PS390 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Psychophysics, Scientism, Ronald Fisher
Document Summary
Most natural science psychologists adhere to the quantitative imperative" (notion that to study something you need to measure it) Psychologists were under pressure to follow other natural sciences and create empirically based measures of psychological phenomena to make research more efficient and meet social needs. Two areas of study in 1800s paved way for quantification of psychological phenomena: psychophysics and mental testing. These precedents led lange to develop 4 types of psychological scales: nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio. 1800s: galton wanted to support eugenics theory but had no way to measure variation in individual"s psychological traits, thus introduced ideas of regression", standard deviation" and. 1900s: karl pearson (eugenicist) formulated a way to compare two variables (the "correlation") which emphasized individual differences. 1930s: ronald fisher developed both t" and z" statistics that greatly helped hypothesis testing + led to technique of analysis of variance that allowed the comparison of group means.
