge a book by its cover base rate how common a behavior or characteristic is base rate fallacy when you neglect to consider base rates availability heuristic we estimate the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our minds on how available it is in our memories cognitive biases systematic errors in thinking Hindsight bias i knew it all along effect refers to our tendency to overestimate how well we could have successfully forecasted known outcomes overconfidence our tendency to overestimate our ability to make correct predictions naturalistic observation watching behavior in real world settings without trying to manipulate people s behavior external validity the extent to which we can generalize our findings to real world setting internal validity the extent to which we can draw cause and effect inferences naturalistic observations are low in internal validity because we cannot control the vari ables case study researchers examine one person or a small number of people often over an extended period of time existence proofs demonstrations that a given psychological phenomenon can occur Self Report measures random selection participate 1 2 every person in the population has an equal chance of being chosen to Evaluating measures Is our measure reliable Is it valid reliability refers to consistency of measurement test retest reliability a questionaire yields similar scores over time Interrater reliability is the extent to which different people who conduct an interview or make behavioral observations agree on the characteristics they re measuring Validity is the extent to which a measure assesses what it purports claims to measure truth in adverstising Ex see a phone labeled iphone open it and its a watch Advantage Disadvantages to Self Report Measures advantage easy to administer self report measures of personality and behavior work reasonably well disadvantage they typically assume that respondents possess enough insight into their personality characteristics to report on them accurately self report questionnaires typi cally assume that participants are honest in their responses b c of positive impression and malingering Positive impression management we are malingering aim of achieving a clear cut personal goal the tendency to make ourselves appear psychologically disturbed with the is the tendency to make ourselves look better than Rating data can circumvent some of the problems with self report data because ob servers may not have the same blind spots as the people they re rating halo effect this is the tendency of ratings of one positive characteristic to spill over to influence the ratings of other positive characteristics correlational design psychologists examine the extent to which two variables are associated Rating Data Correlations 1 3 types of correlation they can be positive negative or zero A positive correlation means that as the value of one variable changes the other goes in the same direction Ex if one goes up the other goes up A zero correlation means that the variables don t go together Ex music and math ability don t go together A negative correlation means that as the value of one variable changes the other goes in the opposite direction If one goes up the other goes down 2 correlation coefficients the statistics to measure correlations Range value from 1 0 to 1 0 A correlation coefficient of 1 0 is a perfect negative correlation whereas a correla tion coefficient of 1 0 is a perfect positive correlation To find out how strong a correlation is you need to look at its absolute value 3 scatter plots a grouping of points on a two dimensional graph illusory correlation the perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exists Ex full moon and strange occurrences CORRELATION DOES NOT MEAN CAUSATION If observational designs case studies and correlational designs don t allow us to draw cause and effect conclusions Experimental designs They permit cause and effect inferences Experiment Consists of Two Things 1 random assignment of par ticipants to conditions random assignment we mean that the experimenter ran domly sorts participants into one of two groups ex perimental group control group Experimental group receives the manipulation control group doesn t receive the manipulation 2 manipulation of an independent variable independent variable is the variable the experimenter manipulates dependent variable is the variable that the experimenter measures to see whether this manipu lation has had an effect operational definition a working definition of what they re measuring confounding variable or confound to refer to any difference be tween the experimental and control groups other than the independent variable placebo effect is improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement to avoid this the participants must remain blind to the condition they ve been assigned
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