howy welcome back we're on chapter two which is all about science and of course we're going to focus on psychology um examples or psychological science examples but in general we're going to go through like the philosophy of science which is applicable or should be applicable to every field that you could potentially do a scientific study on okay so we're going to talk about the wonders of science and also question whether it's possible for science to answer every question that people need answered about Humanity or even biology the fact of the matter is your mind and your body seem indelibly intertwined if you are incredibly stressed out your body is going to go into inflammation mode it's going to go into um kind of immuno compromis motor like immune system Battle Royale as just one very basic example so if you just study the biology of an organism you're kind of ignoring the fact that perhaps our bodies are not just skin suits totally doing their own thing and perhaps our minds or our souls or ourselves are not just dark passengers in these bodies okay um before that just kind of a fair warning about your first exam so for the group project if you are in an in-person class you'll have to prove that you know your to teammates for the group project and are in communication with them so you know don't give me their phone numbers I don't want that information but like maybe a screenshot of the fact that you have a group chat going something like that if you're on in an in online class purely online class um just show that you've been thinking about the assignment um so the video project is at the end of the semester if you're in an in-person class what I have learned is if I don't make sure in the beginning of the semester that you all have found your groups I will get so many emails that you don't have a group at the end of the semester so we're doing it right away if you're in an online class basically I'll just give you the opportunity to be like yeah I'm kind of thinking about it so so far in the last chapter we talked about anxiety like functionalism versus structuralism um so structuralism if somebody has anxiety it might help them just speak to how much it kind of sucks and how like yeah this is something that I would prefer if somebody could help me decrease my experience of anxiety so that's more of like a medical model definition of anxiety um but the goal of the group project is to question the medical model so functionalism suggests that anxiety serves a purpose and if we see anxiety as the enemy perhaps we won't understand the purpose of anxiety so maybe diagnosing somebody with anxiety um has risks as well as benefits because because of course one of the most beautiful things about the medical model of mental health is it validates somebody's experiences so just stalt perspectives again from last chapter might say like you can tell me all you want that anxiety serves a purpose you're not in my body when I'm having a panic attack so thank you very much go hug a cactus you know what I mean which is totally valid and so those people uh being given a diagnosis basically is like saying your pain is real but perhaps we can validate people's experiences and respect people as well and say yeah maybe the environment in which you exist or your body right now is going haywire in terms of anxiety so the goal isn't to get rid of anxiety but to find a good Balancing Act which is very different than just seeing anxiety as the enemy something like that um okay so start thinking about that group project either you'll have to prove that you've talked about it that you've you know who you're your team or if you're in an online class that you've just given at least a little bit of that um you can absolutely discuss the exam with people please do discuss the class you cannot say the answer to question one is f you can say oh I think the example she gave in class for that concept was this or this is how I see it or here here's a cool video website that I found or oh my God this is so relevant to World issue current event funny podcast profound video whatever example from your own life um you can and should discuss the project like okay my understanding of emotions is this what if we did something like this should it be sad funny musical professional whatever um if you're in an inperson class and you're in a season in your life where getting together with people is truly challenging tell your teammates that now and ask what you might be able to contribute on your own be like I'm really great at video editing and I help with their research portion but it's going to be really hard for me to meet up something like that just be honest with each other now I hope that you decide to be friends with one another and as I mentioned you're welcome to use the group chat for side tangents about the class okay psychological theoretical framework schools of thought this is a review from chapter one remember we have structuralism so this is breaking Concepts into smaller parts um and the idea that's a good way to describe an experience like Consciousness that school of thought or theoretical framework or philosophical underpinning is structuralism the technique or method or how we do that um one example is introspection so looking inward then we have functionalism this asks how a concept feeling or conscious component of Consciousness is adaptive so how does that feeling serve a function either in that individual or in society as a whole for good or bad purposes um then we have just adult it's kind of like the response to structuralism it's like you can break things down into smaller and smaller pieces and describe it and excruciating in detail all you want but the whole is always more or different than the sum of the parts that's the big thing with just St um and then psychoanalysis big contribution is the unconscious mind remember the iceberg metaphor you have a tiny little portion of your consciousness of who you are of how you think of how you feel is on the uh is above the surface the water level surface and then you got most of who you are is underneath the unconscious surface and one of the best ways to organize that is through the id ego super ego Battle Royale another big contribution of psychoanalysis is that um who you are in the present moment is at least in some ways a continuation of who you were in the past and all of that stuff is being repressed into the unconscious so there's a lot about who you are that you don't fully understand you have to deeply analyze yourself and others in order to understand who you are and then behaviorism everything is a downstream effect of the consequences of previous actions um I think I didn't emphasize this term when I went over behaviorism and so I apologize for that so as I said as I know I said in the previous lecture um everything about who you are is the result of training from the environment or perhaps learning from the environment we thought about training as like a pig like if I hit this thing um I will get food that's training learning would be like kids watch adults be mean to the Bobo doll like by hitting the Bobo doll kids will not only hit the Bobo doll but start yelling at the Bobo doll start shooting at the Bobo doll they're learning above and beyond just repeating certain behaviors right so that's difference between training and learning conditioning is this fancy term sort of for the training comb component so if I wanted to condition all of you to hand in assignments early um basically I would uh You' you'd somehow learn that if you hand in the assignment early I grade a lot more generously and if you hand in the assignment right at midnight then I'm harsher and so you learn through conditioning because I'm rewarding certain behaviors and punishing other behaviors that's what conditioning is rewards versus um uh rewards versus punishments for particular behaviors so when you think behaviorism think training think I don't have Free Will and the fancy term for that training is conditioning conditioning comes down to when you perform this Behavior you get either a reward or a consequence or like a punishment a reward or a punishment and and you're being conditioned if you get a reward to continue performing that action or you're being conditioned to not continue to perform that behavior if you're being punished so jumping on the couch um or no let's do climbing trees as a kid um some families like it that their kids go out and climb trees so every time their kids go out and climb trees they're like Mom is in the kitchen making them a little snack oh you guys must be so tired from climbing trees come in and have a snack so there are being conditioned to continue climbing trees versus other parents are going to see kids climbing trees and be really nervous about it that they're going to fall and so they're going to go out and yell at the kids to get down off the trees so the the kids are being conditioned to not climb trees because they get punished for that behavior that is conditioning we take that conditioning and hopefully learn we transcend past that training um but the idea is you get Rewards or punishments and that's what forms your behaviors okay so these are the theoretical framework or schools of thought introspection is one of the few techniques I talked about that helps us understand these theoretical Frameworks from a research perspective because it's like a research technique sort of um but of course we have much more sophisticated versions of this nowadays thanks a lot to behaviorism because behaviorism is just purely observing behaviors so um we talked about the again experiment where the kids watch adults hit a bobo doll the kids who watch the parents hit the Bobo doll were more likely to hit the Bobo doll themselves that's an experiment so we do research in Psychology for a couple different different purposes uh the first one is to describe I mentioned in lecture one that psychology is both a science and a field of application of insight so because of that psychology as a science has a tendency to run right to how do I fix everything for Humanity but really you're not supposed to do that until you simply describe like what are the phys physiological experiences of anxiety like you just describe it you don't try and fix it because that's putting a judgment on the observation um and then eventually we want to make accurate predictions because if the idea is I do want to decrease at least dysfunctional anxiety Then I should be able to predict um I don't know uh let's say let's say we're trying to decide like okay how functional is anxiety so we measure anxiety in kids who have A's versus kids who have FS which one do you think has more anxiety and so we might see that students who have A's are more anxious because that forces them to um study more um and then it seems like kids who have FS have le less anxiety about school however if we measured some so that makes it seem like anxiety is good right but remember what I said in lecture one your hypotheses matter a lot because that makes it seem like anxiety is Gucci we don't think anxiety is Gucci certainly not the dysfunctional kind that leads you to have super casual panic attacks every once in a while n gusta panic attacks science I don't care if it leads me to getting a let's find another answer so we might find that people who are getting FS have higher levels of like depression perhaps especially the type of depression that we kind of suppress the type of depression that we don't tend to admit to but that shows up in other ways like risky behaviors or something like that um and so then the so now we see that we have kind of a problem and if I have a a student who gets A's I can predict that their anxiety level is going to be here and a student who has an F has a depression level that's going to be here but then what we want to do is we want to be able to demonstrate that we can have some kind of control over these variables so let's say we want to get the kids who are failing to feel like they do have the self-esteem um ability to be able to achieve an a so I give them some training protocols to help increase their self-esteem and see if that allows them to study in response to feelings of anxiety instead of suppressing the anxiety and instead going into Turtle mode and trying to just um avoid avoid avoid if yes then that means okay I can learn to or I can show that I can use self-esteem to help people feel feel like they are capable of responding to feelings of anxiety so when I feel anxiety that means that I should go study and because I feel like I'm capable of studying because I did all of this training that helped me see that I am capable of doing math problems for example so now when I feel anxiety I do actually study and then that increases my grades which decreases my depression now when you have the the EG students we have to figure out how to decrease anxiety so they don't run themselves into a nervous breakdown or burnout burnout is so real you guys um so okay maybe if I showed all the a students kind of what what all is required to get an A so for instance I taught this summer class and a lot of people decided to use artificial intelligence because it was a summer class and um one of the meetings I had with a student will you know forever change me I was just trying to figure out like why they decided to make this decision and one of the conclusions we came to is like if you've always gotten A's and you got A's throughout High School you feel like you have to outdo your past self in order to continue to get A's but then that starts to feel impossible um so we tried to see if we could flip that on script a little bit and be like okay so you know that you're capable of getting an a capable of getting a can you use that confidence to assume that you are doing enough instead of feeling you have to constantly kind of outdo yourself um so on and so forth so uh so basically trying to like increase confidence in the a students so that they don't feel like they have to constantly kill themselves in order to continue getting A's and then we see if we can decrease anxiety while maintaining that a grade status or whatever so you would do a bunch of experiments in both of those different uh groups of people and then if you can influence their GPA and slash or their depression or anxiety score you'd have to in that scientific study explain with confidence so that would be like the discussion section and in that discussion section of a um research paper or an experimental paper I'll talk about this later in lecture um you want to be able to apply that research to serve Humanity so basically you look at those studies