Conducting Psychology Research in the Real World

Conducting Psychology Research in the Real World
Often times in Intro to Psych, we get so busy thinking about the importance of demonstrating causation (aka an emphasis on lab experiments), that we forget to create a balanced view of psychological research. This leads to a simplistic view that experimental research is the only “good” or acceptable form of research (that is, if research cannot prove causation, it is not good research). Therefore, the key concept in this module is the importance of field research, which cannot always be experimental. Technical Note: These slides may contain simple click animation so that you can focus students’ attention on a particular question, a selection of text, or an image and not have them be distracted by reading ahead. You can either preview the sequence of animation by going through the slides in slideshow view, visiting the animations tab, or reviewing the slide notes. In the notes you will see a cue - (Click) – that corresponds to each animation. You will also find hyperlinks to outside videos at various places in the slides. These hyperlinks are embedded in text and indicated by color and in the notes section. [Professor Name] [Class and Section Number]

Let’s get started! Do children like sweets more than adults like sweets? To introduce students to the idea of controlled laboratory experiments versus research conducted in the natural world you can get them discussing the relevant advantages and disadvantages of laboratory experiments. To do so, you can explain a fictional study to the students and then use it as the basis for discussing research in general. Description of the fictional study: Rashi, a graduate student in psychology, was interested in exploring whether children like sweets more than adults. This idea is based on his hypothesis that children are always begging for candy. To investigate he brings 10 boys and 10 girls into the laboratory and gives them an opportunity to eat marshmallows. 85% of the children opt to do so. When Rashi brings 10 men and 10 women into the lab and repeats the study only 20% of the adults opt to eat marshmallows. Rashi concludes that children are far more likely to enjoy sweet foods. Rashi’s advisor, however, is not convinced. He asks Rashi to outline some of the weaknesses of his study and asks him, more importantly, how he might study this phenomenon in “the real world” (ie outside the laboratory). Engage your students in a discussion about these issues. Possible comments from your students: Rashi only tested Marshmallows. Real world data collection would allow him to generalize across more types of sweets. Rashi used a small sample. Real world data collection would allow him to generalize from larger samples to populations. Rashi’s lab study was artificial. In the real world other factors might determine whether people elect to eat sweets.

Overview Research in the Real World Studying Daily Experiences
Studying Daily Behavior Studying Daily Physiology Studying Online Behavior “Smartphone Psychology” The purpose of this slide is for the instructor to provide students with an overview of the material that will be covered during the lecture.

Research in the Real World
This slide provides you with two separate options: Ask the students to identify what Lewin, an accomplished social, organizational, and applied psychologist, may have meant by this quote. You may also choose to interpret the quotation for the students depending on the familiarity of the class with experimental design. Explanation: Traditional psychology emphasized the laboratory experiment as the “gold standard” in research. This is because only laboratory experiments can clearly separate cause from effect and therefore establish causality. Despite this unique strength, it is also clear that a scientific field that is mainly based on controlled laboratory studies ends up lopsided. Specifically, it accumulates a lot of knowledge on what can happen—under carefully isolated and controlled circumstances—but it has little to say about what actually does happen under the circumstances that people actually encounter in their daily lives. “Experimentation in the laboratory occurs, socially speaking, on an island quite isolated from the life of society” - Kurt Lewin

Limitations of Experimental Research? Ethical Practical/Logical Realistic Here, you go into specific detail regarding the shortcomings/limitations of experimental research. For each of the following bullet points, consider eliciting student ideas before providing your own examples (suggestions below). (Click) Ethical Limitations As psychologists, we can’t manipulate everything! For example, if we are interested in whether or not smoking causes anxiety, we would have to rely on a survey or other non-experimental design. Because we know that smoking has serious negative consequences, it would be unethical for us to conduct a true experiment and randomly assign participants to become smokers. (Click) Practical/Logical Limitations Even if we could ethically manipulate some variables, not all variables are amenable to change. For example, if we want to know which psychological disorder has the biggest impact on social relationships, psychologists cannot possibly randomly assign participants to the experimental condition (in this case, having a psychological disorder). Just like we cannot randomly assign participants to race, gender, age, etc. (Click) Realistic Limitations Even if we could manipulate all variables, does it make sense to do so? Are there any instances where psychologists wouldn’t necessarily want an experimental design? Of course. Even in a perfect world where we could manipulate variables for an experiment or lab design, there are times when we prefer other methodologies. For example, a researcher wants to know how often single people engage in certain behaviors (e.g., eating alone at a restaurant, going to a movie alone, sitting at a bar alone, etc.). In this scenario, an experiment or laboratory study doesn’t make sense. The bottom line There are limitations to what psychologists can ethically and practically do. Beyond that, there are conceptual considerations that make field research more desirable than lab or experimental research. The trade-offs associated with each are discussed in the following slide.

