Intro to Psych 1 1 The Science of Psychology

Kristen Atchison here and we're talking about thinking critically in Psychological Science this is chapter 1 for our intro to psychology course at Georgia State so as we talked about in the prologue psychology science and we approach our questions from scientific approach so the goals of our research are to describe we want to describe behavior we want to describe mental processes we want to describe the phenomenon that we're interested in and more than just describe them we want to explain that we want to understand what's going on with these things both described and explained are typically kinds of questions that you'll have in those basic research designs that we talked about in the prologue we also want to be able to predict so we want to be able to predict differences in behavior differences in mental processes differences in thought and we want to be able to predict these based on the information that we have based on different phenomenon based on these different kinds of things and to do that in really empirical way we need to control the other variables that could be influencing outcomes so we want to control them in by any kind of way we can we can either do that by just holding it constant so not letting something else vary or we can do it by other kinds of research method techniques by balancing conditions balancing variables those sorts of things in our research basic so it looks like lot of you have are going going after science degrees so this may be review for you but that never hurts theory and just like in any science but in spec especially in psychology is an integrated set of statements that explain or predict behavior so like to think of it as kind of an umbrella okay so it's an umbrella at which our questions are research questions or research hypotheses all these things kind of lie and it's ways to organize our idea in more higher order I'm kind of way so we take all the findings from whole bunch of different research studies with different hypotheses and we integrate that into an overarching idea about mental processes and behavior and this is really tentative explanation so given what we know this is what we think is happening overall and again this is something that's gonna be revised and changed based on the new information that we're getting as we seeked answers to these questions so again these theories are really accumulation of findings so I'm sure you're familiar those science people and those of you who aren't science people one study doesn't prove anything one experiment doesn't prove anything you have to have an accumulation of studies to even get close to proving theory or proving an idea or finding any kind of scientific fact so it really is accumulation of findings accumulation of information in different ways from different people in different experiments and different types of research studies that really help us organize this theory and give us an overarching idea of how this behavior and mental processes work hypothesis is that prediction so I've got small child so watch lot of PBS and one of the shows that she used to really like was Dinosaur Train and there's t-rex there that he loves to have hypotheses and his name is buddy and they say buddy has hypothesis and his definition is really great one so totally steal it it's an idea that you can test okay and so it's an idea it's not question it's an idea think it happens this way and then you test it and so again this prediction could propose relationship between variables it could propose that one thing is causing another thing it could be any number of things but it's again an idea prediction about in psychology behavior and mental processes and another important term is operational definition for our research lot of these things that we study in psychology can be little bit hard to pin down sometimes when you try to define something if you're just talking about it memory well what do you mean by memory do we mean can you remember somebody's phone number do you mean do you remember something on that happened when you were kid do you remain do you remember what you have for breakfast what what do you mean by remember an operational definition is that precise description of that variable that we're interested in so when say memory mean how well you remember series of 12 numbers that gave you to memorize that's what mean by memory or how well you remember an event that showed you six months ago that's what mean by memory those are the operational definitions and then one of the final things that we're going to talk about for these basics is replication replication is really really important in all scientific arenas and psychology is no different and replication is just reproduction of results in this study so you found it once great we'll do it again can you find it again can you find the same thing again and so if you read research articles some of the reasons that they're so detailed in the methods section is so that you're giving everybody enough information to replicate the study for them to go do it themselves in different place with different group of people and hopefully find the same results to replicate the findings so again we're using the scientific method in psychology and again this is just that way that we gain knowledge about the behavior and mental processes that we're interested in what's really helpful about the scientific method is it's empirical and requires systematic and controlled observation this is not one person's subjective interpretation again this is very systematic this is very controlled to the point that we can start to make objective statements about different kinds of behaviors and the scientific method is really this jet approach to gaining knowledge and we are one of the many sciences that use this all of them really to to answer our questions so again the science is this method of logic or inquiry and we've got five steps know we've convolve been through this before so bear with me but it bears repeating so we need to identify the problem and form hypothesis remember hypothesis isn't question it's statement think that this behavior is caused by this situation that's hypothesis now I'm gonna go see if can recreate this situation and if get that behavior again I'm in group of people hypothesis is again this prediction we need to design the experiment or the research study not all of our studies are experiments experiments however are the kind of gold standard of all research especially psychological research because it's the only way that we can really make judgments about cause and effect so we have to design that and we have to think about what variables are we interested in what do we think is the cause what do we think is the effect and everything else that's there how do we control it that the only