and be like all right we need a little bit of a balance like some anxiety is useful without people stop thriving but too much anxiety is basically not worth it is not fair that you have to be in constant stress in order to maintain A's maybe the A's are not worth it at that point um one of the things we talked about last lecture was just introducing you or reintroducing you hopefully to the scientific method and the basic steps associated with the scientific method one of the most important is the constructing of a hypothesis if a if research never chooses a hypothesis to pursue you will never be able to find evidence to support that hypothesis um one way to look at the scientific method is that it's basically how humans pursue truth in general so anytime you are in any situation you already have a hypothesis about what's going to happen now if you don't experience your brain like a little experiment you assume that hypothesis is the truth so you opened up your Psych first video and you had a general impression of whether you're going to hate it or whether you're going to like it if you decided you were going to hate it you would find evidence to support that as being true um decided you were going to like it same sort of thing um I recommend you challenge both of those um or you know something about your life so basically I just want you to interact with your own brain's ability to form hypotheses and instead of seeing those as inherent truths I want you to see it instead as just that a hypothesis and choose a contradictory one and see if basically your own thoughts become this self-fulfilling prophecy so um your assignment for this week or this chapter is to use hypothesis testing to change your own mind just like in chapter one I gave you an assignment to practice active listening and I said whatever you got to tell yourself to get yourself to do this assignment do it same thing for this week this is an assignment that I think is gener genuinely one of those things that could change your life um if you choose to do it I want you to choose to do it so I want you to choose an opinion that you hold that you believe is true about who you are or true about the world and what I want you to do is decide to use hypothesis testing to change your own mind um for the purposes of Performing this experiment in other words um your hypothesis that you are searching for evidence and supportive is that the opposite of your original hypothesis is true I know it's confusing language hang on so so far let's say you think you hate sports or you hate ballet so you're going to flip that on its head and say you actually love sports or you actually love ballet um and the experiment might be like teaching yourself to learn one or the other assuming that you do indeed love sports or B so asking other people what they love about sports or B um how did they learn to love sports or B um have them teach you about what it is that you hate about it so if you hate Sports because let's say football they're constantly banging into each other share with somebody like whenever I see that I cringe and I just it like pains me to see it how do you see it in a good way like genuinely like not judging you I genuinely want to see it your way like change my mind kind of a thing um maybe you need to watch it 247 for a few days maybe you need to watch it with somebody who genuinely likes it um maybe you need to want to love it because someone you love loves it etc etc find the evidence that you've been ignoring you might use introspection to truly evaluate your feelings or senses deeply um lots of people have done this with like food too like let's say you assume you hate Dr Pepper you take a sip of Dr pepper and you describe every sensation of Dr Pepper and you see if searching for different types of evidence actually changes your own experience level 9,000 considerations you might ask yourself okay how does this relate to your sense of self thinking about authenticity was it most authentic of you to go with your most natural inclination that you hate what you hate and you love what you love um or as being truly authentic allowing yourself to explore lots of different um perspectives whatever so let's say you're a runner um she's a runner she's a trackstar you know because I'm hip like that I think that's a song so are you a runner because you genuinely like to run or at some point did you choose to like to run like at some point where you like oh Sports people like to run I'm a sports person I like to run and then you slowly became a runner that way um so just like play around with your own mind okay so scientific method we talked about the general steps for performing a particular experiment the scientific method sort of exists within this larger Paradigm um of science again kind of as like a branch off of philosophy philosophy was in Pursuit Of Truth kind of in general and used a lot of what we would call science nowadays too it's just it didn't have the concrete scientific method just yet so um the scientific method the cycle of the science of science as a broad field basically you start off with some sort of question like I want to know this about the world about Humanity about biology about material things whatever whatever whatever and that question leads to hypotheses very importantly hypotheses are particular educated guesses about what should happen in a particular experiment so let's take um the a versus F kids quickly okay my hypothesis is that better self-esteem equals better grades so I'm going to give all of those students a self-esteem therapy you know session that happens over the course of the entire semester all I'm going to do is increase their self-esteem and my hypothesis is if I can increase their self-esteem make them feel better about themselves in general their grades will improve that's a hypothesis about this particular experiment and this particular group of people that's what's going to happen and this group of students so that leads to research and analyses I'm going to do the study I'm going to give them the therapy and see what happens and that generates or refines theories theories are more abstract theories are hypothetical accounts of how and why a phenomenon occurs it describes the phenomenon so you have the theory of self-esteem self-esteem is how you feel about yourself and the better you feel about yourself the more you feel like you're capable of doing things so probably I use that theory to create my hypothesis that in this study um or with these students if I just increase their self-esteem the type A's will continue to achieve A's but they'll feel less anxiety and the F students will um study harder like it's a self-esteem issue no matter where you are on the Spectrum um so now let's say what happens in the study is it works for the type A students increasing their self-esteem means they have less anxiety and they continue to get A's but for the F students increasing their self-esteem actually decreased the amount of effort that they put into their classes because basically I did a gr real good job making them feel real good about themselves I don't need this I'm perfect the way I am and so I'm an F student and I've decided to be okay with the fact that I'm an F student you know what maybe that's all that really matters maybe not everybody needs to get A's on everything maybe we've overvalued this whole education type thing on the other hand um what we might do is refine the theory of self-esteem that in general self-esteem does encourage people to pursue tasks but maybe it's also important to incorporate something like self-efficacy self-efficacy self-esteem is generally how do I feel about myself self-efficacy is a little more nuanced so theories can get more and more nuanced um self-efficacy is my confidence and my ability to complete this particular task so just because you increase someone's self-esteem in general doesn't mean you've increased their self efficacy to perform that particular task so basically if my goal was to increase GPA and students who are failing I would probably need to increase their self-esteem like make them feel better about themselves that's important because we don't want to turn them into anxious little nines um in the name of getting a higher GPA but if I also wanted to increase their GPA I would need to help them with that particular skill like if they're failing math you can't just give them General self-esteem things you have to give them math questions and show them that they can complete those math questions so now they have self-efficacy in a particular context um so that's basically what happens theories can lead to hypothesis but then um hypotheses and the research that you do to see if you your hypothesis works out generates or refines theories okay so for the rest of lecture um I'm going to go through some like kind of the nitty-gritty of the scientific philosophy like how we actually pursue truth well as we go through I want you to try and finesse your own attention like an athlete or a scholar or someone that has a lot of dignity or respect um or deserves dignity and respect from others and wants to give dignity and respect so I recommend that you play around with like your posture like if you start to get bored and you find yourself going like this like all right let's see what happens if I sit up like a scholar or if you've been sitting like this too long and you feel exhausted can I at least lighten up a little bit and just kind of my head in a bit of curiosity see work with your unconscious see what happens if you start to find yourself getting bored choose a particular question you have about mental health or happiness or treatment of mental health disorders or something kind of irrelevant psychology whatever it might be like choose a question that you might genuinely want to answer with science and keep that in the back of your mind as an application of the abstract Concepts we're talking about ask yourself how would or could you use the scientific method to start to answer those questions you have with research studies and hypotheses and again you might start discussing this with your groups and the group chat especially if you're already starting to think about like mental health disorders the group project is to question the medical model of mental health okay so we have the scientific method steps of the scientific method I'm going to throw some um what do you call glossery terms at you first we have variables variables are very broadly the what are we studying the um characteristics that are manipulated or measured in research so we were talking about the variable of self-esteem and the variable of self-efficacy and the variable of um achievement before the variable of self-esteem self-efficacy which is a type of self-esteem and we have um achieve intellectual achievement in the form of GPA or test scores or something like that okay so it's very broadly what is it like tell me what self-esteem is how you generally feel about yourself operational definition is how are we going to measure that because the whole point of science is to not just talk about things theoretically but talk about things in an objective way so a description of the exact methods that will be used to measure the VAR variable very common measures in Psychology include self-reports behavioral measures so watching how people behave and physiological measures this might include something like EEG data or fmri data for Neuroscience studies or um maybe heart rate or something like that okay um so the first thing I want you to wonder about is whether you think it's really possible to measure Something like Happiness especially in a quantitative way quantitative means numbers qualitative means like descriptions of something so your qualitative description of your happiness level can be anything from like a poem trying to describe the joy you feel when you sip some coffee like stars have suddenly entered the constellations of of my thoughts you know something like that um or just a a description of your life and the plot of your life and how it's a happy life um qualitative is not seen as nearly as scientifically rigorous as numbers because it's really hard to argue with numbers especially if you don't know how to do statistics a lot of Science and scientific discourse is like I know this and I double dog dare you to argue with me and you better be able to say something super smart if if you think you can argue with me high school never ends um but there's also of course a lot of theoretical riger to the Reliance on numbers because it's also really easy like if you were talking to Freud and you said yeah I'm totally happy with everything going on in my life he'd be like I highly doubt that and start asking you tons of questions trying to get up the distress that the battle between the it and the super ego is going through and honestly I think Freud would probably be on to something but it kind of sucks to have somebody else tell you that you're not happy when you are telling them that you are happy same thing with I feel sad no you don't those are crocodile tears that kind of sucks so the intention of things like quantitative measures is to make it more real and more concrete but that doesn't mean that we've succeeded at it and it doesn't mean that we shouldn't question it so this is just one example of a short depression scale and I want us to think about how hard it is to say that the results of this scale tell us anything like real or concrete so for example I was bothered by things that don't usually bother me you're supposed to answer how often you felt this in the past week so what does it mean to be bothered by things um let's say uh somebody is bothered by something and like me thinking about recording this video it crossed my mind and I immediately felt dread right so someone might stop start at dread and stop at dread that's basically how I felt about doing this or on the other hand being having the thought that I have to record these videos and I don't want to do it might lead to something like worry like oh my gosh they're going to think I'm weird or oh my gosh they're going to think I'm boring or oh my gosh I'm going to say something stupid or like that feels very different than the person who starts and stops at dread um okay and then let's think about um something like I felt hopeful about the future so and and let's really try and give respect to every human being a lot of helpers in the world people who just want to fix the world and cure the world and whatever will go right into caretaking mode and people who are really offut by the mental health model hate that because it feels disrespectful