PSY100H1 Final: PSY100 Final Exam Review
PSY100
Final Exam Review
LECTURE 1: PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
• Psychology —> The scientific study of behaviour, thought, and experience, and how they
can be affected by physical, social, and environmental factors
• Unifying Themes
- Use of empiricism, the scientific method
- Importance of socio-historical context
- Recognition of multiple influences on behaviour
- The Mind is Adaptive
- Experience is subjective
- People are generally unaware of the influences on their behaviour
• Psychology is an empirical science
- Although the seeds of psychology were planted long before he came along, Wilhelm
Wundt is given the honour of formally founding experimental psychology
- Biopsychosocial Model —> idea that behaviour is a product of biological,
psychological, and socio-cultural factors, all of which can interact an influence one
another
• The Mind is Adaptive
- From evolutionary adaptations that have shaped the human brain over thousands of years
to your own personal experiences that can change your brain within a tiny fraction of that
time
- Regular mediation can strengthen and weaken certain connections/pathways in the
brain
• Peoples experience of the world is highly subjective
- No one sees the world in its objective state
- Our experiences are shaped by our beliefs, our biases, our history, our culture
etc…
• People are often unaware of the influences acting upon them
- Often unaware of how events, memories, the environment, other people and so
on, can influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours
• Psychology in the Classroom
- What if you use your laptop only for notes?
- Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014
- Study 1: Laptop note takers performed worse on conceptual-application
questions —> more verbatim notes
- Study 2: Instructed not to take notes verbatim. Laptop note takers still performed
worse, still took more verbatim notes than longhand note-takers.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
- Study 3: Maybe laptop notes are better for studying. Participants who took
longhand notes and were able able to study from them performed better than
anyone else.
LECTURE 2: RESEARCH METHODS
• Empiricism & the Scientific Method
- The view that knowledge comes from sensory experience
- Empirical evidence: refers to the data that has been collected (or the knowledge
that has been gained) by scientific observation
- The belief that knowledge comes from our scenery experience in the world.
- Contrast with some unscientific ways of reasoning or forming beliefs about the
world…
- Intuition, gut feelings
- Authority => trusting that something is true based on what an authority figure
says
- Logic => using what we know to make decisions
• Typically statements about the causal relation between two or more variables
• Scientific Theories
1. Determinism
- In the absence of determinism, orderly, systematic causes wouldn’t exist, and theories
would be useless
2. Theories must be
- Testable using currently available research techniques
- Falsifiable: it must be possible in principle to make an observation that would show
the proposition to be false, even if that observation has not been made
3. Example:
- Goal Setting Theory (ex. Locke & Latham, 1990)
- According to this theory, there are five key principles that can improve the
chances of succeeding with a goal (clarity, challenge, commitment, feedback,
complexity of the task)
- In a nutshell: Setting specific and (reasonably) challenging goals is motivating
and leads to better performance
• Understanding Variables
- Sample Hypothesis: Individuals who are asked to achieve a clear, specific goal will perform
better than those who are given a vague, non-specific goal
- Independent variable: Type of goal (specific or vague)
• Variable being manipulated, in order to see its impact on the dependent variable
• Dependent variable: Performance
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find more resources at oneclass.com
• Variable being measured, in order to see how it is affected by the independent
variable
• Operational Definitions
- Definitions of theoretical constructs that are stated in term of concrete, observable procedures
- Sometimes variables are well-defined and easily measured or manipulated
- Some Variables are not well defines and cannot easily be directly observed
- Constructs: Internal attributes or characteristics that cannot be directly observed but
are useful for describing and explaining behaviour
• Performance
- What type of performance are we interested in? How do we want to measure it?
- Physical performance => endurance, speed, weight lifted, number of
reps/baskets/points/goals, etc.
- Intellectual performance => IQ test, general knowledge test, math test,
grade in a class, reading comprehension, etc.
- Other => number of products assembled, number of sales, customer
satisfaction ratings, and so on…
• Experiments
- Involve manipulating the variable(s) of interest, while keeping everything else consistent
(control!) between the different conditions
- Participants are randomly assigned to study conditions
- Example: Manipulating the type of goal given to participants, see if it leads to higher
performance.
- Independent variable: Type of goal given
- Participants in the experimental (or treatment) group receive a specific, clearly-stated
goal: “Your goal is to achieve at least 90% accuracy on the test.”
- Participants in the control (or comparison) group receive just a general, vague goal:
“Your goal is to perform as well as you possibly can.”
- Dependent variable: Test performance/accuracy
- Confound: Anything that may unintentionally vary along with the independent variable
- E.g., We are intentionally varying the type of goal given to the participants
- Is there anything else that might be different between our two conditions?
- Confounds limit our ability to make causal claims
- Random sample: Each member of the population you are interested in has an equal chance
of being chosen to participate
- Random assignment: Each participant has an equal chance of being assigned to each
experimental condition
- Necessary component of an experiment, because this ensures that your different
groups are equivalent on average
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
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PSY100H1 Full Course Notes
Verified Note
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Document Summary
Lecture 1: psychological science: psychology > the scientific study of behaviour, thought, and experience, and how they can be affected by physical, social, and environmental factors, unifying themes. People are generally unaware of the influences on their behaviour: psychology is an empirical science. Although the seeds of psychology were planted long before he came along, wilhelm. Wundt is given the honour of formally founding experimental psychology. Biopsychosocial model > idea that behaviour is a product of biological, psychological, and socio-cultural factors, all of which can interact an influence one another: the mind is adaptive. From evolutionary adaptations that have shaped the human brain over thousands of years to your own personal experiences that can change your brain within a tiny fraction of that time. Regular mediation can strengthen and weaken certain connections/pathways in the brain: people(cid:1685)s experience of the world is highly subjective. No one sees the world in its objective state.