two things that are varying are their cause and our effect then we have to actually go and do the work we have to actually do the conducting an experiment and that could take very long time or it could be done really quickly it really kind of depends on the nature of the experiment that's designed for me when was doing my dissertation my data collection took good part of nine months to collect enough infant data for these two age groups was looking in these various conditions than was looking at so it can take while even though an individual study was like five to ten minutes to get enough subjects so that could make judgments about my population could take while and then what we do is we take that information that we have we take that data that we have and we test our hypotheses how we test these hypotheses is through statistics so we're we use inferential statistics and in fact one of the other courses that teacher at Georgia State is the research methods and statistics course the advanced version for our psychology majors so if you have more questions about these have whole course that you can look up even on YouTube and find out more and the final and sometimes the most important piece of that is communicating these research results we do that in myriad of different ways there's conferences where people give talks there's the primary way that it's done is through research articles so if you choose not to participate in research you'll be reading research articles that are communicating the results of research to other people it's basically our conversation that we have amongst scientists I'm saying well this is what found and this is what found and having to talk about those things another way that we communicate results is often through poster presentations as mentioned on the first day of class one of your research for tips and participation options is to go to presentation of poster and find out about their research hear them communicate the results it doesn't do us any good if we do the first four steps of the scientific method and then don't talk about it okay great you did all this work and nobody knows so that communication piece is very very important when we're looking at these questions often the question that we need to start with is who are you studying in psychology that's gonna be really big thing when have my research method students write they always have to talk about who they're who they're studying and be specific you can't just say adults because do you mean college students do you mean on the general population do you mean young adults do you mean old adults we need to kind of be specific and the kind of terms that we use to talk about this is population and the population is our main group of interest and it's everybody in that group so if we're studying high-functioning autistic middle schoolers our population is every single high functioning autistic middle schooler in the entire world or in the entire country or whatever population we've designated it our findings are generalized to this group now clearly we didn't do research on every single person in the entire world but we use sample of people selected segment of the population and hopefully that's really representative of the population that we're talking about to do our research on to do our research on so that we can hopefully generalize these findings to the group and the question that we always have to ask is is that sample representative of the population so you guys are going to participate in research and lot of that research is going to talk about you in terms of adults and make generalizations about adults based on the performance of you guys the performance of college students and the question that we often talk about lot in psychology is is this really representative of the population the average college student age is younger than the average adult age the average college student education level is higher than the general population and so you guys are kind of special group and so we lose some of our generalizability but the reason we keep doing it is because you guys are great starting place to kind of figure these things out if it doesn't work with you it's probably not gonna work with the general population either and so it's good way to kind of start to look at it to start to look at those questions another thing we have to be concerned about is the size of the sample if you have two people that's probably not going to be representative of your population again collected data for like nine months and that was so that got big enough sample that it could really be representative of infants representative of four and six months infants so that could generalize my sample findings with the individual foreign six month olds that were in my study to the larger population of all four and six month olds so we have to figure out how we're gonna design these studies and there's bunch of different ones that we use in psychology and we're gonna just kind of gonna go over them so that when we talk about these different kinds of studies as we get to the various topics in psychology you know what we're talking about so one kind of methodology we can use is descriptive this not methodology is looking at observing and describing behavior this includes things like naturalistic observation case studies and surveys and we'll talk about these in more detail in minute we also have correlational methods this is trying to make associations between two or more variables so we're interested in two things is there relationship between these and if so is it strong relationship is it positive relationship and again we'll talk about these and again our gold standard experimental designs this is the way that we look at cause-and-effect relationships is causing change in so our naturalistic observation is kind of that descriptive methodology and one of the really good things about naturalistic observation is that it really minimizes observer effects so an example that give in my 3530 class of of this kind of design is they took parents who were taking their kids to science museum and they just recorded what they said to their kids they just measured what they said to their kids and their explanations of these scientific kinds of displays and what they did is then they look to see what their difference is and how the parents were talking to the male children versus how the parents were talking to the female children and unfortunately we found that there was lot more likely to get thorough scientific explanation if you were male than if you were female but what's really nice about this is it minimizes observer effect so these are being recorded and it's not and they're just going about their normal life and they're just these things are being recorded they don't necessarily they just know that they're being