Internal Validity - The degree to which a cause-effect relationship between two variables has been unambiguously established, or the degree to which a study allows unambiguous causal inferences. The purpose of this slide is to formally introduce the following key concept: internal validity Possible class activity: “A Study on Attractiveness” in the Noba Instructor Manual > Module 2: Conducting Psychological Research in the Real World > Activities/Demonstrations AND Appendix B of this slide deck Internal Validity Ask students to recall and describe the experiment example from the text about whether or not a positive mood after watching a happy movie causes a person to be more helpful. How carefully controlled was this experiment? Could this level of control be problematic? Why? Contrast with External Validity on next slide.

External Validity - The degree to which a study ensures that potential findings apply to settings and samples other than the ones being studied. The purpose of this slide is to formally introduce the following key concept: external validity/generalizability. External Validity (or generalizability) Does the happy movie experiment have a high degree of external validity? What are the concerns? Because participants were helpful in one particular situation does that generalize to other situations? Do all happy movies result in similarly helpful behavior? What about other positive experiences that might boost mood, like receiving a compliment or a good grade? And what if you were watching the movie with friends, in a crowded theatre, rather than in a sterile research lab? Taking research out into the real world can help answer some of these sorts of important questions. Instructor's Note: You should emphasize that it is difficult for one study to have equal internal and external validity. This is because creating a controlled setting, in which all potentially influential factors (other than the experimentally-manipulated variable) are controlled, is bound to create an environment that is quite different from what people naturally encounter (e.g., using a happy movie clip to promote helpful behavior). In other words, if an experiment is very far-off from what a person might normally experience in everyday life, you might reasonably question just how useful its findings are. For extended discussion: Consider explaining the following. Threats to Internal Validity: Confounding Variables Selection Bias Operationalization of Variables Threats to External Validity: Situational Specificity Sampling Bias WEIRD Participants (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) If it has not been explicitly acknowledged up to this point in the lecture, you may also want to identify (or have students identify) the benefits/utility of both forms of validity.

Ecological Validity - The degree to which an effect has been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life. The purpose for this slide is to formally introduce and define the key concept of ecological validity. You should acknowledge that the goal for researchers must be to complement traditional laboratory experiments with less controlled studies under real-world circumstances. A study with adequate ecological validity provides the researcher with information relevant to how a specific relationship between two variables found in the laboratory plays out in the real world. Many studies must choose to compromise, prioritizing one form of validity over the others. Due to the importance of identifying true causal relationships, psychology has traditionally emphasized internal over external validity. However, in order to make claims about human behavior that apply across populations and environments, researchers complement traditional laboratory research with field research. One approach to field research is to study daily life.

Studying Daily Behavior Studying Daily Physiology Studying Online Behavior “Smartphone Psychology” The purpose of this slide is for the instructor to indicate to the students that the lecture is moving forward to the next content topic.

Studying Daily Experiences
Location - “Where are you now?” Social Environment - “Who are you with?” Activity - “What are you currently doing?” Experiences - “How are you feeling?” This slide is intended to emphasize that the basic idea behind studying daily experiences is to collect in-the-moment (or, close-to-the-moment) self-report data directly from people as they go about their daily lives. Possible discussion question: What type of data would a researcher studying daily experiences likely want to collect? Survey the class and then click through examples. (Click) Location (Click) Social Environment (Click) Activity (Click) Experiences Explain that it is not enough to simply ask a participant what they are feeling. Researchers attempt to get a snapshot of what was going on in participants’ lives at the time they were asked to report by raising these questions.

