Psychology 2070A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Falsifiability, Dependent And Independent Variables, Research On The Effects Of Violence In Mass Media
16 Jan 2015
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Document Summary
A fundamental principle of social psychology is that many social problems, such as causes of and reactions to violence can be studied scientifically. Hindsight bias: the tendency for people to exaggerate how much they could have predicted the outcome after knowing that it occurred. In one condition, participants were told that the soldier managed to save the village, students felt like this was the obvious outcome. However, in another condition, the students were told that the soldier failed to save the village. They still believed this was the obvious outcome! Social psychology is an empirical science with a well-developed set of methods to answer questions about social behavior, such as the ones about violence. There are three types: the observational method, the correlational method, the experimental method. While insights do sometimes occur suddenly, science is a cumulative process, and researchers typically generate hypotheses from previous theories and research.
