September 9 2014 General Psychology HILL 114 Scientific Methods in Psychology Evaluating Evidence and Thinking Critically What constitutes an explanation Unexplained Underperformance Syndrome Doesn t explain what s wrong just gives it a different name UFOs Doesn t explain what it really is buy it doesn t say there s nothing out FUO Fever of Unknown Origin Not giving a clear explanation for the health there problem Gathering evidence Observation going to a setting place to see and observe Experimentation actual hands on approach testing experimenting The general scheme of things Hypothesis Original question Method How to test Hypothesis Results results of experimenting methods Interpretation what you make of the results Hypothesis A prediction of what s to happen under certain circumstances Specificity what to expect from testing Children and TV violence Logically falsifiability There has to be a way that you could show it s hypothesis false September 9 2014 General Psychology HILL 114 Method Random Assignment Assigning people to different groups to eliminate any confounding variables Operational definitions definitions that specify the operations or procedures used to produce or measure something ordinarily in a way to give it a numerical value But not always numeric Results and Interpretation What were the results What do they mean statistically more later and next time every result will slightly different yet will remain close What does it mean in terms of the hypothesis and or theory What else might they mean Should we believe what the author s claim Replicability Replicable results are those that anyone can observe at least approximately by following the same procedures Operational definitions again A scientific theory is an explanation or model that fits many observations and makes accurate Falsifiability if it isn t falsifiable there is no point in the experiment In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development predictions Burden of Proof Parsimony Lloyd Morgan s Canon Law of Parsimony September 9 2014 General Psychology HILL 114 Parsimony Clever Hans Extra Sensory Perception ESP Predicting the Future Nostradamus Wrote strange things predicted vague things credited for predicting world war 2 even though it just happened to match up to his description Specificity Jeane Dixon Volume Comprehensiveness Precision and Testability Parsimony Empirical Validity Heuristic Value Leads to future research Applied Value Operational definitions Samples Supported by statistically significant data Selected based on something other than People wearing red People wearing short sleeves or with a W in their name A sample is considered to be random if each person in the population has an equal chance of being included in the sample each time a new score is added People wearing red nobody changed during class People wearing short sleeves or having a W in their name nobody changed clothes or their name September 9 2014 General Psychology HILL 114 Volunteers self selection Call in shows Letters to the Editor Samples Convenience Representative stratified Random Cross cultural The editor may select to show opinions across the board but the population that writes is still the population that selects to read the paper September 9 2014 General Psychology HILL 114 Observations Naturalistic Case histories Surveys Surveyor bias
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