PSY BEH 104S Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Random Assignment, Psych, Confounding
14 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Science builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe (including people) Three goals of science: description of events. Define, classify, categorize: prediction of events. Extremely useful at a practical level: explanation of events. Theory: the distillation of a set of known or observable facts into a smaller set of principles or propositions that can explain those factors. Science strives to get the level of causation** A hypothesis: increased experiences of fear heighten desires for social affiliation: study 1: survey people about situations differing of fearfulness and ask about likelihood of affiliation behavior in each situation. Purely self-reported: study 2: observe people in places where people wait and observe behavior and code for affiliation. There could be a third variable that is influencing: study 3: experimental study, randomly assigned to 2 conditions. Can tell direction and magnitude of relation.
