the scientific emphasis on casual explanations

• Sciences are heavily deterministic and promotes the idea of CAUSAL explanations - the idea that manipulating or observing X variable will cause and affect Y variable. Behaviour can therefore be caused or determined by internal or external factors.
• This can be applied to psychological theory - for example, according to Operant Conditioning, if I were to constantly praise you for a specific behaviour (cause), then you will likely repeat that behaviour in the future (effect).
• Psychology as a science is based on the idea that behaviour can be:

  1. Found to have an identifiable cause

  2) Determined in the future
• This can be applied to psychological research-for example, Loftus and Palmer (1974) manipulated and changed the verb (IV) to measure the effect on the participant's estimated speed of the car (DV).
• The goal of scientific Psychology is to identify and explain these causal relationships. This involves manipulating an independent variable (the presumed cause) to see if it has a measurable effect on a dependent variable (the presumed effect).
• To establish a causal relationship, researchers aim to control extraneous variables that could influence the outcome of a study. This is often done through laboratory experiments and controlled environments, where conditions can be carefully regulated and standardised.