Experimental Psychology

Chapter 1

Experimental

Common Sense Psychology

The kind of everyday, nonscientific data gathering that shapes our expectations and beliefs and directs
our behavior towards others.

- When you notice that your roommate is in a bad mood, you don’t ask for a favor.
- You dress up when you are going for job interview because first impressions are important.
- You don’t invite John and Evan to the same party because they don’t like each other.
- You assume that when high school students work while studying, it will help them build character
and value money.
- You think that children who read a lot are not very social or physically fit.
- People with low self-esteem are more aggressive.
- The best way to treat juvenile delinquents is to get tough with them.

Limitations of Common Sense Psychology

- The source of psychological information (nonscientific sources of data).

- Inferential strategies (nonscientific inference).

The data we collect from our own experience and we have learned from others that have generated a
very small simple of behaviors that limit their accuracy and usefulness. It can be unreliable and
predictions that we derive from them are likely to be imperfect.

Nonscientific Sources of Data

Confirmation bias

- The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s
preexisting beliefs or hypotheses; It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic effort of inductive
reasoning.
- Once we believe we know something, we tend to overlook instances that might disconfirm our
beliefs, and we seek, instead of confirmatory instances of behavior.
- Eg. If you believe that the full moon brings out psychotic behavior, you will notice and remember
that people acted abnormally while the moon was full, and you will ignore the many more
instances in which no unusual behavior occurred.

Research has shown that we are more likely to believe information if it comes from certain kinds of
individuals. People who are popular, attractive, high in status, seemingly expert, or who appear
highly confident are more powerful sources information than others are.

We frequently use data from our own experiences to come up with commonsense assumptions
about cause and effect.
 Nonscientific Inference

Commonsense psychologists as trait theorists – when we understand other people’s behavior, there
is a strong bias to overlook situational data in favor of data that substantiate trait explanations,

- When we see our friend is sporting another new designer outfit, we conclude that she is vain
about her appearance and spends money frivolously when in face her mother designs for the
manufacturer and gets Stacey’s clothes for almost nothing. We miss or ignore importance
information about the situation.
- Perceiving others by their traits can be useful for predicting their behavior, but it can also lead to
overestimation of the likelihood that they will act in trait-consistent ways across a wide variety of
different situations.

Gambler’s Fallacy

- The gambler’s fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of
chances, is the mistaken belief that, if something happens more frequently than normal during a
given period, it will happen less frequently in the future.

Overconfidence Bias

- The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person’s subjective confidence in

his or her judgement is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgements,
especially when confidence is relatively high.

The Scientific Mentality

- Psychologist’s goal of predictions: Behavior must follow a natural order; therefore, it can be
predicted.
- Alfred North Whitehead: faith in organized universe is essential to science. If no inherent order
existed, there would be no point in looking for one and no need to develop methods for doing so.

Determinism

- Determinism is the philosophical belief that all events are determined completely by previously
existing causes.

The Scientific Mentality

Gathers empirical data – data that are observable or experienced.

Seeks general principles – wherein understanding is advanced by devising and testing an interim
explanation called theory.

Has good thinking – systematic, objective, and rational. This is not letting private beliefs or expectations
influence observations or conclusions. This is being open to new ideas even when they contradict our
prior beliefs or attitudes.

Principle of Parsimony

Parsimony – exhibiting or marked by parsimony; especially: frugal to the point of stinginess.

The Scientific Mentality

Self-correction, modern scientists accept the uncertainty of their own conclusions. The content of
science changes as we acquire new scientific information, an old information is reevaluated in light of
new facts.

Publicizing Results, Modern science should be a highly public activity. The continuous exchange of
information is vital to the scientific process. It would do little good for scientists to work in isolation.

Replication, we should be able to repeat procedures and get the same results again if we have gathered
data objectively and if we have followed good thinking.

The Objectives of Psychological Science

Description – a systematic and unbiased account of the observed characteristics of behaviors.

Prediction - the capacity for knowing in advance when certain behaviors would be expected to occur –
to be able to predict them ahead of time – because we have identified other conditions with which the
behaviors are linked or associated.

Explanation - includes knowledge of the condition that reliably reproduce the occurrence of a behavior;
to explain a behavior, experimental research design should be used systematically.

