Science and Research Basics
This is an educated, testable prediction about what you expect to happen.
A hypothesis
Add all the scores together and divide by the number of scores.
Mean
Ivan Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate when they heard a sound associated with food. What is this called?
Classical Conditioning
You want to know whether college students prefer morning or evening classes. What's one simple way you could find out?
Ask/survey students.
Psychology is the study of _________ _________.
Human Behavior
A researcher wants to know whether getting more sleep improves exam scores. In this study, "hours of sleep" and "exam scores" are the _________.
Variables
Put the scores in order and find the one in the middle.
Median
This famous experiment assigned participants to the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison.
Stanford Prison Experiment
A researcher wants to know how stressed college students are, but only asks five of their closest friends. What's one potential problem?
Those five people may not represent college students generally.
This debate asks whether our behavior and characteristics are influenced more by biology or by our experiences and environment.
sample
This is the score that occurs most frequently.
Mode
Milgram conducted a controversial experiment on this topic that involved participants believing they were administering increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person.
Obedience
A headline says, “People who own dogs are happier than people who don't!” What's one question you'd want answered before believing the claim?
Examples:
How was happiness measured?
How many people participated?
Who participated?
How big was the difference?
Does dog ownership actually cause the difference?
Psychology includes many different perspectives and specialties. Name three areas or branches of psychology.
clinical, counseling, developmental, social, cognitive, biological/neuroscience, school, industrial-organizational, forensic, health, etc.
Why might psychologists study the same question more than once instead of accepting the results of one study?
To see whether findings can be replicated, apply to other people/settings, or hold up under different conditions.
Five students report studying 1, 2, 2, 3, and 12 hours for an exam. Which measure of central tendency might best represent the "typical" student: mean or median? Why?
Median, because the extreme score of 12 pulls the mean upward.
This researcher demonstrated that children could learn aggressive behavior by observing an adult interacting aggressively with a Bobo doll.
Albert Bandura
A study finds that people who use social media more report greater anxiety. Give one alternative explanation besides “social media causes anxiety.”
anxious people may use social media more, a third variable may influence both, etc.
This part of the brain is especially important for decision-making, planning, judgment, and impulse control.
Frontal Lobe
A researcher finds that students who drink more coffee also tend to sleep fewer hours. Can the researcher conclude that coffee causes people to sleep less? Why or why not?
No: Correlation does not equal causation!
A study reports that two variables have a correlation of r = –.80. Is this relationship weak or strong, and positive or negative?
Strong Negative Correlation
Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation was a study that gave us valuable information on __________.
Attachment
A researcher wants to study college stress but recruits 5 participants exclusively from the psychology club. What's one potential problem with the sample?
Sampling Bias, Lack of Representativeness, Small Sample Size, etc.
A psychologist explains someone's behavior by considering their thoughts, past experiences, relationships, environment, and biology rather than looking for one single cause. What important idea about human behavior does this demonstrate?
Behavior is complex and influenced by multiple factors / multiple perspectives can help explain behavior.