and sometimes that's purely cruel like somebody showing care to you is not infantilizing you that's very different however um let's say you're talking to a 75-year-old um famed psychologist or highly respected psychologist ol ologist and they look you in the eye and are like I don't feel hopeful about the future I have thought about this long and hard I have talked to many people I have practiced unconditional positive regard and I genuinely think it's important for us to be willing to consider the possibility that the human experiment has been a bit of a failure and um and if we just keep relying on Hope and optimism that we will keep ignoring the very real possibility that um the systems as they exist now are totally futile if I had hope that my book is going to become the New York Times bestseller and and that's going to solve everybody's problems that would be me co-signing the belief that the way things are now are good enough and if I just succeed as an individual um everything is fine whereas I know even if my book becomes a New York Times bestseller there will still be people dying in the streets because of the limitations of a not totally unified you know human species you that's not what this question is asking you know um hang on one sec so I had to pause my very good point that I was making which I will get back to in a moment because someone knocked on my door and um I said that I wanted to make these lectures this semester in like a podcast style sort of a thing um because I think that's the best way to teach is in a very real way um so let me just pause and um mention that that's often the way that I feel about the world that um in order to be a very serious person you have to and in order to really confront the darkness facing humanity and the struggles facing Humanity you have to be willing to consider the possibility that things like peace on Earth is never going to happen that perhaps happiness is fleeting at best and it's really important to to respect people who are willing to express their pain as not being a disease or a disorder within them but instead indicative of real struggles that are hard to confront um that genuinely is kind of how I feel about the world in a lot of ways um and so as I was describing that which is very valid and very philosophically important for a lot of different reasons I got a knock on the door and um somebody sent me flowers I don't know who sent me flowers but um it was such a nice little surprise um and it reminded me um of something I forgot to mention from a previous lecture um so maybe I'll insert this into that video instead um but so what I forgot to mention is uh the difference between Freud's unconscious Theory and Young's unconscious Theory so Freud's unconscious Theory suggests that we all exist um kind of in our own separate Bubbles and my unconscious is entirely my own and separate and the best way to interpret um or get to know your own unconscious is through dreams like your dreams will be so eerily similar to your real life but in a very metaphorical way that it's like your conscious your mind giving you the perfect movie to analyze and understand what's really going on in the deep dark pits of your despair or in your deep dark pits of your shame or just things you don't want to think about um like your hopes exist in your unconscious as well things that you don't dare to hope for very few people dare to hope for something like World Peace because we've decided to kind of and vandalize it um then Yan uh unconscious theory is the collective unconscious which suggests that um we all share an unconscious in a lot of ways so all of us hope for world peace all of us fear that The Human Experience is just complete darkness and kind of this like failed experiment in a lot of ways all of us fear that love is a lie and all of us are afraid to admit how much we need love um and so young suggests that weird coincidences that happen or weird timing is really important and you're supposed to analyze that one of the classic experiments or one of the classic examples of Young's Collective unconscious comes from this story of him and a client so he was in a therapy session with a client and this client was a very analytical person the type of person that would watch this lecture and be like finally we're getting to the real stuff science show me the numbers um and she was like very obsessed with being very analytical so everything young gave her in terms of analyzing her dreams so on and so forth she would like obsess over like a film critic would obsess over correctly analyzing that piece of art and so she he saw how obsessed she was with that and wanted to break her out of that mold and get her in touch with her own like human experiences again like the magic that can happen on this planet if you decide to observe the magic and so when they were in this session I kind of Imagine young standing up she's giving him she's telling him about her dream that she had and um she describes that in the dream she was wearing this like Beetle pin type of a thing and he's thinking in the back of his mind like come on world show me some flipp and magic show let me show this person that her dreams are not just her own that we all share this world and that um it can be quite magical and so he opens the windows and on the window was a scarab beetle which a scarab beetle was not like uh native to that area so it was really weird and just at the moment that he opens the window the scarab beetle lands on the window sill and so young this how I imagine it points to the scarab beetle and like and is like there's your Beetle it's it was kind of like his attempt to invite her back into the real world and experience the real world again instead of being so analytical and needing to do everything like so right um to like an obsessive compulsive degree so a lot of the themes of this class is to always keep a balancing act to pursue objective truths there's a lot of value to be able to do that as well as um valuing the humanity of the art of science when it comes to optimism versus pessimism I really think it's important important that everybody confront the very real possibility that there's a lot of issues with the planet and there's perhaps nothing more important than figuring out how to overcome those problems and that kind of contemplation can absolutely lead you to um having a lot of pessimism about the world a lot of like hopelessness about the world even if you still feel hopeful about your own personal life you know um and it was just interesting that as I was just describing the most pessimistic part of the lecture just so happened to get delivered some flowers thought I would share that with you and um give you a little more insight into uh two unconscious theories okay back to the science so as I was saying um that's not real you could talk to somebody who has philosophically thought about how appropriate and how responsible it is to have a generalized sense of Hope in the world versus how important and responsible it is to be honest about just how dire circumstances might be and how appropriate is how appropriate it might be to have hope for your own life and kind of get high off of that versus how appropriate it is to kind of keep a bluebird in your heart and remember how many people are suffering tremendously on this planet but you can't answer that question on a multiple choice exam so somebody might be answering this question question and be like I never feel hopeful um and they might be talking about their philosophical understanding of the planet um and then you might have somebody saying they never feel hopeful and what they mean is like they don't know if they're going to graduate college and it really is about like their own life and they haven't thought about it more than that um something like that uh someone who feels fearful and they are in a Fe full situation feeling that fear is certainly not a diagnosis of depression but an important response that is keeping them alive other people who feel fearful and there really is no reason to might be dealing with the trauma response that is manifesting as depression you know if you've been uh bullied before in the past and so you're afraid to talk to people now even though those people are not going to bully you that fear isn't serving you you um but you still feel it that might be a little bit closer to depression so basically what I want to get you guys to understand is a lot of different people are going to respond similarly um to these questions and the idea that you can come to one categorical diagnosis or confusion about or or conclusion about so many different types of people um might be kind of inappropriate or in some ways so so this is um psychology's attempts to take the variable of depression depression is human despair depression is um you know depression might be longing depression might be hurt it might be misery it's things that artists have spent their entire lives trying to describe in an effort to help people feel less alone and the hope hope that we can find some sort of diagnostic criteria to help those people is one of the things that Mak psychology important and special the idea that you can water a variable like that down to an operational definition um that hope might be ill faded but again important it's just something I want you to think about so basically variable is the what operational definition is specific observable events or conditions in a way that any other researcher would be able to independently independently measure or test for them so the idea with operational definitions is that it's clear concise and objective and that another researcher could take that same operational definition and use it again so if you're studying depression if you use that measure of depression another researcher could also use that measure of depression um and hopefully if they're trying to replicate your study get the same results we'll talk about replication a little bit later so let's look at some examples for operational definitions speed and accuracy so how would you measure speed of a car what metric would you use maybe like miles per hour and um the method of how you would acquire miles per hour would be either the speedometer on the car um or like if you were to time it separately from the car accur ACC y on a math test you'd have to have a math test with correct and incorrect answers and how many correct did they get so sometimes it's really easy what about something like kindness how would you operationally defined define kindness has anyone ever tried to be kind to another person and go absolutely wrong I was um riding a Subway in New York City and tried to give up my seat to an elderly man and it did not go well at all he did not want me to do that and he said my skirt was too short so that was a bad one I don't think that he found my gesture to be kind so does that mean I'm an unkind person um H would you define it basically by intention or by outcome what about somebody who just really likes drawing things like genuine that's their favorite thing to do in the world and now their apartment is full of drawings and so they start handing them out um their intention was not actually to be kind now they just want to free up some space in their apartment but if it makes people's day does that mean that person's kind um would you measure the number of times somebody does a kind gesture or the bigness of the gesture like handing a dollar out every day versus SA giv up all your money to give a big portion of your money to somebody else kind um here's another thing you can think about when it comes to kindness like uh would you um let's say I asked you to fill out this questionnaire and it's going to give me an assessment of how kind of a person you are so we're not talking about kind behaviors anymore but how kind you are personality wise and you give a number and then let's say I give the same survey out to five of your friends and that comes up with a number would you be more willing to trust your friend's Judgment of you or your judgment of you think about it for a second okay if you said you'd be more likely to trust your friend's Judgment of you is that because you think they are nicer to you than you are to yourself or because basically you value something like humility and if that you're imagine like okay what if they say I'm not as kind as I think I am a kind person would um be humble and take that feedback and try and be even Kinder but then that makes you even more kind and if your friends didn't rate you as kind then wouldn't they just be wrong um that's a big question in Psychology when you trust that individual person versus when you trust um other people in their lives or when you trust an expert opinion uh would you trust somebody who says I'm not a narcissist or would you trust their therapist who says they are a narcissist I want you to think about that for a second because we're going to come back to it a little while right now decide for yourself like in general do I trust my opinions of myself or other people's opinions of Me versus do I trust my opinion of myself or an expert's opinion of myself and how far are you willing to go on that we'll come back to it think about it and then the next one is genius um Kanye has been one of my favorite people to interpret throughout my career I understand that it's a giant roller coaster with Kanye and like I can't always keep up with it and it's hard to figure out where he is right now but what I can promise you about Kanye is a should not have taken the microphone from our dear mother Taylor Swift um but that is sad um there was a time when the you know rhetoric or me around mental health was like mental health is um obviously like really important but um I think the rhetoric was going so hard on mental health is in and mental illness is so harmful so hurtful that if somebody has a mental illness you it's pure compassion it's pure poor them it's pure um dysfunction and disregulation and things like that and that was meant to be really compassionate and kind and give people extra help if they have mental health struggles but then Kanye um I think was diagnosed with bipolar at the time and decided to describe it as a superpower and at the time everybody hated this like this was one of the worst things you could possibly say it's like saying that trauma is a good thing even though lots of people do describe their trauma and say that um it made them stronger but something about seeing a celebrity say it everybody had this immense allergic reaction to it but nowadays you see people all the time saying that things that I get diagnosed for are