PSYA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Operational Definition, Internal Validity
Document Summary
Psya01 - lecture #5 - experimentation: finding the cause. There are scenarios where it seems like sharks want to eat human beings, while there are scenarios where sharks don"t seem to want to eat human beings. Sharks have special sensors along their snout that allow to them to detect electrical current. Metal cages that humans are put in underwater messes with shark"s sensors. Shark attacks cage because they are confused by cage. Hypothesis: sharks do not want to eat humans, they want to eat cages. The electric activity here attracts the shark and brings out aggressive behaviour. To determine this, we must conduct a causation experiment, to determine the cause of the shark"s behaviour. Experiment: typically involves contrasting behaviour across two (or more) conditions that differ in some way that should matter (i. e. , affect behaviour) according to some theory. Independent variable: the variable that was changed to create the critical difference across conditions.
