EXP PSY

• science of behavior

  psychology
• latin word scientia which means knowledge

  science
• content and process

  science
• facts we learn in our courses

  content
• systematic ways in gathering data, noting relationship and offering explanations, ways to produce a content

  process
• Everyday, non-scientific data gathering that shapes our beliefs and directs our behaviors towards others

  commonsense psychology
• limitations of commonsense psychology


  sources of psychological information

  inferential strategies
• Tendency to overlook instances that might disconfirm our beliefs and only seek confirmatory instances of that behavior

  confirmation bias
• When we understand other people’s behavior, there a strong bias to overlook situational data in favor of data that substantiate trait explanations

  non-scientific inference
• Our predictions, guesses and explanations tend to feel much more correct than they actually are and the more data we have available, the more confidence we have in our judgments about behavior

  overconfidence bias
• characteristics of scientific methods

  scientific mentality

  gathering empirical data

  seeking general principles

  good thinking

  self-correction

  publicizing results

  replication
• Behavior must follow a natural order; therefore. It can be predicted; there are patterns

  scientific mentality
• There are specifiable causes for the way people behave and that these causes can discovered through research

  determinism
• Advocated systematic observations and careful classification of naturally occurring events

  aristotle
• Observable and experienced data

  empirical data
• basis of our hypothesis

  laws and theories
• Principles that have the generality to apply all situations

  laws
• Set of general principles that attempts to explain and predict behavior or phenomena

  theory
• We don’t let our biases to influence our judgment and accept no matter the result is

  good thinking
• Simplicity and clarity of thoughts

  principle of parsimony
• Accept the uncertainty of our own conclusion

  self-correction
• End goal of research to make the information known which can be used by other researchers

  publicizing results
• Be able to repeat our procedures and get the same results again if we have gathered data objectively and if we have followed good thinking

  replication
• 4 major objectives of research

  description

  prediction

  explanation

  control
• Systematic and unbiased account of the observed characteristics of behaviors

  description
• Capacity for knowing in advance when certain behaviors would be expected to occur because we have identified other conditions with which the behaviors are linked or associated

  prediction
• Knowledge of the conditions that reliably reproduce the occurrence of a behavior

  explanation
• Application of what has been learned about behavior

  control
• Designed to solve real-world problems

  applied research
• Designed to test theories or to explain psychological phenomena in humans and animals

  basic research
• tools of psychological science

  observation

  measurement

  experimentation
• Systematic noting and recording of events


  observation
• Assignment of numerical values to objects or events or their characteristics according to conventional rules

  measurement
• • Must have procedures for manipulating the setting
  • Predicted outcome must be observable
  • Able to measure the outcome

  experimentation
• Circumstances that come before the event or behavior that we want to explain

  antecedent conditions
• Specific sets of antecedent conditions

  treatments
• • Controlled procedure in which at least 2 different treatment conditions are applied to subjects
  • Procedures in the psychology experiment are carefully controlled so that we can be sure we are measuring what we intend to measure
  • Successful experimentation relies heavily on the principle of control

  psychology experiment
• how to achieve control

  • Random assignment of subjects to different treatment conditions
  • Presenting a treatment condition in an identical manner to all subjects
• Infer a cause and effect in an experiment

  establishing cause and effect
• Infer a cause and effect in an experiment

  temporal relationship