sometimes some of the best parts about me you know um if somebody's diagnosed with autism but then um and one of their symptoms is uh having a very big special interest like I'm really into world pece I bring it up in almost every conversation um so is that something wrong with me or is that a aspect of my personality that would exist no matter what I haven't been diagnosed with autism but um you know for example if I had been and that was my special interest is the idea that when I bring it up that is purely a symptom and when I bring it up too much it's best to not encourage it you know not shame people for anything of course but you know basically to see it as a symptom or is that still part of that who that person is and of course an important Balancing Act is great but at this time nobody was practicing that Balancing Act it was really kind of different for somebody to be like I appreciate that I can experience the entire spectrum of human emotion whereas most people stay right in the middle um so that's the one Kanye cont I'm willing to bring up today um but so Kanye um argued argues a lot that he should be allowed to be seen as a creative genius that I think what he's basically asking us to observe about him is that he has turned his life into an art installation and when you have a reaction to Kanye you're supposed to understand him and his life as being a work of art and your reaction to him as being about you if that's true about the way that he has run his life then that's incredibly generous of course the other people in his life have to ask themselves if that's something that they are genuinely willing to do is he being coercive blah BL blah blah um so when you think about words like genius do you want to only use the objective operational definition of something like an IQ test or are you willing to believe what Einstein believed which is that everybody is a genius but if you um judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life beleving that it is stupid if you assume genius first You observe the way that person's genius play out if you are constantly trying to judge people whether or not they are smart enough then you will constantly find ways to tear them down because frankly that's easier we like the Fall From Grace um believe what you will but the line told me I was the aomination of Obama's nation is gosh darn genius that's a Connie song okay um um so and importantly what I need to mention again is critiquing other people is totally valid perhaps turning your life into a work of art and saying things that are derogatory to groups of people is not appropriate sometimes we assume that what people are saying is derogatory to entire entire groups of people and we don't actually hear what they are truly saying um for instance JK rling has um ruffled a lot of feathers and I haven't read everything that JK rling has said about transgender individuals for example but at least some of the quotes that I've read from her are saying I am in support of the transgender Mo movement I just also believe that there is a difference in general between people who are born biologically female and people who are born biologically male um but people if you already are told that JK rling is um transphobic then you're just going to be certain everything she says is evidence that she's transphobic and I don't know maybe she I haven't read everything but I have read a couple quotes and I'm like I think this is a reasonable Balancing Act between there are biological differences between different organisms and I'm still in support of people choosing for themselves how they want to present themselves so something to keep in mind okay so types of an experiment so we talked about variables in general variables again basic constructs basic ideas of things so going back to the construct of Genius the variable of Genius most of the time we're talking about an operational measure of IQ which is very different than observing artistic genius so we also have different types of variables that are only relevant to a particular type of study experimental designs we're going to talk about different study designs in a moment experiments are just one type of scientific studies I'm just trying to give you all the kind of vocabulary words so in an experiment we have independent variabl versus dependent variables independent variables here's what you need to remember independent variables are what makes experiments experiments because independent variables are manipulated by the experimenter if something according to basic scientific philosophy if something has not been manipulated by the experimenter we cannot determine causality um because the philosophy of science suggests that you manipulate the IV or the independent variable to cause a change in another variable the dependent variable so the dependent variable is supposed to change as a result of the independent variable it depends on the independent variable basic scientific philosophy suggests that you can't determine causality if you don't manipulate an independent variable now this doesn't mean that this is always the way interpretation goes down for instance let's look at gender um let's pretend that we have souls or whatever like you have a quintessential self like the idea that transgender individuals um uh like their sense of self is attached to one gender kind of um depiction but their body doesn't match up with that how they're let's I like the word soul is that okay with you great um how their soul how their sense of self feels so in order to determine whether your soul or sense of self like does is attached to a particular gender and that's separate from your biology what we'd have to theoretically do is take take the but only in a case study um format so I'll get back to that but keep that in mind that if we wanted to know if there's a difference in men versus women in terms of aggression um looking at gender instead of sex in order to determine causality technically what we'd have to do is manipulate gender or sex in order to determine if gender or sex causes differences and aggression since we can't do that technically any differences we observe in men versus women we can't say that the sex of male or the sex of female causes aggression differences the best we can say is a male um maleness is associated with more aggression and femaleness is associated with more gossiping or something like that um so really you can only determine causality if you manipulate something say it out loud independent variable we manipulate to determine causality cause and effect all right so let's take a look at these independent versus dependent variables so um basic idea here is a characteristic can have different values so what variables might help the plant grow oh this is so funny because I just got a a plant see this is Young's Collective unconscious coincidences mean something or are meant to happen that way and speak to I don't know uh deeper meanings or whatever the fact that we all exist in this Collective shared unconscious okay anyways what causes the plant to grow did you say amount of water and sunlight you're absolutely right um but another thing oh sorry uh another thing that we want to actually yeah another thing that we want to keep in mind is like how do we measure growth so with the plant it's a little bit easier to get at an operational or objective definition which is basically the amount that the plant blooms or how tall the plant grows like it's a little bit easier to get at some operational objective measure when it comes to baby well do we mean physical growth because in that case sure quality of nutrition or quality of Health Care is going to be re relevant to physical growth but you also are going to have a hard time comparing different babies so a baby that's born to two professional basketball players ERS who are both 6' five and above that baby might have a very different growth from infancy even to like 10 to 12 years old versus the baby born to 5 foot2 parents you know and then when it comes to weight we don't really want the heaviest baby we want the healthiest baby that would be ideal growth so you can overfeed a baby and then if all you're doing is well which baby is heaviest then one baby's going to look he heaviest and if you define that as growth and any type of growth as good you're going to get you're going to stray away from what it means to be healthy which is really probably the purpose of that study versus a plant I don't know that a plant can ever grow too much I can grow too much like we as humans don't like it but I don't know that that means that that plant is unhealthy so it gets a little bit trickier and then if you didn't just mean physical growth for the baby but you meant like emotional growth then certainly things like quality of caregiver support is going to matter um being able to balance responding to a crying baby quickly but not so quickly that the baby doesn't learn to regulate on its own or on their own um that being able to balance being responsive but not so responsive that you don't allow the individual to develop autonomy that's going to determine quality caregiver support but what is the perfect amount to respond to a crying baby and also is every baby really the same or do some babies need more responsive parenting and how do you decide if that parent has been appropriately responsive this is how difficult it is to study Humanity especially if you look into research on human development they will just say things like we measured how responsive the parents were to crying um but that's assuming that every baby has the same needs which just isn't true you know as you look at kids as they get older some kids really need a parent to be like a good coach to them and that's what they respond best to and then other kids really need a parent to be really soothing because they're already very hard on themselves um so yeah science has a tendency to kind of remove individual proclivities out of its understanding of things okay so let's just look at the plant um so the question is what variables help the plant grow what would be the independent variable in a study if we wanted to see what causes growth very good the independent variable would be amount of water and amount of sunlight and then what would the dependent variable be very good it would be how tall it grows or how much it blooms something like that and then for the baby let's say we're talking about emotional and cognitive growth what would the I independent variables be all of these very good because to have good cognitive and emotional growth you also need adequate nutrition and health care and then the dependent variable would be harder to operationally measure but it'd be something like appropriate emotional regulation and uh intelligence success in school and also healthy physical development okay so reminder uh we have variables versus operational definitions variable is what is being measured operational definition is how are we defining what is being measured we want as clear and concise as possible that's really hard to do with humans and perhaps by trying to turn humans into numbers we sort of dehumanize them a little bit that's kind of the struggle of science it doesn't mean we shouldn't pursue science of course we should pursue science but then we should use our wisdom and keep in mind the limitations of science when it comes to humanity um so then within an experimental design remember that experimental designs we will come back to it we have two different types of variables we have something that's supposed to influence that's the independent variable and then something that's supposed to be influenced by and then that's the dependent variable so I'm going to manipulate the amount that I water my brand new plant and um then I'm going to measure how much it blooms the water because I'm manipulating it week one I'm G to water it as much as it tells me to um and then week two I'm going to see if maybe they lied to me and I can get away with just watering it once a week or something like that I didn't look at the instructions yet um so because I'm manipulating it from time one to time to and then I'm seeing how well it grows the dependent variable is how much it grows how much it blooms or something like that okay so that's your basic terminology variables operational definitions and then within experiments we have independent variable versus dependent variable now we're going to talk about types of research designs so as I said science has a goal of describing and then um uh controlling oh sorry describing predicting controlling and then explaining with confidence and then applying the very first step is just describing so that's descriptive research the goal here is to describe and sort of predict behavior and mental processes and we accomplish this through naturalistic observation case study surveys and correlational studies so the first we're going to talk about is naturalistic observation so observations of behavior in the environment in which it typically occurs the big dilemma here is whether you should participate or just observe so let's think about if you wanted to learn about a cult you wanted to describe what it means to join a cult how hard it is to uh remove yourself from the cult so on and so forth um would you participate so would you actually join the cult and not tell them what you're doing or would you just observe like go let's say they live in a little Community they know that you're a researcher and you sit there and like take notes so thinking about the pros and cons of both um to participate you might actually find your mind influenced by the cult for example the Agy land cult I drank the Kool-Aid I get it um I was really into it for a minute and then I went to a football game and I couldn't stand up anymore because it was at 12:00 in the afternoon and I'm from New York I've never dealt with this heat and someone gave me a dirty look and then that was the for me just kidding um agie agies generally a pretty nice but um anyways so by participating you might actually feel yourself being kind of into it like I sort of assumed that this place is full of community and I assumed that Community um was true in the classroom as well um but then because I could also remove myself like I wasn't fully drinking the Kool-Aid I could also observe like okay but there's a lot of clicks here too and frankly it's not the the same thing in the classroom as it is um on the football field I kind of think these people just like football um and I'm not sure that actually amounts to like an auland Community I have definitely tried to tell students like listen this is my