PSYC 2360 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Latin Square, Confounding, Observational Error

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2360
• Professor: David Stanley

Document Summary

Casualty- when one event causes another one to occur. In order to make inferences about causality you must consider three factors: association, temporal priority, control of common- casual variables. These three form the basis of experimental research. Association; before we can infer what the former causes are, there first must be an association between an independent and dependent variable. Not all correlations are a perfect measure; casual relationships between two variables are considered probabilistic. An example of this would be the correlation of smoking cigarettes and having lung cancer; not everyone who smokes has lung cancer, but the probability is a lot higher than it would be if that individual didn"t smoke. If a certain event occurs prior to a behavior, then it can be assumed to be associated. But if an event occurs after a certain behavior is displayed, then it cannot be assumed to be associated.