Studying Daily Experiences: Two Examples
The purpose of this slide is to present two key studies that illustrate how experience-sampling studies have yielded findings that could not be obtained with traditional laboratory methods. Discuss the following studies as examples: Study 1 - Stone, Reed, and Neale (1987) tracked positive and negative experiences surrounding a respiratory infection using daily experience sampling. They found that undesirable experiences peaked and desirable ones dipped about four to five days prior to participants coming down with the cold. Study 2 - More recently, Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) collected momentary self-reports from more than 2,000 participants via a smartphone app. They found that participants were less happy when their mind was in an idling, mind-wandering state, such as surfing the Internet or multitasking at work, than when it was in an engaged, task-focused one, such as working diligently on a paper. Study 1 Study 2

Studying Daily Experiences
Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) – Participants report experiences of a given day by systematically reconstructing a day. This slide focuses on the Day Reconstruction Method. Consider using the notes below to direct the conversation. Recently, the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004) has been developed to obtain information about a person’s daily experiences without going through the burden of collecting momentary experience-sampling data. In the DRM, participants report their experiences of a given day retrospectively after engaging in a systematic, experiential reconstruction of the day on the following day. As a participant in this type of study, you might look back on yesterday, divide it up into a series of episodes such as “made breakfast,” “drove to work,” “had a meeting,” etc. You might then report who you were with in each episode and how you felt in each. This approach has shed light on what situations lead to moments of positive and negative mood throughout the course of a normal day. Potential Activity: Have students reconstruct their previous day and share it with a partner. Ask students if they felt the description of their previous day was accurate. Were they able to recall information accurately/easily? Do they believe they left information out? Did anything help them to recall the information (e.g., filling in content around key events in the day). The purpose of these questions is to illuminate both the advantages and possible disadvantages of this methodology, as well as the ways in which a researcher might obtain as much information as possible (e.g., asking participants to remember key events in a day first). Time permitting, you may wish to test the students’ ability to recall by asking them to next reconstruct a day which occurred two weeks ago. What about a month ago?

Studying Daily Behaviors
Electronic Activated Recorder (EAR) This slide introduces the Electronic Activated Recorder (EAR) method. In addition to studying how people feel on a given day, researchers also wish to better understand what people might do. However, this is much harder, since behavior is easier to directly observe than it is to record in the context of a person’s life. This has required researchers to get quite creative. Electronic Activated Recorder (EAR) – Researchers equip participants with a portable audio recorder (EAR) that is programmed to periodically record brief snippets of ambient sounds (e.g., 30 seconds every 12 minutes). Discussion question: Do you believe that women or men are more talkative? Instructor’s note: Share with students that Mehl and his colleagues used the EAR method to debunk the long-standing myth that women are considerably more talkative than men. Using data from six different studies (utilizing the EAR method), they showed that both sexes use on average about 16,000 words per day. The estimated sex difference of 546 words was trivial compared to the immense range of more than 46,000 words between the least and most talkative individual (695 versus 47,016 words; Mehl, Vazire, Ramirez-Esparza, Slatcher, & Pennebaker, 2007).

Studying Daily Behaviors
Other ways of studying daily behaviors? Time-lapse photography Observing personal & professional spaces Garbage This slide illustrates other methods of studying daily behavior. Warm-up question: What are some other ways researchers might study daily behaviors? (Click) Time-lapse photography Researchers have used time-lapse photography to study the flow of people and the use of space in urban public places (Whyte,, 1980). (Click) Observing personal and professional spaces More recently, they have observed people’s personal (e.g., dorm rooms) and professional (e.g., offices) spaces to understand how personality is expressed and detected in everyday environments (Goslin, Ko, Mannarelli, & Morris, 2002). (Click) Garbage They have even systematically collected and analyzed people’s garbage to measure what people actually consume (alcohol and cigarettes; Rather & Murphy, 2001). Discussion question: Why might analyzing participants’ garbage/recycling be particularly useful for researchers interested in substance abuse? Answer: Not only do people often not remember the amount they consume, sometimes they may not want to accurately report what they do for a variety of reasons (fear of legal repercussions, fear of being judged by the experimenter, etc.). The same might be true about other mental health concerns (e.g., researchers may use self-injurious behavior as an indicator of depression). The bottom line is that the direct—and ideally nonreactive—assessment of real-world behavior is of high importance for psychological research (Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007).