life's work um I genuinely asking you as a fellow human to give it your like serious attention and people just don't show up the class I can see how long you spend on the material so on and so forth so then I have to be like okay well what's the culture of being a college student perhaps this time in one's life it's really important to spend time with uh friends like your Social Development is just as important as your intellectual development and perhaps taking four classes where if you fail you might destroy your life forever as way too much pressure something like that um so by participating but still remaining a little bit separate you can feel how it influences you but still remain a little bit objective if you just observe you know you don't uh have the same fear of never being able to escape the cult but perhaps you don't actually experience for yourself what it's like to Simply believe what it's like to watch somebody on a Podium and believe everything they say is fact even though it really rests on things like faith and belief systems and things like that which can be both a beautiful experience and one of the scariest things ever um so if you just observe you'd have to have like the secondhand account also maybe the people would change their behaviors because they know that you're observing so maybe you don't really see what it's really like so um strengths of naturalistic observations in general is that it occurs in the real world I can't tell you how true it is that observing something in a lab is so different than um assuming it works like that in the real world so um trying to study impulsivity in the lab for example so these are studies that are interested in things like ADHD um ADHD means yeah you can't pay attention and you're a bit hyperactive but it also is associated with like impulsive behaviors like I can't stop myself from behaving when I have a thought that I should do something I'm going to do it immediately and importantly there's a lot of good things about that like if somebody is really inhibited then they might never take the risk and be brave and just act and if they think about it too much they'll never do anything or they miss the moment so impulsivity is not just a bad thing but if you're studying impulsivity in the context of ADHD you're going to assume that impulsive behaviors are bad which is one of the big limitations of ADHD studies that's my other recommendation for reading research anytime they're talking about a symptom and they're saying this symptom is a bad thing really ask yourself if I give unconditional positive regard to that that person if I assume that I can respect them how is that supposed symptom also perhaps a good thing um how does that create their sense of self like we talked about with somebody who might have something similar to the cognitive perspectives of depression are they also potentially a philosopher um perhaps they think they're depressed because they don't realize that a lot of their thoughts could be very sophisticated philosop um philosophical musings and in fact if they did realize that some of their thoughts are really sophisticated philosophical musings maybe they'd feel inspired to do something with them instead of feeling like there's something broken about them now none of that uh detracts from the fact that depression is incredibly crippling and if you are feeling yourself falling down into that rabbit hole um you know I don't know if that respect is going to pull you out of it nearly as much as somebody wanting to take care of you wanting to show you that you know um you don't need to do it all on your own things like that so um back to impulsivity uh If You observe impulsivity in the lab you're going to look at a lot of tasks like have you ever been assessed for ADHD perhaps you've experienced something like this um they'll there'll be a bunch of letters on the screen and if the letter is green then you might hit the space bar but if it's and you're supposed to go as fast as you can but if it's red you're supposed to in inhibit your impulse to hit the space bar and not hit the space bar when the letter is red or something like that um stop go type challenges so um the idea is that Laboratory test if somebody struggles to not hit the space bar when the letter is red so you're supposed to hit the space bar the Letter's green don't hit it if it's red if you can't inhibit yourself from hitting the space bar if the letter is readed then you might have behavioral impulsivity kind of a thing and so the idea is that Laboratory test is supposed to be associated with something like ADHD that the person might want to get diagnosed for so um the idea of that Laboratory test is going to be important to real world experiences the person who can't inhibit hitting the space bar is also the person that can't decide to stop playing video games when it's time to study and sometimes that's true other times the two have nothing to do with one another that really what's happening with the video games is like they just don't like school has nothing to do with impulsivity or um uh what's happening with the video games is they get hyperfixated so on and so forth um or the person could re if you're just looking at a laboratory study you're not looking at people who are already diagnosed with ADHD someone might look like somebody who's diagnosed with ADHD and be perfectly functional and perhaps that means that that task is not related to ADHD at all so the wonderful strength of naturalistic observation is you're watching in the real world what happens you're not relying on these operational definitions that might not be relevant to real world experiences um limitations include that it's not very objective you're just watching One cult one time and whether you participate or just observe your own subjective experiences are going to influence the way you describe what all is going on in the real world okay case studies are intensive examinations of a specific person or situation so it's just one um statistics is a really big part of research um design so the idea is even if something looks like an experiment if it's one person or one situation it's way safer to just call it a case study because basically you can't do the statistics on that one person situation that you could do on a large group of people so if it's one it's a case study um the classic case study example is Phineas Gage Phineas Gage was working on the railroad and a giant Rod went through his skull in frontal lobe and somehow he survived um he was still very cognitively cogent and awake and aware but he had a huge change in his personality like night and day change in his personality and so because we didn't have really sophisticated technology yet this was our first attempt to understand what the frontal lobe does and based on this one set of data because we're not going to do it again we're not going to shove you know rods through people's head and see what happens to their frontal lobe we got this one so what we observed in Phineas Gage is oh this person went from like an optimistic Family Man very polite person to a grumpy old individual who can't contain his anger and wants nothing to do with his wife and kids kind of a deal I'm EXA but you know to that extent it felt like night and day and so the uh basic summary was that the frontal lobe is responsible for personality and if you mess with the frontal lobe you mess with personality but and the strength is that it's very detailed and it's a rare private phenomenon we're not going to be able to do do that again so it is important to interpret what we saw in that one instance but we have this huge limitation which that which is that it might not be representative maybe it's just Phineas gauges frontal L maybe it turns out that the brain is not as like one person's brain is really not as similar in terms of the basic landscape as another Persons Of course future studies helps us realize that no the frontal LOE does seem to be in respon in general responsible for certain functions or aspects of self or what have you across all humans but at the time of Phineas gauge we really had this one data set and so it's hard to say that it's representative of everyone also because it's a rare or private phenomenon um there might be all sorts of other factors that we don't know how to account for like perhaps anybody who has a steel rod go through any part of their body but especially any part of their brain is going to be a little bummed after it's going to feel uh like their personality and sense of self and Trust in the world is altered like maybe it has nothing to do with the frontal lob damage specifically and everything to do with trauma um going back to the impact of gender for example um there was a wonderful book written I cannot remember the name for the life of me um but essentially what happened is an infant was born a male and their genitalia was botched during the delivery process and so the doctor's recommendation was to perform a surgery that turned that individual that should have been a biological male into a female and raised them as a female and um that case was followed by a scientist for many years and the scientist sort of suggested that um it matters how you raise the person not the genitalia but that person ended up questioning their gender and sexual and um uh and sex and ended up like that was so important to them they became quite obsessed with it and figured out what happened to them which kind of in ues that no there is an inherent truth about what gender or sex you're meant to be but again the question of whether or not that Soul or that um that self that individual person is meant to be male or meant to be female or if the fact that they were born male is the more important thing is still kind of the question so always ripe with lots of um different interpretations all right now we have surveys surveys are getting closer to the experimental designs a lot of times survey studies are made with the intention of creating questionnaires or interviews that will be later used in experimental designs but the first couple times a survey or questionnaire interview is used it's just to collect data and um one of the most important parts of survey designs is that you're supposed to give that questionnaire or interview to many people in order to acquire lots of data um hopefully in a pretty fast and inexpensive way because you're literally just giving a survey one of the biggest or best examples of this is like the census um it's supposed to be a summary of pretty much all people in a country um so the strength lots of data hopefully fast and inexpensive there's a lot of limitations for example the types of questions asked so the example we're going to talk about uh for right now is the Kinsey scale so so the keny scale was devised as a way to measure sexuality so the hypothesis the theory that Kinsey was developing is that sexuality So Gay versus straight is not actually a binary at all and instead it's a spectrum and everybody exists somewhere on that spectrum and it's just hash society that makes us believe that you're either gay or straight and you're only attracted to people of the same gender or the opposite gender of course by exists somewhere in between I guess you could say what he was arguing is that we're all a little bit by um but really like you exist somewhere on this spectrum so the first thing I want to point out about this idea is before the Kinsey scale um I mean a there was a lot of bias against the lgbtq community there still is but a lot back then so you probably wouldn't ask the question about sexuality very much at all but if you were if you were interested in researching that topic you would simply ask are you gay or are you straight perhaps are you by um and that would be that because Kinsey's hypothesis is that we exist on the Spectrum he asked different types of questions he asked things like okay who are you more willing to share your most vulnerable um emotional intim emotionally intimate Thoughts with people of the same gender or people of the opposite gender um or are you willing to share them with both so that kind of changed the perception of what counts as being attracted to someone of the same gender and opposite gender um and the idea is that we have so much bias against the lgbtq community that if you just allow yourself to feel a pull towards one person or another and you weren't so conditioned to see that as being a good thing or a bad thing you'd find yourself pulled in way more directions than you sort of realize um and so the question that I want to pose to you all is think back to a couple slides ago when I was we talked about kindness I think I was like okay would you be more likely to um believe your own assessment of your own kindness or some or your friend's assessment of your own kindness I think a lot of you probably went with friends based on past experiences okay now think about the difference between your own perception of your own kindness and an expert's perception of kindness which would you be more likely to believe okay now imag however you define your current self if this expert he spent his entire career studying sexuality came up with the scale gave you the scale you believe you're gay um purely gay only interested in people of the same sex and the scale says like you're actually like pretty close to being in between you know you're really close to the middle of the spectrum and um I would implore you to wonder if perhaps sometimes you are attracted to people of the opposite sex would you be willing to listen to that expert opinion of that um of your sexuality and from my experience teaching classes people are less likely to be willing to um entertain the input of other people when it comes to their sexuality which Freud would say is because you're all shamed you're all ashamed of sex it's what Society does to us you have not thought about this at all and you're just going with a of Shame um and Kinsey would probably agree and then lots of other lots of you would argue that basically that's um something that nobody else can feel for you um it's a decision that I make or it's completely outside of my own hands but what I've found is that throughout the years I think I've been teaching intro to psych since like 2017 um it's 2024 now every year people get a little bit more willing to entertain the thought like yeah maybe I haven't thought about it so much you know maybe I haven't allowed myself to really wonder interestingly what Freud would say is that perhaps um the people who are truly the most confident in their own sexual identity would allow themselves to wonder the degree to which they