0.1 Psychology as a Science: Set 1
Critical Thinking Hindsight Bias | Illusory Correlations Overconfidence | Psychology |
Illusory Correlations Overconfidence | David went into the voting booth sure that his candidate would win. Surely most people were reasonable like himself and would make the same decision.
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Critical Thinking | When reading a news article about a new psychological study, Jamal questioned the source's credibility and looked for evidence to support its claims.
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Psychology | Chloe is studying to understand the connections between the human mind and behavior.
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Hindsight bias | After her favorite sports team lost the championship, Maria exclaimed, "I knew they were going to lose all along,"
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Illusory Correlations Confidence | Sarah believes that every time a new moon occurs, she has bad luck even though if she were to track this with data, there wouldn’t actually be any relationship between these.
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0.1 Psychology as a Science: Set 2
Falsifiable Hypothesis Operational Definition | Peer Review Qualitative Data Quantitative Data | Reliability Replication Self-Report Bias | Social Desirability Bias Theory Validity |
Some psychologists have put forth the idea of Self-Determination as a way to explain people’s motivation. It posits that humans have 3 innate psychological needs: autonomy (the need to feel in control of one's life), competence (the need to master challenges and feel effective), and relatedness (the need to feel connected to others.)
A group of researchers decide to test this in college students. They state that if self-determination is correct, college students who perceive a higher level of autonomy, competence, and relatedness from their instructors will report greater motivation and academic well-being.
They distribute a survey about students’ feelings of autonomy, competence and relatedness, their levels of motivation and corresponding behaviors, and their feelings of academic well-being. The survey includes both Likert style questions (agreement on a scale of 1-5) and open ended questions where students can elaborate their thoughts in their own words. |
Quantitative data | The responses to Likert scale style questions from 1-5 are a type of -
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Qualitative data | The responses to open ended questions are a type of -
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Operational definition | The idea of self-determination is an evidence based explanation of people’s behaviors and mental processes, which makes it a -
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Hypothesis | The researchers prediction that college students with greater autonomy, competence, and relatedness will have higher intrinsic motivation and academic well-being is a -
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Falsifiable | The researchers’ prediction is able to be disproven by the evidence they collect, making it -
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Operational Definition | The researchers are measuring academic well-being using a set of responses on a survey, which we would call the -
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Validity | The researchers gave students another survey that has already been shown to test intrinsic motivation. This is to test whether their instrument accurately measures intrinsic motivation, testing its -
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Social Desirability bias | Jenna, one of the research participants, thinks the researchers would like to see that she is a happy and motivated student so she inflates her survey responses to match. Jenna is displaying the -
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Self-Report Bias | Austin, another research participant, can’t quite remember how often or how long he studied for the course. He just makes a random guess on the survey, displaying the -
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Reliability | The researchers gave a similar survey to the students 2 weeks later and compared scores to make sure that students gave consistent responses. This was testing the -
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Peer Review | Before they publish their study, the psychology journal they have submitted to sends their proposal to several experts in the field to evaluate, the process of -
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Replication | Five years after this study was published, another group of researchers in a different country wants to repeat the study at their university to see if they will see similar results. This is called -
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0.1 Psychology as a Science: Set 3
Convenience Sample Generalizability | Population Random Assignment | Random Sample Representative Sample | Sample Sampling Bias |
Juliana and Nathan are researchers at a university who want to study whether drinking caffeine before an exam will improve exam performance. |
Population | The researchers want their findings to apply to all college students in the US. This describes the -
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Sample | Since they can’t actually study all the college students in the US, they select a group of 400 students from their university to participate. This is their -
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Convenience sample | Nathan proposes just using their 2 Psych 101 classes since they have easy access to all the students, which would be a -
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Sampling bias | Juliana argues that students in a Psych 101 classes would be younger and have different characteristics than their population, leading to -
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Representative sample | Juliana thinks they need a group that accurately reflects the characteristics of all college students across the US, called a -
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Random sample | They decide to use a random number generator to select the participants for their study, making it a -
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Generalizability | Because Juliana and Nathan used this method of a random generator, they feel that they can apply their findings to their intended population. In other words, they have good -
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Random Assignment_____ | Once they have selected their participants, Juliana and Nathan again use a random number generator to choose which participants will be told to drink caffeine and which will not. This will help them establish any causality and is called -
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Identify: Random assignment (RA) or Random sampling (RS)
RA | 1 | Participants are randomly told to either sleep 4 hours or 8 hours before taking a memory test. |
RS | 2 | Researchers randomly select 1,000 high schoolers across the U.S. to survey their sleep habits. |
RS | 3 | Out of all Instagram users aged 13–25, a computer randomly selects 500 participants to study effects on self-esteem. |
RA | 4 | 100 people with anxiety are randomly put in groups to attend either cognitive-behavioral therapy or mindfulness-based therapy groups. |
RA | 5 | Half of the kids in a study play a video game where the villain wears red, and half where the villain wears blue to test the influence of color on aggression. |
RS | 6 | A parenting researcher uses a national database to randomly select 250 parents of children under age 10. |
0.2 Overview of Research Methods
Case Study Correlational Study | Experiment Meta-Analysis | Naturalistic Observation |
Correlational Study | Maria is a researcher who wants to see if there's a relationship between the number of hours people spend on social media and their self-esteem. She gives a group of 200 participants a survey that measures their self-esteem and their social media use.
