Methods

Intuition

Believing you know something based on feelings rather than evidence.

Pure Observation

Using one’s senses to observe the world in a specific way.

Authority

Accepting that the world works in a certain way because an expert says so.

Science

A community of people following agreed rules for observing, predicting, and explaining parts of the world.

Theory

Possible explanations for why or how something works.

Hypothesis

Predictions about what should happen in a specific situation.

Observational Tests

Experiments that test a hypothesis by creating or finding situations where the hypothesis should hold true.

Universality

The number of people to whom a hypothesis or theory is believed to apply.

Scientific Skepticism

An approach that should not be tied to any specific theory or hypothesis.

Peer Review

The process of having scientific conclusions reviewed by other scientists.

Replication

Conducting multiple studies in the same way to see if they yield similar results.

Falsifiable Hypothesis

Hypotheses that make predictions that can be shown to be false through observation.

Operational Definition

A description of a psychological property in measurable terms.

Naturalistic Observation

Collecting data by unobtrusively observing people in their natural environments.

Case Studies

Collecting detailed data on one or a few unique individuals.

Correlational Studies

Establishing predicted relationships between two measured variables.

Spurious Correlation

Correlation in which two variables are related not causally, but due to a confounding factor.

Independent Variable (IV)

The variable that is manipulated in an experiment.

Dependent Variable (DV)

The variable that is measured and predicted to be affected by the IV.

Random Selection

Participants chosen randomly from the general population for a study.

Demand Characteristics

Aspects of observational settings that cause people to behave as they think is expected.

Observer Bias

The tendency of observers’ expectations to influence what they think they observed.

Normal Distribution

A statistically defined distribution where measurements peak in the middle and decrease symmetrically.

Central Tendency

Descriptive statistics indicating where measurements tend to lie near the center of a distribution.

Mean

The average value of all measurements.

Median

The middle value in a series of measurements.

Standard Deviation

A measure of how much individual measurements differ from the mean.