Excavating Human Behaviors

 Pretend you are a Psychologist and briefly describe how you would study the following:  1. The life & culture of the “urban teenager”.  2. The types of music different ethnicities prefer.  3. The effects of drinking coffe on an adolescents sleep patterns.

 A. The need for the scientific method  1. What may seem to make sense at first glance often times provides a wrong answer.  2. Hindsight bias = the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it.  3. Overconfidence = we tend to think we are more correct than we often are.

 We tend to think we know more than we do. 82% of U.S. drivers consider themselves to be in the top 30% of their group in terms of safety 81% of new business owners felt they had an excellent chance of their businesses succeeding. When asked about the success of their peers, the answer was only 39%. (Now that's overconfidence!!!)

1.Observe some aspect of the universe. 2.Invent a theory that is consistent with what you have observed. 3.Use the theory to make predictions. 4.Test those predictions by experiments or further observations. 5.Modify the theory in the light of your results. 6.Go to step 3.

 A. The Scientific Method – testing the truth of a proposition through careful measurement and controlled observation.  1. in the beginning … theory – an assumption based on observation that attempts to explain a specific phenomenon.  2. hypothesis – a clearly stated and testable educated guess about the causes of behavior. a) the predicted outcome of an experiment “Frustration encourages aggression”

The Hypothesis - “Frustration encourages aggression”  How would you test your hypothesis?  How would you frustrate people?  How would you measure whether or not they became more aggressive?

 C. Operational Definitions – a precise definition of a term in a hypothesis, which specifies the operations for observing and measuring the process of phenomenon being defined.  “Frustration” = preventing a child from playing with a favorite toy  “Aggression” = the number of times the child strikes a punching bag

 A. Principle of falsifiability – a scientific theory must make predications that are specific enough to expose the theory to the possibility of disconfirmation.  1. you have to be willing to accept evidence contrary to your hypothesis  When the children’s toys are taken away they become quite and sulk in the corner.

 B. Openness – willingness to let other experts look over and check your work  1. replication – other scientists can repeat the study or experiment to verify or challenge findings.  1962 – Researchers trained worms to cringe in response to a flashing light, then killed the worms, ground them into mash, and fed the mash to another set of worms. Research showed that this cannibalistic diet sped up the acquisition of the cringe response in the 2 nd set of worms.

 C. Peer Reviews  1. researchers are expected to publish their findings in professional journals  2. other psychologists can “check” findings before any release to the public

 A. Descriptive Methods – methods that yield descriptions of behaviors, but not necessarily causal explanations.  1. any research that observes and records  2. types: case-study, survey, test, naturalistic and laboratory observation.

 Any research that observes and records.  Does not talk about relationships, it just describes. What is going on in this picture? We cannot say exactly, but we can describe what we see. Thus we have…..

 B. Correlation research - a descriptive study that looks for a relationship between two phenomenon.  1. Detects relationships between variables.  2. Does NOT say that one variable causes another.

There is a positive correlation between ice cream and murder rates. Does that mean that ice cream causes murder?

 A statistical measure of the extent to which two factors relate to one another

 C. Experimental Research  1. explores cause and effect relationships  2. experiment – a controlled test of a hypothesis in which the researcher manipulates one variable to discover its effects on another. Eating too many bananas causes... Constipation