feel really secure and certain about their sexual identity such that they are willing to entertain the possibility that they could be could also be gay or straight or by or whatever um but that doesn't mean that that becomes your final answer instead your ability to open the just don't think about a box walk around in it and then come back to a sense of certainty or a sense of open-mindedness that's a way more healthy person but then the people who are like f you Freud you got to respect that because like you're basically telling people that like they have to be willing to explore but they still might come back to that certainty maybe I'm just certain um and perhaps there's a big difference between people who like already feel like they've found their forever partner um and they're either of the same gender that or an opposite gender because it feels like I'm choosing that person I'm not going to let get let anyone get in the way of love which is the most important thing in my life versus people who haven't found that person they might be more willing to like question so on and so forth um a really big limitation of survey data is response bias or desirability bias so basically or specif a big limitation of descriptive research is response bias for example desirability bias so you're going to answer how you think you're supposed to answer either because of what Society expects from you or what you've been trained so very few people are actually willing to analyze their own thoughts and in fact people who are willing to analyze their own thoughts will often get labeled as kind of like evil because they're willing to talk about things that most people won't talk about there's also sampling errors so sampling tends to be biased and convenience-based for instance I often say that psychology can say all at once that it is the study of humanity it's mostly the study of undergraduate um students taking a psychology class because you all have to perform or participate in these studies to get that research credit or write the alternative paper and that's true in every other undergraduate institution almost every paper has some sampling of undergraduate students that's overstating a little bit um and if you try to make too many predictions based on surveys that can be kind of theoretically um inappropriate so if let's say um let's say I did a survey on using Kinsey scale and then also uh asked about their background so I asked like are your parents straight or lgbtq whatever and I found that lgbtq um parents were more likely to be associated with like uh people being closer to being fully straight on the Kinsey scale that would be a correlation so I could still if I interact with somebody um who has parents who are part of the lgbtq community maybe I'd keep that in mind and kind of start to assume that they're a little bit CL I don't this is not actually true um there's no data I'm just talking about how predictions might not be theoretically appropriate um my assumption that they might be closer to being fully straight might not be theoretically appropriate especially if I assume that it's because of their parents because that would be causality and what I just described is really correlational which I'll get back to in a second but first let's just uh exercise our mental muscles remind ourselves of an earlier part of the lecture so 1920 John wson attempted to demonstrate that he could create a phobia of rats and 9-month-old Albert he did this by ringing Bells every time the um baby held a rat until the baby was conditioned to hate the rat remember conditioning means rewards for good behavior punishments for bad behavior so whenever Albert sees the rat loud banging noise he cries he's conditioned to have a phobia of rats um this would be think about it pause it for a second a case study because it's just one baby it's just baby Albert so we can't analyze a whole bunch of data um okay getting back to our next descriptive research design we have correlations correlational studies only ask this question is one variable related to another and how strong is that relationship do they have anything to do with one another that's all correlations are and we have a couple different types of correlations positive means as one increases the other has a tendency to increase as well so this one is looking at acts of aggression and uh I think watching violent TV Zoom is getting in the way of me seeing um so more acts of aggression is associated with watching more TV right that's all we're observing right here is there's a relationship between one another um and we do this using statistics so we plot it on this line graph and we see if they all hang out around the same line um and these would be pretty heavily related because the slope is so severe and then negative relation is as one increases the other decreases uh so we have illness and optimism scores so as illness increase optimism scores decrease and then we have zero which is no predictive value phases of the moon and crimes funny story anecdotally people who work in in uh psychiatric words often say that people being admitted to psychiatric words the rate of people being admitted to psychiatric words does seem to be related to phases of the moon I don't know if that's ever been empirically studied but anecdotes are funny okay so big strengths of correlations are that you can test relationships between Concepts evaluate theories and suggest new hypotheses you get a lay of the land like what constructs what variables hang out together it's especially useful when you can't manipulate variables like you can't manipulate the phases of the moon and you can't make somebody commit crimes to see if committing crimes causes or is associated with um phases of the moon uh but the big limitation here is say it with me correlation does not equal causation just because every time I land on a planet the planet sets on Fire doesn't mean I set the planet on fire you don't know what's going on that causes that planet to set on fire Okay so let's look at these two examples and how tempting it is to see correlation as being a causal relationship so acts of aggression and watching violent TV yeah watching violent TV it's a natural assumption that knowing that this coalation exists watching TV violent TV causes aggression you're teaching kids to be aggressive but it's just as likely that kids who are naturally aggressive will seek out violent TV and they both like reciprocally influence one another right um so it could be like the opposite and same thing with illness and optimism scores so this one's kind of interesting because it seems in a lot of ways the kindest interpretation is that the sicker you are the less optimistic you're going to be and that makes illness even more dilus to health because it also influences your mental health now let's um flip it for a second and say that people with less who are less optimistic are more likely to get sick more often so some people hearing this are going to get very defensive and I'm not saying that that's true but let's just say maybe that's what's happening um people who uh feel very sick might get very defensive and be like so basically you're saying that if I had just thought positively this wouldn't have happened to me so you're basically blaming me um and that's not very help on the other hand we could also look at it as like well they're just related to one another so I'm not saying it's not it's your fault at all but perhaps um when someone gets the flu if they see the flu as their body telling them that they need to rest so not that they cause themselves to get the flu at all but that it's their body telling them they need to rest and so they indulge in resting they enjoy resting they see this as a need versus somebody who gets the flu and says like oh my gosh I'm going to lose my job and all my friends are going to hate me because I can't hang out with them for a week it basically increases the stress that your body is in and might make the flu last a little bit longer I'm not saying if the flu lasts a really long time for you that you're not optimistic enough or anything like that um but the cool thing about looking at it that way is it might help you feel like you have a little bit more agency about what's going on in your body that might not be true at all but it might be something to play with as you're stuck in bed having the flu anyways um it's interesting when a potential truth isn't going to be received well by the person because in some ways that makes that truth kind of not helpful and maybe don't say it at all and in other ways it's like the question becomes how do we present this truth in a way that that person might be able to digest and make use of use of okay so a couple more examples of how correlation is not causation a few years ago newspaper headlines announced coffee suspected as a cause of heart attacks big news medical studies have found a COR and the truth of that headline is that medical studies had found a correlation between the amount of coffee people drank and their likelihood of having a heart attack so looking at the actual finding what they actually found is that there's a correlation between um drinking coffee and the chances of people having a heart attack based on many different metrics like here's all the biological potential precursors of a heart attack I'm measuring all of these things cholesterol is the first thing that comes to mind and I'm measuring how much coffee you drink amount of coffee you drink and cholesterol CH cholesterol and cortisol and things like that are increasing as well those are risk factors that's what the medical studies actually found what the headlines show is coffee suspected as a cause of heart attacks think about it for a second pause the video what are other reasons that correlation might exist besides coffee being toxic think about the type of people who drink coffee maybe drinking coffee interferes with sleep and sleep is a really important protective mechanism against some of the things that might cause a heart or be associated with a heart attack on the biological side maybe people who drink coffee has more stress have more stress jobs and stress is really the underlying um variable that causes or increases the risk of heart attack and stress is also the thing that makes people drink coffee more so basically there's always like missing variables um maybe uh whatever it is inside that organism that makes them have a higher risk of a heart attack that underlying principle or variable is also the thing that makes them crave coffee more um so many different ways to interpret this now um I want to point out that like the media get a really bad reputation for things like this but I want you to think about how likely it would be for you to read a long article describing all of this in excruciating detail all the possible interpretations of this finding and how many people would genuinely read that versus how many people are going to look at this headline um you can hate on the people who present information or you can say there's a real problem with how people digest their information I've tried really hard to present really complex information um in as much detail as possible giving people the power to interpret things with a lot of nuance and complexity on their own the fact that matter is I can't force them to read it and if I make it short and sweet it's not going to be the entire Truth by any means but they'll read it um okay so basic just you can never definitively assume causation from a correlational relationship here's another example a reverse causation so for example let's say married people are more likely to be happy that seems to suggest that um marriage causes happiness however the alternative interpretation is that happy people are more likely to get married because as my exes have said um if you complain a lot it doesn't make people want to spend a lot of time with you so if you just pretend like you're happy time and everything's Gucci and it's fine if you don't show up on time then yeah for sure they want to keep you around for a little bit longer okay another similar type of relationship is reciprocal causation so what we're really saying here is reverse causation like if you say you're happy or if you're genuinely a happy person then people want to marry you um which is very different than marriage causing the happiness on the other hand we have reciprocal causation which that both continue to influence one another so helping people increases happiness you know who knows what happens first maybe you help somebody and it increases happiness but if you're happy you're more likely to have energy in your tank to be able to help people if you're miserable like you really need other people to help you and so how are you going to help other people interestingly though if it's true that helping people causes happiness H causes happiness if you're miserable even though you're not going to be super inclined to help people if you make yourself anyway that might actually increase your happiness um which is kind of the beauty of reciprocal causation okay so last type of experimental design Sciences bread and butter this is truly genius um the experimental design it's Humanity's best attempt to be like I can tell you why this is happening in a causal way so the big goal of experimental research is to predict explain and control behaviors and mental processes which is huge because like if I can show that I can increase happiness I can slowly take over the world and we do this again by manipulating the independent variable in order to measure its effects on the dependent variable so for the coffee thing if I wanted to show that coffee causes heart attacks I'd have to continue to give people a ton of coffee and see just like super casually if they have a heart attack I'm pretty sure this is ethical I definitely think they would let me do this no on the other hand they definitely wouldn't which means that the cool thing about experimental designs is that they help you determine causality the bad thing is that they have to let you do the experiment um and then when it comes to life and death questions which are the questions we want to answer the most um you have to prove that your study is important enough to uh warrant manipulating a variable that might cause bad things um so again the indep variable the variable the researcher controls or manipulates and that example coffee is what I would manipulate I'd have 50 people drink coffee every day and 50 people not drink coffee at all and the dependent variable would be the variable that the researcher observe and measures for an effect I'd see