1. Entrance Task  Would you participate in a psychology experiment? What would make you willing to do it?

2. Clearing up misconceptions  Case Studies are from unusual situations / unethical for the researcher to administer.  Like the Movie(s) SAW-  Can’t study how much pain somebody is willing to go through to save themselves.

3. SO YOU WANT TO CONDUCT AN EXPERIMENT? #oryourteacherismakingyou

4. Correlational Studies  Proves that two things are related, but not causality  Topics:  Violence and video games  Hours of tv watched & grade point average  Vaccinations and number of autism cases

5. Correlations  Positive – high values of one thing are associated high values of another  hours of studying & GPA  Negative – high values of one thing are associated with low values of another  hours of tv watched & GPA  How do you know which variable is independent? Independent Variable Dependent Variable

6. But it doesn’t prove much  Maybe you hate school so you watch TV which results in a low GPA  Maybe you don’t know how to read so you watch TV which results in a low GPA  Maybe you can’t focus on schoolwork so you watch TV which results in a low GPA  These are confounding variables – other things we didn’t account for in the experiment that played a role

7. Coefficient of correlation:  Definition: a statistical index of the relationship of two things  If the two variables are perfectly linked in a positive direction, they will get a coefficient of +1  If they are linked in a negative direction, they will get a coefficient of -1  If they are not related AT ALL they will get 0.

8. We’re going to walk through an experiment to learn the parts  Hypothesis – a testable prediction  Nicotine impairs driving ability  Independent Variable – what the experimenter changes – Use of nicotine  Dependent Variable – what the experimenter expects will change – driving ability / # of collisions

9. How do we test?  Subjects will ‘drive’ on a simulator with a gas pedal & break  You tell them the object is to go as fast as they can while avoiding collisions  You need your two groups  Control group – the group that is NOT exposed to the treatment (will be compared) smokes a placebo cigarette  Experimental group – (the group that is exposed to the treatment – the independent variable) smokes a real cigarette  BOTH groups will use the SAME simulator, SAME course, etc. You should only change one thing ! Slow Down Grab the wall… Gas pedal

10. How do you decide who’s in what group?  RANDOM ASSIGNMENT  Assigning participants to experimental & control conditions by chance, to prevent a bias outcome  This is critical. You have to make sure that on average, the groups are the same, EXCEPT FOR VARIABLE YOU ARE MANIPULATING (in this case, cigarettes)  We don’t want one group to have really aggressive drivers and the other to only have sweet, polite drivers. That will mess up our study. So you randomly assign them to a group.

11. How do you ‘administer’ the independent variable?  You can’t just give some people cigarettes, and others not. They might think something is up. Or maybe, even the act of lighting up causes a reaction – not the nicotine !  So you have to give a placebo – or a fake treatment given for psychological effect. In this case the placebo will be a cigarette with no nicotine.

12. Which brings us to one more hitch  What if the experimenters know which treatment is which and they treat the subjects differently?  They know who has the real cigarettes and they wink at them? Or even unconsciously give signals that encourage nicotine like reactions  ((easier example: treatment for cancer, if the doctors knew who had the real treatment and the fake treatment, they may show pity to the group that got fake drugs, or real excitement to the ones who got the real one))

13. Extra Credit?  You try:  How much does your small signals effect others?  Make a hypothesis –  Walk down the hallway (smiles/stoic)   Do at random to people (some you know and some you don’t know, both genders and both races, teachers and students)   Only change your face, everything else must be constant (duration of eye contact) (Don’t say something different- let your face speak)   You can try this somewhere other than a school   Credit part= record your findings (10 of each face expression at least) Bring in the data (describe person and reaction for each face expression)

14. These are called experimenter effects  Unintended changes in subjects behavior due to cues inadvertently given by the experimenter.  Which results in:  Double blind studies: the experimenters AND the subjects don’t know who gets what treatment until the end of the experiment

15. The risk with double-blind  In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of 30 people with carpal tunnel syndrome, use of a static magnet produced dramatic and enduring benefits, but so did use of fake magnets.34  In a study of 321 people with low back pain, chiropractic manipulation was quite helpful, but no more helpful than giving patients an educational booklet on low back pain.35  In a randomized, controlled trial of 67 people with hip pain, acupuncture produced significant benefits, but no greater benefits than placing needles in random locations.33  And in a randomized, controlled trial of 177 people with neck pain, fake laser acupuncture proved to be more effective than massage.32  Note that these studies do not actually disprove the tested therapies.

16. Okay okay, so they run the study  The results:

17. Math Words  The experimenters condensed the data into averages (sum of collisions divided / total participants )  Mode – the most often recurring number  Range – the lowest to the highest number

18. PHEW. SO MANY WORDS. Let’s practice

19.  Marci and Sean are students in an introductory psychology course. As an assignment, their instructor has asked students in the class "pair up" and to "gather some real life descriptive data and calculate the mean, median, mode, and range of those data."  Sean tells Marci that this will be an easy assignment since he is a student-manager of the school's basketball team, the members of which he is sure will let him take their height measurements. He asks Marci to meet him at 2:00 in the gymnasium where they will measure the height of each of the team's 15 members.  The members of the basketball team gladly cooperate with Marci and Sean. In their report to the class Marci and Sean write: "The mean height of the basketball team is 6' 7," the median height is 6' 5," the modal height is 6" 8," and the range of heights is 6'2" to 7'1." In conclusion, the average height of male students at our school is very tall." What’s wrong with this experiment?

20. Answer:  It is an unrepresentative sample which they made generalizations about