recorded sometimes it could also be if somebody came and sat in the back of our classroom and measured behavior they our classroom we wouldn't necessarily know that this wasn't student in our class that they were measuring how many times you checked your cell phone or something we wouldn't necessarily know that so you're not gonna change your behavior you're not going to have an observer effect which is that change in behavior because you're being observed this is really important for reliability reliability is our big fancy word for our findings are we gonna get them again and again and again so if you're and again this increases reliability because if you're not changing your behavior because somebody's there you're not likely you're likely to do the same thing in the same situation again another descriptive method is survey so in the first day of class gave you survey with Likert scale which is that numbers 1 through 7 strongly disagree to strongly agree that was Likert scale and what these do is they investigate opinions behaviors or characteristics of particular group was investigating your opinions about psychology as science ok and remember if you've got high number you are more likely to view psychology as scientific than if you got low number did my own and the highest score you could get was 105 and got 103 so clearly my opinions are very that that psychology is very scientific again this is usually in self-report form which is what we did right you wrote down about yourself so this self-report form is is very typical in surveys which can be problem because you know you're being asked these questions knew it was what he was even about and so maybe answered some of the questions more extremely than would have ordinarily because knew that think psychology of science and this was measure of how scientific think psychology is and wanted them to wanted it to be high and so these self reports can have downfalls and biases another descriptive study is case study and this is highly detailed description of single individual and we usually use these to investigate rare or unusual or extreme conditions so this is picture of little girl named Jean and unfortunately her parents were highly abusive and neglectful so what sure that they basically locked her in closet for the better part of her of the beginning of her life when she was eventually found and she was eventually let go and and her parents went to jail she had not developed properly because she had not had the proper environment in which development she never developed language properly she never there were certain kinds of things that she never did because I'm period had passed clearly there's lot of information that we can find out about development based on her experience and so that's an example of case study we'll also when we talk about the brain and things like that lesion studies are usually case studies so we'll talk about people who got rods stuck through their skulls and railroad accidents and we learned about what parts of the brain that he lost because of the rod in his brain helped with different areas different kinds of behaviors and so these case studies can be very very helpful in describing things they don't have lot of generalizability because it's just one person but they can help us start to talk about and think about these ideas the next method that we'll talk about is correlational studies and these measure two or more variables of various any variable is anything that changes okay so hot and cold could be variable temperature could be variable time of day could be variable and really anything that changes weight height any of these sorts of things constant is kind of its opposite and it's just something that stays constant something that stays the same so an example would be to measure parents disciplinary styles so are they put using timeout are they spanking are they redirecting what are they doing and then also measure the children's behavior and see if there's relationship between the kind of behavior the child is exhibiting and the kind of discipline daenerys they're using this gives us information about how strong these two things are related it tells us they're in relationship together and it tells us the direction of the relationship so if one goes up and then the other one goes up too that's positive relationship they're moving together if one goes up while the other one goes down that's negative relationship they're moving in opposite directions another example would be more democratic parents have children who behave better these are act that's actually correlation that we find that that there's correlation between these two things the problem with correlation is that it does not prove causation and the problem with the media is they like to take correlational studies and say could this be causing this next at 11 when really we're just saying hey these two things are related to each other we don't know that one's causing the other we just know that these are related so we like to say correlation cannot prove causation correlation does not tell us - that - one thing causes another thing so an example of this is does here we know that ear hair and heart attacks are highly correlated they have very strong positive relationship so if you have more ear hair you have higher risk for heart attack if you have less ear hair you're at lower risk for heart attack and so the question is then does your hair cause heart attacks do heart attacks cause your hair to grow or could there be an unmeasured common factor that's causing both of those in this case an example would be age increases both your risk for ear hair growth and heart attacks another one is that crime rates and ice-cream sales are very highly correlated so let's take second and kind of think why that could be go ahead and pause the video think about it and we'll come back so we know that ice-cream sales and crime rates are highly correlated and one of the third common feature that we think is going on here is its temperature crime rates go up in the summer when you are really real hot you are more irritable and more likely to commit crime know sometimes walking across campus when we start in August get to class and feel like I'm ready to commit crime but also feel like that maybe an ice cream would be nice and so we see again the temperatures influencing both the crime rate and ice cream sales and so to really kind of unrelated things have this relationship because of this third variable we can see that in this graphic here from your book low self-esteem could caught we know that low self-esteem and depression are correlated so you have higher risk of depression when you have low self-esteem negative correlation so low self-esteem could cause depression depression could cause low self-esteem or you could have distressing events or