Control – application of what has been learned about the behavior. Once a behavior has been explained
through experimentation, it may be possible to use that knowledge to effect change or improve
behavior.

Tools of Psychological Science

Observation – systematic noting and recording of events.

Measurement – assignment of numerical values to objects or events of their characteristics according to

conventional rules.

Experimentation – process undertaken to test a hypothesis that particular behavior.

Scientific Explanation in Psychological Science

Antecedent conditions – the circumstances that come before the event or behavior that we want to
explain. If we can identify all the antecedents of a behavior, and the antecedents occur again, then we
expect the same outcome.

Cause-and-Effect Relationship

- If XYZ set of antecedents always leads to a particular behavior, whereas other treatments do not,
we can infer that XYZ causes the behavior.

A temporal relationship is the timing between a factor and an outcome which can be used to assign
causality to a relationship.

Critic on the Cause-and-Effect Relationship:

- We can never establish causality from temporal relationships.

Experimental Process

1. Review of the research literature to suggest a hypothesis about behavior.

2. Design a procedure to test that hypothesis in a systematic way.
3. Use statistical procedures to analyze observations and to decide whether or not the data
support the hypothesis.
4. Reevaluate procedures.
5. Write a research report of the findings.

Chapter 2

Research Ethics

- Provides guidelines for the responsible conduct of research. In addition, it educates and monitors
scientists conducting research to ensure a high ethical standard.

Honesty – report data, results, methods and procedures, and publication status. Do not fabricate,
falsify, or misrepresent data.

Objectivity – strive to avoid bias in experimental design, data, analysis, data interpretation, peer
review, personnel decisions, grant writing, expert testimony, and other aspects of research.

Integrity – Keep your promises and agreements.

Carefulness – Avoid careless errors and negligence; carefully and critically examine your own work
and the work of your peers. Keep good records of research activities.

Openness – Share data, results, ideas, tools, resources. Be open to criticism and new ideas.

Respect for Intellectual Property – Honor patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual
property. Do not use unpublished data, methods, or results without permission. Give credit where
credit is due. Never plagiarize.

Confidentiality – Protect confidential communications, such as papers or grants submitted for

publication, personnel records, trade or military secrets, and patient records.

Responsible Publication – Publish in order to advance research and scholarship, not to advance just
your own career. Avoid wasteful and duplicative publication.

Responsible Mentoring – Help to educate, mentor, and advise students. Promote their welfare and
allow them to make their own decisions.

Respect for Colleagues – Respect your colleagues and treat them fairly.

Social Responsibility – Strive to promote social good and prevent or mitigate social harms through
research, public education, and advocacy.

Competence – Maintain and improve your own professional competence and expertise through
lifelong education and learning; take steps to promote competence in science as a whole.
Legality – Know and obey relevant laws and institutional and governmental policies.

Animal Care – Show proper respect and care for animals when using them in research.

Human Subjects Protection – Respect human dignity.

Institutional Review Board (IRB)

- An institutional review board (IRB), also known as independent ethics committee (IEC), ethical
review board (ERB), or research ethics board (REB).

American Psychological Association (APA).

- One of the main roles that the APA plays is to help further psychology as a science. From the
APA’s official mission statement.
- Encourage the growth of Psychology
- Regulate official titles

Five Principles of Ethics set by APA

1. Discuss intellectual property frankly.

2. Be conscious of multiple roles.
3. Follow informed-consent rules.
4. Respect confidentiality and privacy.
5. Tap into research resources.

Animal Welfare

- A human responsibility than encompasses all aspects of animal well-being, including proper
housing, management, disease prevention and treatment, responsible care, humane handling,
and when necessary, humane euthanasia.

Chapter 3

Alternatives to Experimentation
Nonexperimental Designs

- Used in situations in which an experiment is not practical or desirable

- Used to study behaviors in natural settings.
- Test hypotheses in realistic conditions, such as children playing, or life in a gang
- Primary purpose of an experiment is to establish a causal relationship between specified set of
antecedent conditions (treatments) and the subsequently observed behavior.
- Experiments can have good validity.
Internal validity
- An experiment has high internal validity when we can demonstrate that only the antecedent
conditions are responsible for group differences in behavior.
- An internally valid experiment allows us to draw cause-and-effect conclusions.
- However, experiments are often criticized for being artificial and unrealistic.
External Validity

- Is the degree to which research findings can be generalized or applied to other settings and
individuals.

