PSY 308 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Bloor Street, Confounding, Statistical Hypothesis Testing

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 308
• Professor: Dana Williams

Document Summary

Hold extraneous variable constant: same age group 18-24, same words to memorize, same room and experimenter, same room noise level, same time between learning words and recalling. Confounding variable: might be the time of day. For example, memory may have not been affected by the amount of marijuana, but the time of day each person was tested for memory. Another confounding variable could be the different events that can happen to each individual before being tested (which is very difficult to hold constant in an experiment). Random assignment to conditions: balances out the variables you cannot control, but only works if there are large amounts of people assigned to each group. You don"t know if jogging happiness or happiness jogging. It is unethical to test it, therefore you perform a quasi. Experiment: can"t manipulate independent variable, can"t randomly assign conditions.