biological predisposition for both of these that could cause this relationship so again the important thing to remember is just because these two things are related just because they're correlated does not mean that one is causing the other so correlation does not mean causation and again the media is really really bad at trying to tell us that one thing is causing the other and so one of the things we'll talk about is you being consumer of this kinds of research and know how how does they call BS when there's BS so again if you see correlational study these two things were just measured you know that one cannot cause the other they can't make judgments that one can cause the other here's examples of what correlations look like so high positive correlation we measured this with statistical measure called correlation and if you get one that's perfect positive so they are in as one event increases the second exactly increases as well and that is drawn as straight line and that's very very strong if you get one correlation that's very very strong correlation 0.5 would be positive correlation as one event increases the second sometimes it's increases so look at those dots sometimes they go up some they don't and zero correlation there's no kind of line there at all there's no relationship between the events the negative correlation again we can have sometimes as one event increases the second sometimes decreases and again you can kind of see that that line that would be there with those dots but it's not very strong line we're that negative one that perfect negative correlation as one event increases the second exactly decreases so that's kind of our spectrum of correlation so again you can have really really strong correlations that are either positive or negative and then you can have really really weak or no correlations in the middle got our gold standard experiments we use these to understand causal relationships to say that is causing to look at these sorts of things one variable is systematically changed and been and manipulated so that's our independent variable and we measure that's our cause our independent variable or manipulated variable is our independent variable or our cause in this relationship and then we look at or we observe we measure the effect on another variable our dependent variable our effect so you take group of brand-new moms they just had their babies and let's say you could do this you can't but you randomly assigned half of them to breastfeed their children and half of them to give them formula so that would be your independent variable and then you could go at eight and there say both groups have to do this for at least twelve months and you have it all controlled and other things accounted for and then at eight you go and you measure their IQs and you look to see if there's difference between these you can't do that because you can't tell parents kind of how to feed their kids that doesn't work well and the parents liking you but it also there are some ethical implications for some of those things because we know that there are benefits of breast milk to tell one group of parents that they can't to breastfeed would have ethical problems and we wouldn't be able to do that at least in modern day the independent variable is again this is that that variable that we're controlling or we're manipulating in some way so we're changing it whether they got formula or whether they got breast milk we change that it has to have minimum of two levels you have to have two different things if it only has one level it's not variable it's constant so you have to have something to compare it to the most simple version of that would be control group and an experimental group so again we have our treatment or experimental condition and then we have our control condition an example would be writing about adjusting to college or writing about kind of just random things so we take college freshmen and we say okay we're gonna measure how your adjustment to college and half of you are going to write about that process and half of you just have to fill up three pages each week we don't care what you write about the dependent variable we measure behavior using the we measure behavior our dependent variable we're measuring that variable to see kind of what that effect is again our dependent variables that effect and so we're going to measure the effect from our cause the independent variable an example that we could look at how maybe we're defining adjustment to colleges GPA so we measure students GPA and we see if writing about adjusting to college creates different higher hopefully GPAs than not writing about that adjustment process and most studies involves several dependent mayor measures I'm just measuring students GPA is probably not very good measure by itself of adjustment to college know not everybody's GPA is what they wanted to be that first semester so maybe you measure several dependent variables including maybe measures of the students health and well-being you could also measure things like involvement with on-campus activities you can measure things like number of new friends made I'm since joining campus these sorts of things could all be dependent variables that we look and see how that independent variable about writing adjustment to college really affected that let's finish up with the ethics of research with humans as we mentioned on the first day of class we have very high ethical standard to stand by that we do no harm okay and remember gave the example of doing the study where asked to do it with college students and they bounced it back and said no no no you didn't tell us that possible risk could be that these students would get bored they need to be perfectly aware of that and so we have again this high ethical standard there are your rights are listed in the syllabus on that appendix that has the information about research participation so these are some of our ethics there are whole classes on this so this is really kind of glossary we need to have respect for persons that people are autonomous creatures they have different wants they have different desires and we have to be respectful of that and that people with diminished autonomy need deserve even more protection so do research with infants right and they can't say yes know the risks and agreed to participate in your research on their parents do and because of that they goes under higher scrutiny than research that's done with college students because the kids can't say no they can't they can't properly assess the risks and make an educated decision the ways that we do this is through informed consent so when you participate in research for this class as part of the risk research participation component you're going to be engaging in an informed consent you're gonna sign document on whether