PSYC 201W Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Abusive Power And Control, Falsifiability, Scientific Method
8 Mar 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Iv. can psychology be a science: goals of psychological research, describing behaviour, explaining behaviour - what conditions are necessary to make causal inferences, predicting behaviour, controlling behaviour causal inferences x has a causal effect on y. * causal inferences are possible when three conditions have been met. * covariation - as x changes, y changes. * temporal order - a change in x occurs before change in y. * the plausible alternative explanations - other factors that could have driven change in y can be ruled out. * events are not random but rather demonstrate regularity or pattern. * it is possible to discover these causes. * designed to reduce personal bias, and reflects what we know to be true. * operationism - clarifies definitions/conditions in which experiments are being performed. * our understanding of the natural world is corrected by new and future discoveries. * basic research seeks to examine the fundamental nature of phenomena.