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Case study | A clinical psychologist, Dr. Sharma, works with a patient named Liam, who has a very rare neurological condition that affects his memory. To understand the condition better, she conducts an in-depth, long-term study of Liam. Over the course of a year, she gathers detailed information about his family history, academic records, and daily life, and conducts extensive interviews and cognitive tests. The information gathered from this single case provides unique and valuable insights into this rare condition.
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Naturalistic observation | A team of developmental psychologists wants to study how children interact during playtime while in the preoperational stage of development. They set up a camera in the corner of a preschool classroom's play area. For several weeks, they simply observe and record the children's spontaneous behaviors, like sharing toys, negotiating rules, and resolving conflicts.
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Meta-analysis | Dr. Chen wants to determine the overall effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for treating anxiety disorders. He gathers the results from 50 different published studies that have already investigated this topic. By statistically combining and analyzing the data from all these individual studies, he is able to draw a more powerful and comprehensive conclusion about the therapy's effectiveness than any single study could provide.
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Experiment | A researcher named Emily wants to test if a new drug can improve memory. After completing safety trials with animals, she receives approval to test the drug in humans. She randomly assigns participants to receive either the drug or a placebo. If the group taking the drug performs significantly better on a subsequent memory test than the placebo group, she can conclude that the drug likely caused the improvement in memory.
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Identify: Correlational research (C) or Experiment (E)
E | Parents were randomly assigned to either be told their child would be given a sugary drink or their child would be given a zero sugar drink. All children were actually given a zero sugar drink. Parents were then asked to rate hyperactivity in children.
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CR | Researchers analyzed the academic performance of elementary students with school start times ranging from 7 am, 8 am, or 9 am by comparing neighboring counties with different start times.
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CR | A study explored the relationship between happiness and academic achievement among university students. Students were given the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ) to measure happiness. Academic achievement was measured using participants' Grade Point Average (GPA) from their university records.
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E | A study aimed to investigate how in-class cell phone use impacts students' immediate memory recall during lectures. 150 university students were divided into 3 groups - one that could not bring their cell phones to lecture, another that were instructed to bring them but keep them in their bag, and another that was told to have them out and use them freely during the lecture. Students were given a quiz after the lecture to test whether there was a relationship between phone usage and recall.
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CR | Researchers tested whether social loafing impacted a person’s likeability to their classmates. Social loafing is a phenomenon where a member of a group works less hard than normal and relies on the other members of the group to make up for it. After a group project, members were asked to rate each member of the group on their relative contributions to the project. Then they were asked to rate the likeability of each member in order to see whether there was a relationship between the 2 scores.
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0.3 Correlational Research
Correlation Directionality Problem | Third Variable Problem Regression Toward the Mean |
Directionality problem | A study found that people who watch more violent TV are more aggressive. It's unclear if watching violent TV causes aggression or if aggressive people are more drawn to watching violent TV.
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Third variable problem | There is a positive correlation between the number of ice cream cones sold and the number of shark attacks. This is because both of these increase during the summer.
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Regression toward the mean | After Chloe received a perfect score on a test, she was disappointed when her next score was slightly lower.
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Correlation | Lana researches social media use and self-esteem and found that as social media use increased, self-esteem decreased.
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Match the correlational coefficient (r value) to each graph:
0 -0.5
-0.9 0.5
0.9
0.4 Experimental Research
Confounding Variable Control Group Dependent Variable Double-Blind Experiment | Experimental Group Experimenter Bias Independent Variable Placebo | Placebo Effect Random Assignment Single-Blind Experiment |
A pharmaceutical company is researching a new antidepressant medication. Participants are randomly divided into 2 groups: one that will take the antidepressant and one that will take a fake pill with no active ingredients. |
Random assignment | The process of dividing the participants into 2 groups is called -
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Placebo | The fake pill is called a -
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Experimental group | The group taking the antidepressants is the -
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Control group | The group taking the fake pill is the -
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Confounding variable | Participants are given a similar diet and exercise routine, and to continue seeing their therapist at the same rate. If these factors were different between the 2 groups, they would be considered -
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Independent variable | Whether or not participants are taking the antidepressant is the -
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Dependent variable | Whether the depression symptoms improve over the course of the study is the -
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Placebo effect | Some participants taking the fake pill begin to feel less depressed as soon as they start treatment due to the -
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Single-blind experiment | If participants are not told which pill they are taking, but the researchers are aware, this would be considered a -
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Researcher bias | One problem is that the researchers may unintentionally treat participants in the 2 groups differently if they have expectations that the antidepressant should work. This is called -
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Double-blind experiment | To fix this problem, we can run the experiment so that neither the participants nor the researchers know who is in what group (until after the experiment concludes and data has been analyzed). This is a -
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0.5 Statistical Reasoning
Bimodal Distribution Effect Size Negative Skew | Normal Distribution Outlier Percentile Rank | Positive Skew Standard Deviation Statistical Significance |
Sarah, a high school psychology teacher, wants to test a new study method on her students. She splits her class into two groups: Group A, who uses the new method, and Group B, who uses the traditional method. At the end of the semester, she gives both groups the same final exam. After grading the exams, Sarah plots the scores for both groups.
