PSYC 230 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Nuisance Variable, Coin Flipping, Blind Experiment

• School: University of San Diego
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 230
• Professor: Goldschmied

Document Summary

Experimenter"s expectations about their studies bias their experimental observations or treatment. Any situation in which some additional variable (a) varies systematically with the independent variable (b) could exert an affect on the dependent variable. Lead to spurious (or false) association between the variables. Important but overlooked variables that are held constant in a given study. (a) might vary in the settings in which a researcher most likely wishes to generalize their result to. (b) have some kind of theoretical connection to a particular research finding. The independent variable may be only associated with the dependent variable under the specific (and possibly unusual) set of conditions under which the study is conducted.