Studying Daily Physiology
This slide focuses on physiological responses to psychological stressors. Discuss the following with students: In addition to studying how people think, feel, and behave in the real world, researchers are also interested in how our bodies respond to the fluctuating demands of our lives. What are the daily experiences that make our “blood boil”? How do our neurotransmitters and hormones respond to the stressors we encounter in our lives? What physiological reactions do we show to being loved—or getting ostracized? You can see how studying these powerful experiences in real life, as they actually happen, may provide more rich and informative data than one might obtain in an artificial laboratory setting that merely mimics these experiences. Possible activity: Consider having students identify their various physiological responses to certain stressful situations. To achieve this, it is often helpful to ask students to recall a certain instance when they experienced significant anxiety. For example, many people report that public speaking is extremely anxiety-provoking. Think back to a time when you were asked to give a speech for a class or in your profession. What types of physical reactions did you have? What was the most prominent symptom? Expand this discussion to other emotional experiences (What about when you felt loved? Angry?). The purpose of this discussion is to identify the wide array of physiological reactions that one might have in a given situation (e.g., within the context of a specific emotion), and both the similarities and differences among these physiological responses, between people and between situations (e.g., emotions). Instructor’s Note: If students have a hard time generating physiological symptoms of anxiety, consider presenting the list of commonly endorsed physiological symptoms of anxiety provided in Appendix A (final slide).

Studying Daily Physiology
This slide continues the discussion of physiological responses to psychological stressors. Discuss the following: It is important to keep in mind that what is stressful, engaging, or boring for one person might not be so for another. It is, in part, for this reason that researchers have found only limited correspondence between how people respond physiologically to a standardized laboratory stressor (e.g., giving a speech) and how they respond to stressful experiences in their lives. To give an example, Wilhelm and Grossman (2010) describe a participant who showed rather minimal heart rate increases in response to a laboratory stressor (about five to ten beats per minute) but quite dramatic increases (almost fifty beats per minute) later in the afternoon while watching a soccer game. Discussion questions: Can you identify unique moments when you have experienced intense physiological reactions? What is the context in which these physiological reactions occur?

Studying Online Behavior
This slide focuses on human behavior in virtual spaces. Discuss the following: Another domain of daily life that has only recently emerged is virtual daily behavior or how people act and interact with others on the Internet. Irrespective of whether social media will turn out to be humanity’s blessing or curse (both scientists and laypeople are currently divided over this question), the fact is that people are spending an ever increasing amount of time online. In light of that, researchers are beginning to think of virtual behavior as being as serious as “actual” behavior and seek to make it a legitimate target of their investigations (Gosling & Johnson, 2010). Discussion topic: Think about a researcher who wishes to use online behavior to measure narcissism. What aspects of a person’s online behavior might this researcher observe? Instructor’s note: Potential answers for this question include, but are not limited to, s, Facebook pages, tweets, chat records, and blogs. What indicators of narcissism might be evident in an individual’s online profile? Perhaps the researcher may wish to examine key differences in profile pictures on social media sites or the degree to which a person blogs about him or herself compared to other people? There is no right or wrong answer here, per say. The goal is to get students to not only identify ways in which they may obtain online information, but also the ways they may use that information to answer certain research-related questions. One way to study virtual behavior is to examine the language people use during common web-based activities— ing, chatting, tweeting, blogging, posting. For example, differences in the ways people use words (e.g., subtle preferences in word choice) have been found to carry a lot of psychological information (Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer, 2003). Therefore, a good way to study virtual social behavior is to study virtual language behavior. Researchers can download people’s—often public—verbal expressions and communications and analyze them using modern text analysis programs (e.g., Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007).

