PSYC1030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Demand Characteristics, Confounding, Social Desirability Bias
PSYC1030 Lecture Six: Psychological Research
Methods
• Sometimes, Psychology is called the study of the bleeding obvious, or characterised as
telling us what we already know in words we don’t understand.
• Despite directly being affected by psychology and the human nature every day, there is
still inaccuracies with it and so there are many systematic researches using the
scientific methods to test the different psychological phenomenon. And so, psychology
is the study of human behaviour and thinking
• Just like in other science, in psychology, the scientific method is relied on, and there
are three goals of it:
-to observe and describe phenomena relating to human behaviour and thinking, in
systematic and objective manners
-understand and predict phenomena through tests and studies, and revisions of those
tests and studies
-apply theories to attempt to control phenomena by relating theories to real world
contexts and assist people in a positive way
• Even so, the scientific method isn't perfect it's the closest thing to being able to
understand and describe reality
• A theory is a systematic way of organising observations, but a good theory has certain
characteristics. A good theory explains what is already known about the existing
observations, if it doesn't, then there's a massive problem with the theory. It provides
testable predictions about things that have unknown answers, even under certain
circumstances or how things might be in the future. In making those predictions, it
has to be falsifiable, the central defining feature of what a good theory is. There's a big
difference between "proven wrong" and "can be proven wrong". Theories that have
outcomes that support them are often not that useful because they can never be
tested
• When observations are made in a theory, one can pretty much always provide plausible
explanations for the outcome AFTER the fact, which is why it's best to make
predictions before knowing the outcome. Otherwise, people can be easily convinced
that they provided a sensible explanation because they're just explaining what has
been observed and what they already know. While it's important to be able to explain
what is already known, one has to test their theories to see if they are still accurate
when explaining outcomes that hasn't yet been observed
• The reason why it's so easy to explain things after the fact is because people have a lot
of intuitive theories about how the world works, there are so many theories that
sometimes people have two theories that contradict each other, so they can think of an
explanation for whatever is observed
e.g. two kids wearing death metal t-shirts cuddling on a bench, one thinks "aw, birds
of the same flock". When seeing two kids, one wearing a death metal shirt and the
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other wearing a Taylor Swift shirt, one thinks "aw, opposites attract", rather than
thinking "wait, people who are similar are more inclined to like each other", etc.
• This means that people can pretty much explain most things that happen using
common sense theories. Which can't be relied on to explain psychological phenomena
• In psychology, the scientific theory is used, and that helps to tease apart what people
think is going on from what is actually going on
Scientific Method
• FORMULATE a testable hypothesis: take the theory and translate it into a testable
prediction by generating a hypothesis, a hypothesis being a prediction about a
relationship between two or more variables, and has to be specific and testable, which
means it has to make a statement about the directional relationship between variables.
e.g. predict that if variable A increases, variable B also increases, variable A increases,
variable B decreases, etc. Actually describe the relationship of the variables
Once the prediction is made, to be able to test it, the variables have to be translated
from abstract constructs into something more concrete, operationalise the variables
• There are two types of variables
-the independent variable which is controlled and manipulated
-the dependent variable is what is measured, the outcome that is thought to be
influenced by the independent variable
There are other variables such as subject variables, measured predictors, outcome
variables, etc.
• When operationalising variables, one is turning abstract constructs into concrete
variables that can be directly measured or manipulated, keeping in mind reliability and
validity since the process requires a HOW the abstract concept investigated is
measured,
• It's important that the measure is reliable (sometimes confusingly called internal
validity) the extent which a measure produces consistent results. When using
psychological measures, it's not so easy to see how unreliable they are, so there are
particular methods that are used to assess their reliability
-alternate forms reliability involves the evaluation of two different versions of the
same measure, the score from the two tests are then compared to see if the measure
is actually reliable
-split half reliability also involves the evaluation of two measures. However, sometimes
it's not possible for researchers to develop two versions of the same measure (money,
time etc.). When that happens, the one measure is split into two measures, and then
compare the performance of the first half of the measure and the performance of the
second half
-test reset reliability involves getting the same group of people to complete the same
measure twice with a break in between, then compare the performance of the two
occasions
• and valid (sometimes called external validity) is the extent to which a measure
measures the thing it's supposed to measure
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