you are willing to participate knowing the risks so again you'll be applying this respect for persons when you fill out your informed consent forms for the research that you are participant in another thing that we can turn ourselves with is justice who ought to receive the benefits and bear the burdens of research the way that we apply this is we need to make sure that we're selecting participants fairly there's lot of examples out there before we understood these kinds of things where participants were not selected fairly there's the information that the Tuskegee syphilis studies things like that where they were receiving all of the burdens of the research without any benefits and so again this was done very poorly in the past and so it's something that we really concern ourselves with lot now to make sure that it's being done fairly and equitably there's some really great images and website that I'll post as well where you can see how in the past there was there was problems with this and so the way that we solve this is we make sure that our selection of subjects is fair that we select them partit fairly that the benefits aren't just received by one group if you're doing if somebody was doing cancer study and one group was receiving the treatment and the other group was not receiving the treatment and they found out that the dream was actually working they would start giving the treatment to the control group as well because that do no harm and the risks are really something that we we take very very seriously in research another thing that we worry about is benefits benefits and that's again that Hippocratic oath of research first we do no harm we really are held to that that we're doing this to better understand things but that it's not okay to hurt people and then in the process we'll talk about some studies that were done in different areas of psychology will talk about Milgram study later on we'll talk about the Stanford Prison study both of those were stopped and or or have yet have since been determined that we didn't have this first no harm so these are again the rules that we apply to our current research in the past in both medical in Psychological any research with human subjects and human participants are ethics in the past we're pretty bad and we've come long long way for that and that's true of medical research as well it's important to secure the participants well-being and the other thing we won't really want to make sure we're doing is maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risk tell the funny story again of that my IRB got bounced back because didn't tell them the risk of getting bored they take this risk very seriously there was researcher at Texas A&M who was doing work with the system called Mears which basically it technically is shooting lasers into somebody's brain and measuring the light that comes out they're not really lasers that would hurt you but technically they are and so the office of lasers because a.m. has all this engineering stuff so has an office of basically lasers had to get involved with the IRB process to make sure that they were doing no harm is using this as way to measure brain activity and the way that we apply this is the risk benefit assessment and this is again done by the researchers themselves it's also done by these governing bodies that approve research we have governing body for humans which is the institutional review board and there's also governing bodies for research with animals as well some psychology research as we'll talk about stem with rats and we'll talk about things that are done with primates again those go through an ethical procedure as well so that we again make sure that we really are maximizing benefits and minimizing risks so the ways that we make sure that these have been maintained is we have the ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct so as psychologists we have governing document that's done through the American Psychological Association and it applies to all psychologists I'm no matter what their level is this is even include psychology students who are helping conduct research again mentioned IRB which is this peer-reviewed ethics committee for research with humans and we have mirror organization for research with animals as well informed consent we talked about that we're again are informing the participants of the risks and benefits of participating in research and that they can choose not to participate at any time they also again we can't compel people to participate in this research which is why we can't say well you have to participate in research for this course we have to give you options because nobody can be compelled to participate in this research debriefing this is after the study is done we tell people kind of what the game was what was going on so in my research we would have the parents come in and we wouldn't really tell the parents much about what we were interested in I'm just kind of what generally we were doing we were going to show them faces and voices and the infant would see these faces and voices and the parent wasn't supposed to look and after that we would show them the video afterwards and we would explain everything so that they would see the same thing with their infants and then afterwards we showed them the video of their child participating in the research and then we explained to them what we were looking at what condition the child was in all the details about the research so that they knew what had gone on another important piece is maintaining confidentiality again this is something that's taken very very seriously are at when was doing my infant research we had to keep all identifying information under lock and key and it was separate from our data so we assigned people participant number and that was their number from there on out and we kept all of their identifying information in separate location and again that had to be under lock and key and had to be locked at all times so that that information really was maintained confidentially we didn't kind of have it in places that were really accessible and that went for the infant information as well as the parents information as well so this maintaining confidentiality is very important too and you'll see that that's mentioned in your rights as participant as well and that debriefing form so this kind of goes through some of the details of our how we conduct research and psychology and how we think critically through these questions your participation question for today is critical thinking assessment where we go through and kind of decide what kind of experiment you would do or what kind of research study you would do to look at this kind of to look at research question we'll also do some more things when we come to class on Tuesday that we'll look at these things as well