if those people have heart attacks or be measuring other constructs or variables that are related to um related to heart attacks okay the strength of experimental research is that it causes is um or it determines cause and effect and again this is due to the independent and dependent variables I've had people kind of perform little experiments on themselves for instance I had a student once change his appearance and see if that influenced the way that other people talked to him um I think it helped him develop like different portions of his personality not like which personality is actually better or worse but instead like sometimes it's useful for me to be the academic sometimes it's useful for me to be the Emo or the cool kid or whatever um there's some pretty big limitations of experimental research for instance confounds you will never measure every variable that's relevant to um the question that you want to answer so even if I did manipulate something like coffee um unless I was also measuring the amount of sleep that I was getting and the amount of like social uh experiences I was getting and the amount of exercise that I was getting like there's always more things that could be contributing to whatever it is you're hoping to observe which sometimes means that experimenters have this false sense of certainty like if you think as long as you're doing an experiment you are finding a concrete truth you're going to do the experiment and think it's changed everything and kind of lack the humility necessary to look at some of the limitations to imagine um what VAR you're sort of missing that might be influencing the study for example experiment and subject bias so when you come up with a study you want that study to succeed you're going to set the scene in your favor because right now the way science works is the publish and perish um kind of culture so all of your professors who are tenure track or tenur they have to do a ton of research to keep their job yeah undergraduate institutions exist to teach undergraduates kind of but not really that's not where the money's at the money's at football don't let them tell you any different look up who gets paid the highest amount in Texas A&M you'll see a whole bunch of sports people um and then besides that the research so grant money um is really what keeps undergraduate institutions going so uh in order to keep your job as a researcher you need to be public lishing an absurd amount this is one of the worst things about scientific culture yeah it's absolutely possible that science is going to be one of the things that helps us find the cure for cancer for sure but it's I actually think that that's highly unlikely to happen in like an academic institution because even though academic institutions have a bit more freedom like there's not as much influence of pharmaceutical Industries or things like that however you need to be publishing like seven papers a year year in order to get tenure or help your graduate students get a tenure position or whatever it may be that means that you just want to find something to contribute to the kind of overwhelming pool of information if you do one study and you're like oh now that I think about it I should have measured the amount that they slept as well and now that I think about it I don't know if I believe their self-reports I don't remember how much I slept last night maybe I should have given them sleep watches that means I need a whole new grant to get the Sleep watches cuz I know have money for them to have sleep watches if we really wanted to know that answer does coffee cause cancer which seems like a really or C attacks that's a really important question but most people do not have the ability to actually pursue that question what they can do is simply coffee and cholesterol that's the tiny portion of the truth that they can contribute and they're going to stack the odds in their favor um perhaps getting a bunch of people who have never drank coffee before like that's the population they're starting off with because that has the least amount of like noise however that is so impractical in the real world very few people have never had coffee before so you're going to get this tiny little um insight into perhaps the effect of caffeine but then okay is it really coffee or is it caffeine what if they have had a lot of sugary drinks before then does that change the results so on and so forth so the experimenters are really yeah trying to find truths about Humanity they're also trying to publish a paper because if they do not publish a paper they will not keep their jobs that is the culture in which science exists yeah we're trying to find truths we're also human beings trying to put food on the table let's be realistic about this um and then subject biases an example of this going back to the survey data is like desirability bias like I'm going to answer this question quickly to get myself out of here like you all are going to participate in a bunch of experiments think about how much you don't want to be there you're going as quickly as possible and now think about how your data is supposedly representative of what it's like to be a human and if you try really hard in those experiments think about the other people that are sitting in that room and how quickly they leave um that's the quality of data we're working with h finally it's limited to the hypotheses and experimental design um another genius Port so you know the limitations should not be ignored keep in mind too what we talked about the operational definitions of variables like are any of those depression inventories really measuring despair you know um but there's so much genius in experimental research designs another bit of genius that's really important and that's really important is the idea of Randomness so um random sampling is supposed to be you have an entire population and you randomly sample from that entire population to get a test population so if we if we really wanted to understand if I don't know uh political orientation is related to or causes uh different levels of intelligence um what we'd have to do is take all of humanity or at the very least all of the United States and um randomly sample from all of the United States in order to get your test population that's never going to happen like zero zero Studies have ever been done that have taken the entire population randomly sampling a test population with the with the only exception being like the census which is very basic information are you married where do you live how many times have you procreated that's really the only time um but that's how it's supposed to be the closest thing we get is something like what you all are doing so you have the entire population of undergraduate students taking 107 classes at Texas A&M you very specific uh population and then the random sampling would be the fact that you guys don't really know what it is the studies are that you're signing up for and that's for the purpose of randomly sampling from you because if you knew like oh this study is going to make me do math problems a bunch of people who are interested in math are going to do that one or this stud's going to make me walk a mile I don't think any of them are going to make you walk a mile don't worry but let's say they did people who are interested in athletics are going to choose that one so that one would be random the fact that you don't know what the study is about is random sampling and that gives you your test population then we have another type of Randomness which is random assignment this one science does a very good job at adhering to and it's very important so from your test population you have to randomly assign your um test population to different groups uh let's say the experimental group or the program group usually in Psychology we call it the experimental condition or the experimental group and the comparison Group which in Psychology we usually call the control group or the control condition so that has to be random because let's say um we are studying I think I said like intelligence and instead of randomly assigning people I was like oh this is easy there's 50% men and 50% women we'll have the men be liberals and the women be conservatives and we'll train them in different protocols and so that we're pretty confident that the men are definitely liberals and the women's are women are definitely definitely conservatives because that's not random we don't know that it actually has anything to do with political affiliation and might instead have something to do with gender um so Random assignment is really really important let's think about um Placebo studies so in a medical study where we want to see like does this drug work let's say for ADHD we're going to give one group a placebo and one group the medication if I put all and let's say everybody really needs treatment for ADHD these are people who are struggling with ADHD if what I did was give all the people who are struggling the most the medication and people who are not struggling got the placebo that might seem kind because I'm giving people who needed the most the medication but then we don't know if the severity of symptoms is really a relevant um factor to keep in mind so you have to randomly assign people to either the treatment group or the placebo group this is a big ethical conundrum in some medical studies where let's say you have a terminal illness and it's a new experimental drug and so you sign up for a study and the placebo effect is um or the placebo design the placebo Paradigm is like gold standard because what we found is the placebo effect is real and sometimes just feeling like you're getting treatment helps at least a little bit and so the gold standard is if the medication can beat Placebo then it's really doing something um but if you have a terminal illness that means you can't get any type of treatment which means that if you're in the placebo group you're not getting any type of treatment and so while that gold standard of course exists for a reason because you don't want to make a drug available that's like not effective on the other hand the cost of adhering to something out of philosophical Fidelity is that some people will not get treatment for a terminal illness now we have all sorts of um attempts to like Rectify this ethical conundrum for example after people um get the placebo after some amount of time they might be they'll be told that they were in the placebo group and then be given the option of then getting the treatment but by that time you know the illness might have gotten worse so on and so forth um it's also fascinating because as much as we know that the placebo effect is real it's still considered unethical to like give a patient a placebo like if you legitimately think like maybe if I just gave them a sugar pill that would help you can't do that because they don't have consent to treatment even though we have found that the placebo effect is um quite real so even if you thought that would help um you can't lie to people it really sucks you know okay so the I think this is the last vocabulary term and is thinking about the levels of independent variables because sometimes you have more than just an experimental group and a um comparison or control group or a treatment group versus a placebo group so um sometimes this is where the language gets a little bit confusing because every field uses slightly different terms so you can either say independent variable levels independent variable groups or inde or independent variable conditions I usually use the term conditions that's what a lot of experimental psychologists use um here we have levels SL groups so let's say the question is do cats influence happiness and I'm doing an experiment where I manipulate the independent variable of cats basically I'd have two groups group one let's say I get a bunch of people who don't have cats I would give them cats group one I would give them cats and group two I would not give them cats so that equals two levels now importantly we have the second term that I want you to know experimental versus control groups experimental groups are the ones that we manipulate sort of the most and then control is what we're comparing the experimental group to so when it comes to medication studies we have the groups that we give the medication to that's the experimental group or the treatment group and then we have the placebo group and that would be considered the control condition um so here we have one experimental group otherwise known as experimental condition we give them cats that's like the treatment and then group two would be the control condition or the control group because we're really not manipulating them we're not changing anything okay let's say we had the question do pets influence happiness and so here we might have three groups um one group of cats we give them cats one group we give them dogs and one group we don't give them anything no pets so that equals three different levels or three different conditions but in this example we have two experimental groups or two experimental conditions cats and dogs and we still have one control group where we don't manipulate them they're not given anything okay so within experimental research we have manipulating the independent variable in order to influence the dependent variable yes okay we have one more type of research Design Within the experimental research Paradigm between subjects versus within subjects I'm so sorry we do have two more vocabulary words okay so both of these were still manipulating the independent variable in order to see a change in the dependent variable for between subjects we will have two different groups of people getting two different experiences and the goal is to compare across those groups of people so the experimental groups get the manipulation or treatment and the control group does not get treatment or or they get a placebo and we're those are two different groups of people and we're comparing between them so in this example this would be a between subjects designed if group one had 50 people group two had a different 50 people and group three had yet again 50 different people so all together I have 150 people and I'm comparing the people who I give dogs dogs to versus the 50 people I give cats to versus the people who I give no pets to that's a between subject design because I'm comparing between groups of people so you have in a between subject design again a random sample you have the whole population you have a random sample of the population and then you have random assignment to a condition so I have a population of all of