03 Critical thinking and research methods

How does our everyday thinking sometimes lead us to a wrong conclusion?

Hindsight bias, overconfidence

What does a good theory do?

1. It organizes observed facts.

2. It implies hypotheses that offer testable predictions and, sometimes, practical applications.

3. It often stimulates further research.

Why is replication important?

When others are able to repeat (replicate) studies and produce similar results, psychologists can have more confidence in the original findings.

We cannot assume that case studies always reveal general principles that apply to all of us. Why not?

Case studies involve only one individual or group, so we can’t know for sure whether the principles observed would apply to a larger population.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of naturalistic observations?

Carefully observing and recording naturally occurring behaviors outside the artificiality of a laboratory. However, outside the lab, you are not able to control all the factors that may influence the observations.

What does it mean when we say two things are correlated?

They coincide/vary together, how well one predicts the other.

What is the main characteristic of experimentation that make it possible to isolate cause and effect?

Random assignment

By using random assignment, researchers are able to control for ___ which are other factors besides the independent variable(s) that may influence research results.

Confounding variable(s)

Why, when testing a new drug to control blood pressure, would we learn more about its effectiveness from giving it to half of the participants in a group of 1000 than to all 1000 participants?

Giving it to half of the participants (randomly assigned) creates a control group, which allows for a group that I can compare the experimental group to (the experimental group is the group that receives the new drug)

Match the term on the left with the description on the right

• Double-blind procedure - helps researchers generalize from a small set of survey responses to a larger group

• random sampling - helps minimize preexisting differences between experimental and control groups

• random assignment - controls for the placebo-effect; neither researchers nor participants know who receives the real treatment

• double-blind procedure - controls for the placebo-effect; neither researchers nor participants know who receives the real treatment

• random sampling - helps researchers generalize from small set of survey responses to larger group

• random assignment - helps minimize preexisting differences between experimental & control groups