Hi everybody, this mini lecture will take a look at how we go about answering the questions that we propose or ask in psychology. And when we go about asking and answering questions, we want to follow something called the scientific method. Now in this little mini lecture, I'm going to be presenting information but just very superficially because you'll be learning more about it in your reading and in assignments. So the scientific method begins with a theory. And a theory, as you see here, is a set of principles that predicts behavior.
And it's based on observation. So I may be looking around and I may, you know, be noticing things. And then I put them together, say, you know, I'm noticing when this happens, then this thing happens over here. So, for example, I may, as a teacher, notice that...
Students who seem well-rested tend to perform better on quizzes than students who seem to be sleep-deprived. So I might have this general idea that somehow sleep affects memory. Because when we test you, really what we're testing is your memory. So my theory is sleep affects memory.
But in order for this theory to be good, I need to have a hypothesis. And I'm going to define a hypothesis as a testable. prediction, right?
So sleep affects memory is very, very general. With a hypothesis, we're going to get specific. So for example, I may say sleep deprivation decreases memory. Notice the specificity.
I'm saying deprivation decreases memory. So it's no longer this general question about sleep and memory. I'm specifically stating that sleep deprivation decreases memory. In other words, if you get poor sleep, you're not going to do well on a quiz that requires you to use your memory. Anytime I ask you in class, is this a hypothesis?
You want to ask yourself two questions. Number one, is it predicting something? And number two, can I test it? And if the answer to both of those is yes, then you've got a hypothesis.
So we start off with a theory, this general set of principles that predicts a behavior. And then we get specific. We create a hypothesis that we can then test to see if there's any support for our theory.
So using sleep deprivation and test taking as the example. You can see it at the top there next to his head. The theory is sleep boosts memory. The hypothesis is more specific. When sleep deprived, people remember less from the day before.
And then that's going to lead, as you see over here, to research and observations. So now I'm going to test that hypothesis. I'm going to give study material to people who either get a good night's sleep or poor night's sleep and then I'm going to test them. And based on what I find, I'll either have some confirmation from my hypothesis, I may not have any support for my hypothesis, and then I have to reject it and start over, or I might have to revise it, change it in some particular way.
Sometimes when people don't have support for their hypothesis, they get upset like, oh man, but that's good information to have, right? So one important thing about a hypothesis is it provides direction to research. If you have support, you keep going. If you don't have support, that's great information to have because you know then I need to reject this and move on or I need to revise it in some way. So when we try to collect information as we're answering the questions that we ask.
There are different ways I can do it. And one is through what's called a method of description. So what I'm talking about now is data collection.
How can I go about collecting data to see if there's support for my hypothesis? And some ways we do it is just by describing what's going on. So for example, a case study is a method of description that looks...
at a person in great detail, gets tons of information about that person, and will describe what's happening for that person, what has happened for that person, and so on. And a very famous example of a case study is Phineas Gage. Now Phineas Gage is a person who was working on a railroad. Super, super nice guy. There was an accident where there was an explosion and a big metal rod that he was using shot through his head.
Now here's the thing. Phineas Gage sat up with the rod in his head and was like, what's going on? It didn't kill him.
And this is Phineas Gage. You can see where the rod went through his head right here. Here he is right here.
This is the rod, the said rod that went through his head. He lived, but his personality was very, very different, right? And through extensive study and doing a detailed history of how he was before and after the accident, really studying him in depth, it was hypothesized that the frontal lobe, this front part of your brain here, had something to do with personality.
Because Phineas Gage's personality changed drastically after that accident when he had damage to that frontal lobe. And it was that detailed history about Phineas Gage that allowed us to make that finding. Another method of description is a survey.
This is a questionnaire that many of you have probably received before for lots of different reasons. And a survey is just asking you particular questions. This is what's called a method of self-report because you are answering the questions. And sometimes they're done here on paper. Other times someone may be interviewing you.
You'll be hearing about these a lot. Anytime there's an election, they talk about polls. Polls are finding this.
That's another name for a survey. And polls and surveys cannot predict who's going to win an election. They can just say, at this particular moment in time, here's who's ahead.
I can describe what people are thinking right now, but that might change on election day. So a survey is a questionnaire. Another method of description is what's called naturalistic observation, where individuals are recorded in a natural environment as opposed to a lab environment.
And in this picture, you see in the foreground that there's a person holding a clipboard and they're making notes about children in the classroom. They're right there for the kids to see, right? They're not hiding or anything like that. And what they're doing is just recording what's going on. And they might be recording.
how many times people are asking questions, who's asking the questions, and so on. They may be observing for any violent behavior. But the thing that you want to pay attention to here is it's behaviors being recorded in the natural environment as opposed to a lab.
Again, with naturalistic observation, I can just say, hey, this is who was asking the questions, or this is who was being most violent. I can't tell you why it happened. I can't tell you what's going to happen in the future, but this is what happened right now in the classroom setting.
Another type of research is called correlational research, and correlation is just a very fancy name for relationship. So with correlational research, we're looking for a relationship between variables, and variables is just a fancy way of saying things, right? We're looking for relationships between things.
So here's an example. Children who are breastfed have higher academic achievement than children who are not. So what are the variables?
What are the things they're trying to see if there's a relationship between? Well, in this particular example, they're saying that children who are breastfed will have higher academic achievement. That's the relationship. Breastfeeding leads to higher academic achievement.
So it's usually at this point where people start going, wait a minute, I wasn't breastfed, what's going on? Does that mean I'm not going to have good academic achievement? Beware, right? Beware.
Correlation does not equal causation. In other words, just because there's a relationship between things does not mean that it caused it to happen. That's what causation means, cause and effect.
And in this case, it would say, hey, breastfeeding is the only thing that causes high academic achievement. And we know that that is certainly not the case. I was not breastfed. I ended up OK. Right.
So just because there's a relationship between things doesn't mean that it's the only thing that made something happen. We know that academic achievement is also tied to how many books you have in a house or how much a child was read to. So there are lots of different things that contribute to that. So correlation just means there's a relationship between things. It helps us predict, right?
Hey, when I see this, I think this is going to happen. But it does not indicate that one variable made the other variable happen. All right, everybody. I hope you find this helpful.