humanity all of humanity gets the opportunity to sign up for my pet study and I randomly choose from all of humanity who gets to participate um then you have the random assignment to a condition so I have my 150 sample from all of Humanity I randomly assign um 50 to experimental group one they get cats 50 to experimental group two they get dogs and 50 to to the control group they get no pets I'm randomly assigning those people I draw from a hat who goes where and I'm comparing across those groups that's between subject Design Within subjects design is all subjects get every level of the independent variable the purpose of is to solve the noise of individual differences so let's say it turns out that intelligence is relevant to happiness and um the purpose of random assignment into different groups is that the random assignment should control for those individual differences so if intelligence was uh relevant if I truly randomly assign people to different groups the average IQ should be pretty similar similarly if gender is relevant a pretty similar amount of women versus men should end up in each group because I'm randomly assigning people right um the other option with within within subject design is if everybody gets every type of pet or no pet then I don't have to figure out if intelligence is relevant to happiness or not because intelligence was exactly the same because everybody gets all of the different levels so for instance if um um let's say I start off with a 100 people who have never had pets before I measure their happiness right now because right now they have no pets then all 100 people for a month get to take care of a dog I measure their happiness then I take the dog away then all 100 people get the cat how happy are they now so the cool thing is again everybody gets every type of pet so there's no individual difference but it's not always possible to do this for instance one of my research designs was um the effect of sex education perspectives on um different measures like sexual health wellness and things like that and so let's say first I taught somebody abstinence only um and then I tested their uh sense of sexual Wellness the idea is like being subjective to that narrative might forever influence them so even if afterwards I taught them the biological approach to understanding sex education I can't change the fact that they're already trained and abstinence only and vice versa so if I really want to know the influence of abstinence only like that's going to influence you forever then once I teach it to you I can't teach you another one you already have that Foundation as just one example okay so let's think about our research question how does alcohol influence your memory and we're going to try and answer this question using a between subjects versus a within subjects design I think a lot of people are more visual Learners than they allow themselves to take credit for so we're going to look at a um we're going to draw it out and when you do your actual research studies I highly recommend you use you like draw out the research that you are reading about so when you read about a research study literally pull out your notebook and draw out their research design okay so here's what I've come up with does alcohol influence memory for my between subjects design it really helps to draw out read a research study for you when you do your paper and then draw it out I have a 100 participants because it's between I'm going to compare at least two different groups of people so for 50 people I'm going to Blame It On the Alcohol I'm going to get them super drunk and then have them do a memory task and then for the other 50 people we're going to do the just say no approach so I'm going to have them be sober and do a memory task so then whatever the memory task is that's the dependent variable it helps to draw that out too right so the DV is memory and the operational definition is uh let's say repeat back these 10 words and you see how many they can remember so the IV is alcohol alcohol okay and then DV is memory so does alcohol influence memory between subjects comparing two groups of people I have 100 people 50 get them super drunk 50 they're totally sober and I just compare across those people on a memory task remember those 10 words okay that's between within we're going to answer the same exact question within everybody gets every level of the independent variable which is alcohol so we have a hundred people and we have time one everybody comes in sober hopefully so I give them the memory task at time one remember these 10 words and then I get them super drunk and at time two I give them probably a different memory task probably like um either a different set of words or well here's probably the problem with it within is now they know what they're going to be tested on but they'll be drunk so they probably won't remember um so yeah so I think maybe I'd give them like 10 numbers or something I don't know or 10 uh may give them a multiple choice exam but the idea is like some sort of memory task So within everybody does both between you're comparing two groups of people so now this is simple enough if it's just like in the moment amount of drunkenness but if we're talking about lifetime use of alcohol it'd be really hard to continue to give um to continue to give either 50% of your participants alcohol or 100% of your participants alcohol So within subjects would be like a longitudinal design is another way to think about it like the accumulated effects of alcohol so time one um how good is your memory and then I'm going to have you drink alcohol once a week for the rest of your life does your memory get worse but the problem with that um design is we don't know if it's just the alcohol or if it's getting older might be influencing your um memory right so lots of things to keep in mind all right so again the summarize U between subjects design I get 50 people drunk 50 people are sober test their memory within subjects everybody walks in sober I give you a memory task I get everybody drunk I give a memory task again within subjects everybody gets every uh type of independent variable between subjects you get one or the other um the power of interpretation in terms of research is incredibly important to keep in mind studies on the brain are in many ways correlational because it'd be super messed up if we manipulated somebody's physical brain so most of the time it's like all right I'm going to have you do this task I have you hooked up to an fmri machine um what parts of the brain are lighting up when you do this task but perhaps um if I so that makes it seem like the hippocampus is relevant to memory but technically to say if hippocampus Health causes good memory according to basic philosophy I'd have to mess with your hippocampus and see if that causes changes in your memory does that make sense otherwise it's simply correlational this person seems to have a lot of hippocampal activity and it's associated with memory but is it their hippocampus their phys hip a campus that's causing their particular memory so we're interpreting data coming to the best possible conclusions that we can come to um all studies on age or gender or race uh that say that age or gender race cause differences don't totally fit the Paradigm of experimental research instead we're just compiling evidence that helps us build a case that age is probably somewhat relevant to memory but the fact of the matter is you can't manipulate age so you're observing correlational um you're observing a correlation at the end of the day science makes compelling Arguments for pieces of the truth most often by using average data when applied to a particular individual it's almost never so simple um and it part of the art of science is experts being able to compile sometimes contradictory studies and come to the best possible conclusion that they can um something that to kind of wonder about is within subjects design versus between subjects design which one would you prefer if you're still confused if you're iners ask me to go over it again in class if not this would be a good time to pause and look at other studies on things like YouTube the activity we're either going to do in class or that you're going to fill out for this chapter is coming up with um some research designs so the research question is are people naturally good at heart or are people naturally bad at heart and so basically you're going to imagine you're in one of two different Labs one lab is Mr Rogers if you don't know who Mr Rogers is pause real quick and go to YouTube he's the happy to be your neighbor guy he's putting on his shoes and telling the kids how much he loves them but he's also spending a lot of time and effort teaching kids how to be good people but with a lot of kindness and then so imagine you're in Mr Rogers uh which perspective that we discussed last week think about structuralism versus functionalism versus Gal which one do you think that he might use and what research designs do you think he might use to approach this question now imagine you're in the Joker's lab which um perspectives might he use and which research designs might he use in order to ask this question and now I want you to take both of those different possibilities you're in Mr Rogers lab versus The Joker's lab when applied to taking over the world who do you think would win um I ideally want you to think about like a series of studies like a descriptive study versus an experimental study versus how would you actually apply this to the goal of taking over the world um but you know it's just a little in class activity don't stress out about it too much I'd rather it be fun and just kind of get your brain working maybe talk about it with somebody else if you're in a dorm maybe have them be Mr Rogers and you be the Joker or vice versa um and just have some fun with it don't obsess about it this is not your writing task this is not your Psych in your world assignment don't wear yourself out just think about it little bullet points something like that I have two more things that I want to point out um before I end the chapter up the first thing is the replication crisis that all science is facing all science is facing the replication crisis right now biology physics chemistry psychology social psychology from Clinical Psychology to Neuroscience everybody has to confront what the heck this means so importantly the replication crisis is when you do indeed replicate a study so the replication crisis is not I can't replicate the study for instance if you read a study on covid and the effects of quarantining you can't replicate that study because covid is I mean of course Co still exists but like we're not no longer quarantining because of Co we're not experiencing that again so you can't replicate that moment in time that's not the replication crisis the replication crisis is I did a study on um alcohol and memory and then somebody else replicates my study exactly they do the exact same thing that I did and they get different results they can't replicate my results so um the big conundrum here is what does that mean does that mean that if my study doesn't replicate we should throw out that study forever what if it's a study that is a foundational study that many other Studies have built upon then suddenly does the whole thing just fall out beneath our feet does it mean that science is a lie in Psychology one of the big questions is like does that mean you know humans have evolved in some way if it looks like um our memory now is not as good as a memory as the memory of participants in a study from 50 years ago does that mean that we didn't replicate that study is finding or does it mean that humans memory has gotten worse um and what type of memory are we talking about so this is a big conundrum in science um a cool thing to think about doing maybe maybe write your paper on that if you are interested in Psychology um in terms of using academic literature and your own work I highly recommend that when you read psychological studies you try and humanize the science as much as possible think about the consequences of seeing pessimism as being the same thing as depression which is a clinical disorder which means that basically your thoughts right now are sort of diseased thoughts what are the implications of that um there have been many moments throughout history where people have used science to come to erroneous and inhumane summaries of differences between groups of people so for instance if it's the case that women aren't as good at math as men is it our responsibility as scientists to take our own opinions out of it and simply believe the science or is it my responsibility to say no I refuse to believe that women women aren't as good at men at something and instead I'm going to wonder what's going on in the education system that makes women believe they're not as good at math I'm going to look towards the environment that's really important to do if you do not do that you will find yourself believing that certain races of people aren't as intelligent and then things like that will justify let's say um races of people being more impoverished than other races of people whether or not the data actually supports that is a different conundrum but there have absolutely been moments in history where people have tried to use signs to justify maltreatment of one group or another and then finally nowadays we often um are required to consider research ethics so in the Dr Rogers or sorry the Mr Rogers versus The Joker example um I hope that you let yourself really imagine what those two Labs would do with that question regardless of Ethics but in the real world whatever studies the Joker would want to do probably he would not be able to do them because now we have something called the institutional review board or the IRB so every study that you want to do that you could potentially get published you have to first propose to the IRB and the IRB has to say like okay that is an ethical study and one of the big things you have to consider is basically is this study worth it we're going to come back to that question in later chapters because there's some studies that seem really unethical and maybe wouldn't be approved by the IRB but the question is is it worth it so the IRB will approve Placebo studies for treatment for terminal illnesses because the idea is it's worth it so long as especially you're willing to give that person the treatment after they're in the placebo group so if there's a risk how are you going to mitigate it which is science is Big attempt to be more Humane and genuinely in service of humanity have a great day