Normal distribution | Group B's scores, when graphed, form a bell-shaped curve where most students scored around the mean. This is called a -
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Standard deviation | The scores are clustered fairly close together. Sarah describes this statistically by saying the data set has a small -
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Percentile rank | Sarah’s student David asks how he performed relative to his peers. Sarah tells him he scored higher than 95% of his peers. This describes his -
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Outlier | One student in particular performed extremely low with the new study method, scoring only a 22%. Sarah refers to this extreme data point as a -
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Negative skew | This student’s extremely low score pulled down the mean of the group and created a graph that has a long tail to the left. This is called -
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Bimodal distribution | In Group A, Sarah notices something unusual. There are 2 distinct peaks in the distribution of their scores, suggesting that the new study method worked exceptionally well for some students, while others performed poorly. This is described as a -
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Statistical significance | Finally, Sarah compares the mean scores of Group A and Group B. She wants to know if the difference between the two groups is due to the new study method or just random chance. She runs a statistical test and finds a p value of 0.02. Because this p value is <0.05, she concludes that the different has -
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Effect size | Sarah also wants to know the practical importance of the difference to help her understand the real-world impact of the new study method. To find this, she calculates the -
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Find the following statistics from the data set: 2, 3, 5, 5, 8, 10, 15, 19, 23
Mean: 10
Median: 8
Mode: 5
Range: 21
Label the normal distribution below with the percentages that fall into each zone:
For the skewed distribution below, label the mean, median, and mode:
0.6 Ethical Considerations in Psychological Research
Confederates Confidentiality | Debriefing Deception | Informed Assent Informed Consent | Institutional Review Board Protection from Harm |
Figure 1. A line test from Asch’s study
A team of psychology researchers is attempting to replicate Asch’s classic study on conformity in children of different ages to investigate whether the tendency to conform peaks at a certain age. In this study, research participants are told they will be sat with other participants and given a series of questions to answer. In actuality, all other “participants” are actually working with the researcher. These fake participants give wrong answers in order to test whether the only real participant will conform and also say the wrong answer in order to fit in. For example, participants would be shown the image above and asked which line from the right matches the length of the line at the left. Each fake participant would state A even though the answer is clearly C.
In order to complete this study, the researchers must follow all ethical guidelines necessary for any psychology research. |
Institutional Review Board | First, the researchers must submit their proposal to a team at their university made up of members of the university and community members for approval. This team is called an -
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Protection from harm | As part of the proposal, the researchers must demonstrate how they will make sure that the research participants are kept both physically, mentally, and emotionally safe. This is called -
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Informed Assent | Before a child participates in the study, the parents and children must be given information about what the study will entail and asked if they agree to participate. The CHILD’S agreement is called -
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Informed Consent | The PARENT’S agreement is called -
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Deception | The participants cannot be told the real aim of this study or it would be unsuccessful. Generally researchers try to avoid lying to participants unless it is absolutely necessary. Lying to research participants is called -
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Confederates | As part of this study, the fake participants must pretend to be actual participants in the study. These fake participants who are actually working with the researchers are called -
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Debriefing | After the study’s conclusion, the real participants are told what was actually happening in the study and are allowed to speak with the researchers about any questions or concerns they have. This process is called -
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Confidentiality | Throughout the study and after its conclusion, participant information is kept private. This is called -
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0.7 Psychology Perspectives
Behavioral Biological | Cognitive Evolutionary | Humanistic Psychodynamic | Sociocultural |
Luis has to give a presentation at work, and he's feeling intense anxiety. |
Psychodynamic | Psychologist A believes that his fear stems from childhood experiences of feeling isolated from his peers that are manifesting unconsciously as this current anxiety.
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Sociocultural | Psychologist B believes that Luis’ upbringing in a collectivist culture contributes to his fear of public speaking.
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Humanistic | Psychologist C believes that Luis should focus on the personal growth that he will experience by overcoming the obstacle of speaking publicly, which will bring him closer to the person he strives to be.
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Biological | Psychologist D believes that his fear is caused by physiological symptoms and recommends a medication to prevent the physical symptoms of his anxiety.
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Evolutionary | Psychologist E believes that his fear is adaptive, the result of human ancestors surviving best when they belonged to a group instead of standing out.
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Behavioral | Psychologist F believes that his fear of public speaking is a learned response and wants to focus on exposure therapy to address the problem.
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Cognitive | Psychologist G believes that Luis’ fear is due to his maladaptive thinking patterns and that he needs to restructure his thoughts and beliefs in order to address the anxiety.
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