scientific emphasis on causal explanations

• one of the basic principles in science is the view that every event in the universe has a cause and one of the aims of science is to discover the laws that govern these, implying determinism.

  • in psych, this means discovering the causes of behaviour. therefore assuming behaviour has a cause and is predetermined
• the use of lab experiment in pysch aims to discover cause and effect relationships for human behaviour

  • this is achieved by manipulating an independent variable to measure the effect on the dependent variable, whilst controlling extraneous variables