Studying Online Behavior
This slide continues the discussion about online behavior by sharing the example of social networking and voting behaviors. Instructor’s note: Reflecting the rapidly growing real-world significance of social networking, researchers are now beginning to investigate behavior on sites such as Facebook (Wilson, Gosling, & Graham, 2012). Most research looks at psychological correlates of online behavior such as personality traits and the quality of one’s social life, but importantly, there are also first attempts to export traditional experimental research designs into an online setting. Warm-up discussion: Did you vote in the last election? What percentage of your friends voted? How do you think the voting behavior of the people around you effects what you do? Share this study: In a pioneering study of online social influence, Bond and colleagues (2012) experimentally tested the effects that peer feedback has on voting behavior. Remarkably, their sample consisted of 16 million Facebook users. They found that online political-mobilization messages (e.g., “I voted” accompanied by selected pictures of their Facebook friends) influenced real-world voting behavior. This was true not just for users who saw the messages but also for their friends and friends of their friends. Although the intervention effect on a single user was very small, through the enormous number of users and indirect social contagion effects, it resulted cumulatively in an estimated 340,000 additional votes—enough to tilt a close election. In short, although still in its infancy, research on virtual daily behavior is bound to change social science, and it has already helped us better understand both virtual and “actual” behavior.

“Smartphone Psychology”
1. Store vast amounts of real-world data 2. Track physical and social context The purpose of this slide is to clearly identify the key advantages that smartphones have within the context of real-world research. Given how common smartphones have become, it is safe to predict that they will not just remain devices for everyday online communication but will also become devices for scientific data collection and intervention (Kaplan & Stone, 2013; Yarkoni, 2012). Discussion question: How do you think smartphones might benefit real-world research? (Click) Store vast amounts of real-world data (Click) Track physical and social context These devices automatically store vast amounts of real-world user interaction data, and, in addition, they are equipped with sensors to track the physical (e. g., location, position) and social (e.g., wireless connections around the phone) context of these interactions. Miller (2012, p. 234) states, “The question is not whether smartphones will revolutionize psychology but how, when, and where the revolution will happen.” Obviously, their immense potential for data collection also brings with it big new challenges for researchers (e.g., privacy protection, data analysis, and synthesis).

Appendix A: Physiological Symptoms of Anxiety
Pounding heart Sweating Stomach upset or dizziness Frequent urination or diarrhea Shortness of breath Tremors and twitches Muscle tension Headaches Fatigue Insomnia The purpose of this slide is to provide a resource to supplement the content on the “Studying Daily Physiology” slide. The list includes some of the most commonly recognized physiological symptoms of anxiety.

Appendix B: A Survey: Psychology of Attraction
Directions: There are two mini-studies on attractiveness (each “study” has 5-6 pictures that students will rate). For each study: show them the series of pictures and have them rate the attractiveness of each picture. At the end of the study, have students reflect on possible confounding variables. For example, in the first study, some pictures are professional while others are amateur/poor quality; some pictures are of famous people while others are not. In the second study, some pictures reflect personality/interests; there are also contrast and ordering effects.

Experiment 1 Indicate if you think that this person is attractive (we are going for objective good looks, so rate everyone) A = Yes, very attractive B = Yes, somewhat attractive C = Neither Attractive no Unattractive D = No, somewhat unattractive E = No, very unattractive

Hot or Not? #1

Hot or Not? #2

Hot or Not? #3

Hot or Not? #4

Hot or Not? #5

Hot or Not? #6

What did you notice? Celebrities Quality of photos Gender

Experiment 2 Indicate if you think that this person is attractive (we are going for objective good looks, so rate everyone) A = Yes, very attractive B = Yes, somewhat attractive C = Neither Attractive no Unattractive D = No, somewhat unattractive E = No, very unattractive

Hot or Not? #1

Hot or Not? #2

Hot or Not? #3

Hot or Not? #4

Hot or Not? #5

What did you notice? Contrast & ordering effects Personality

Photo Attribution Slide 1
Photo Credit: John Brownlow Slide 3 Photo Credit: badvoodoo404 Slide 4 Photo Credit: D Smith Slide 5 Photo Credit: FailedImitator Slide 6 Photo Credit: Joe Shlabotnik Slide 7 Photo Credit: Micah Taylor Slide 9 Photo Credit: *Passenger* Slide 10 Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk Photo Credit: tranchis Slide 13 Photo Credit: j_iglar Slide 14 Photo Credit: sylvar Slide 17 Photo Credit: peterjhart Photo Credit: Tai Gray Slide 20 Photo Credit:

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