True experiments often lack external validity.

Nonexperimental designs are often preferred because they have greater external validity

However, there is a trade-off between internal validity and external validity. Nonexperimental studies
are more frequently conducted in real-world settings with a more diverse sample of participants than
experiments.

Nonexperimental Approaches

All research can be described along 2 dimensions,

a). the degree of manipulation of antecedent conditions,

b). the degree of imposition of units.

- The degree of manipulation of antecedent conditions varies from a low to high; from letting things
happen as they will, to carefully controlled environments

Experiments are usually high in degree of manipulation; nonexperiments are usually low.

The degree of imposition of units is how much you limit a subject’s responses. For instance.

Degree of Imposition

Limited sayings = high

Unlimited sayings = low

Degree of Manipulation

Gina pabayaan = low

Gina control = high

Phenomenology

- A description of an individual’s immediate experience

- Rather than looking at the behaviors and events that are external to us, we begin with personal
experience as a source of data.

Case Studies

- It is a descriptive record of single individual’s experiences, or behaviors or both.

Criteria of Case Studies:

1. They are source of inferences, hypotheses, and theories.

2. They allow the study or rare phenomena
3. They have persuasive and motivational value.

Field Studies

- Nonexperimental approaches used in the field or in real-life settings.

- Researchers doing field studies often combined various types of data gathering.

Different types of Field Studies

1. Naturalistic Observation Studies

2. Participant-Observer

Archival Study

- A descriptive research method in which already existing records are re-examined for new
purpose.
- Vast amounts of data are collected by government and private agencies, hospitals, businesses,
schools, institutes, and so on.
- Getting data from public and private agencies would cost not just time but also with money.

Qualitative Research

- Relies on words rather than numbers for the data being collected; it focuses on self-reports,
personal narratives, and expression of ideas, memories, feelings and thoughts.
- the researcher’s self-reflection on relevant experiences
- Participants’ oral or written description of their experiences of phenomenon.

Chapter 4
Alternatives to Experimentation
Survey and Research

Survey Research
- Useful way to obtain people’s behavior, opinions, attitudes, preferences, and behaviors simply by
asking.
- Survey allows us to gather data about experiences.
Survey Techniques
- Written Questionnaires
- Face to face Interviews
Constructing Survey
- Constructing surveys is generally thought of low-risk research, but there are times when special
care is necessary to protect survey respondents from potential harm.
- The potential for ethical need to be as carefully considered in survey.
Survey Designs
- Closed-ended questions (Yes or No)
“Do you smoke?”
“Should there be a ban on nuclear power plants?”
- Open-ended questions (Unlimited answer)
- Open questions
“What are your feelings about animal rights?”
“Why do you like to watch cartoons?”
“What do you think about characters who hit each other?”
Content Analysis
- Similar to coding behaviors using systematic observational techniques.
- Responses are assigned to categories that are created from the data according to objective rules.
“What kind of things might cause you to hit someone?”
Multiple choice.
Measuring Responses
The four levels of measurement:
1. Nominal Scale
- Classifies response items into two or more distinct categories on the basis of some common
feature.
- Eg. What is your sex?
M- Male
F- Female
2. Ordinal Scale
- Rank ordering of response items. The magnitude of each value is measured in the form of ranks.
- Ranking of Candidates
3. Interval Scale
- Common number scales like (1-4) (0-100)
4. Ratio Scale
- Eg. Time

Scaling Techniques
1. Semantic-differential
2. Likert-Scale

Manifest Content

Collecting Survey Data

- Written questionnaires, mail surveys, telephone surveys, and many more.

Self-administered Questionnaires
- Collect data anonymously.
Mail Surveys
- Do not expect that everyone will fill out and return your questionnaire.
Computer and Internet Surveys
- Able to compute score and put the data in a file for a result.
Interviews
- Face-to-face
Focus Groups
- Another face-to-face techniques used less often for collecting data about a particular topic in the
focus group method.
 Evaluating Surveys and Survey Data
- The goodness of the survey itself.
- Reliability (consistency)
- Validity (measure).