Experimental Psychology: Chapter 1_Experimental Psychology and

the Scientific Method

BS Psychology

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Chapter 1: Experimental Psychology and the Scientific
Method
• Psychology – science of behavior
• Psychological science – research about the psychological
processes underlying behavior.
• Science ➔ scientia ➔ knowledge
o Content – what we know such as the facts we learn
o Process – an activity that includes the systematic ways
in which we go about gathering data, noting relationships,
and offering explanations
• Methodology – scientific techniques used to collect and
evaluate psychological data
• Data – facts and figures gathered in research studies
Experimental psychology started 1862
Father of Experimental psychology: Wilhelm Wundt
THE NEED FOR SCIENTIFIC METHODOLOGY
We all collect and use psychological data to understand
the behavior of others and to guide and own behavior.
• Commonsense psychology – kind of everyday,
nonscientific data gathering that shapes our expectations and
beliefs and directs our behavior toward others
As commonsense psychologists, we find that our ability to
gather data in a systematic and impartial way is constrained by
two very important factors: sources of psychological
information and our inferential strategies.
• Commonsense beliefs about behavior derived from data we
collect from our own experience and what we have learned
from others. The data we collect in our everyday lives have
been generated from a very small sample of behaviors, and
the conclusions we draw from them are the subject to a
number of inherent tendencies, or biases, that limit their
accuracy and usefulness. Often, the sources of our
commonsense beliefs about behavior can be unreliable, and
the explanations and predictions that we derive from them are
likely to be imperfect.
NONSCIENTIFIC SOURCES OF DATA
Very often, the data we gather as commonsense
psychologist come from sources that seem credible and
trustworthy. Psychological information, particularly when it is
offered by people we like, respect, or admire is typically accepted
without question.
• Confirmation bias – once we believe we know something,
we tend to overlook instances that might disconfirm our beliefs
and we seek, instead, confirmatory instances of behavior.
Research has shown that we are more likely to believe
information if it comes from certain kinds of individuals. But other
people are not our sole source of data about psychological
processes. We gather a lot of information about behavior from our
own observations and interactions with others and the conclusions
we draw from them. Researchers have discovered that we are not
always privy to our own decision-making processes. We are often
unaware of factors that influence our attitudes and behavior.
The inferential strategies we use when we process data
are sometimes too simply to be completely accurate.
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• Myths and Superstitions – make believe concepts which is
culturally structured.
• Commonsense Assumptions – came up from data from our
own experiences
All commonsense psychologists are trait theorists – at least
when it come to explaining the behavior of others. When we
understand other people’s behavior, there is a strong bias to
overlook situational data in favor of data that substantiate trait
explanations. Our ability to make accurate predictions about
someone’s traits increases with length of acquaintanceship.
The process of stereotyping illustrates a related problem
of nonscientific inference.
• Overconfidence bias – a phenomenon wherein we
compound our inferential shortcomings. Our predictions,
guesses, explanations tend to feel much more correct than
they actually are, and the more data we have available
(accurate or not), the more confidence we have in our
judgments about behavior.
These and many other inferential biases exist in human
information processing. They are believed to be the brain’s way of
coping with an immense volume of information. If we want to be
able to rely on our conclusions and use them as general principles
to predict behavior across many settings and conditions, we need
to proceed more systematically and objectively – in other words,
scientifically.
• Scientific Method - steps scientists take to gather and verify
information, answer questions, explain relationships and
communicate this information, answer questions, explain
relationships and communicate this information to others
CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERN SCIENCE
The Scientific Mentality
• The psychologist’s goal of prediction rests on an assumption:
Behavior must follow a natural order; therefore, it can be
predicted.
• Alfred North Whitehead ➔ scientific Mentality
• He postulated that faith in an organized universe is essential
to science. If no inherent order existed, there would be no
point in looking for one and no need to develop methods for
doing so. Research psychologists share the belief that there
are specifiable (although not necessarily simple or obvious)
causes for the way people behave and that these causes can
be discovered through research. ➔ determinism
Gathering Empirical Data
• Data are observable or experienced
• Aristotle assumed that order exists in the universe, and he set
about describing that order in a systematic way by collecting
empirical data ➔ data that are observable or experienced.
• Another important of characteristic of empirical data, however,
is that they can be verified or disproved through investigation.
• Thus, gathering empirical data in a systematic and orderly
way is preferable to commonsense data collection, but it still
cannot guarantee that the correct conclusions will be reached.
Seeking General Principles
• Modern scientists go beyond cataloging observations to
proposing general principles – laws or theories – that will
explain them. We could observe endless pieces of data,
adding to the content of science but our observations would
be of limited use without general principles to structure them.
o Laws – principle that have the generality to apply to all
situations
o Theory – devising and testing an interim explanation
o Hypothesis – testable prediction
• Theories pull together, or unity, diverse sets of scientific rules
that can be used to predict new examples of behavior. Testing
predictions stemming from a theory has been the cornerstone
 of psychological science.
NONSCIENTIFIC INFERENCE • Sir Karl Popper, a modern philosopher of science ➔ science
progresses only through progressively better theories.
• Perceiving others by their traits
• Theories also guide the course of future observations: We
• Stereotyping
must remember that what we observe is very much
• Overconfidence bias
determined by what theory suggests should be observed; and
One of the first and most important kinds of data we we must remember also that the way in which observation will
collect about others comes in the form of traits we assign to them. be reported and interpreted is a function of the theory that is
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