Vocab
Psychology
The science of understanding of the human mind and its functions (how people think, feel, and behave)
Hypothesis
A smart guess or prediction about what you think will happen in an experiment.
Theory
Theory-A big idea that explains something important, based on lots of experiments and evidence.
Why is psychology like tomatoes?
Because there are many different ways to study it, and different schools of thought (the way you can use tomatoes to make wildly different food)
Name at least two schools of thought in Psych
Behaviorism, Cognitive Psych, Psychoanalysis, Gestalt, etc
Validity
How well a test or experiment actually measures what it’s supposed to measure.
Which type of Psychology is Pavlov associated with?
Behaviorism (dog, saliva, bell, etc)
Who is considered the Father of Modern Psychology?
Wundt
Sample
A small group of people or things chosen from a larger group to learn about the whole group.
Population
The entire group of people or things that you want to learn about in your study.
Reliability
How much you can trust a test or experiment to give the same results every time you do it.
Ethics
Rules about what’s right and wrong that scientists follow to make sure they’re being fair and not hurting anyone in their studies.
Bias
When someone unfairly favors one thing over another, which can mess up the results of an experiment.
Confounding Variable
Something unexpected that changes during an experiment and might mess up the results, making it hard to know if the change was caused by the thing you were testing or something else
What's the difference between Behaviorism and Cognitive Psychology?
Behaviorism focuses on behavior you can SEE, and Cognitive Psych focuses on how the brain works (like a computer)
Placebo Effect
A fake treatment that looks like the real thing, used in experiments to see if the real treatment actually works.
Random Assignment
Putting people or things into groups by chance, so the groups are as similar as possible from the start.
Double Blind
A setup in an experiment where neither the participants nor the people running it know who is getting the special treatment, to make sure results aren’t influenced by anyone’s expectations.
Causation
When one thing directly causes another thing to happen.
Case Study
A detailed look at one person, group, or situation to learn something important.
Independent Variable
The part of an experiment that you change on purpose to see what happens.
Dependent Variable
The part of an experiment that you measure or observe to see if it changes because of what you did.
Control Group
A group in an experiment that doesn’t get the special treatment, so scientists can see if the treatment really makes a difference.
Experimental Group
The group in an experiment that gets the special treatment to see if it has any effect.
Correlation
A relationship between two things where if one thing changes, the other might change too, but it doesn’t mean one causes the other.