[Music] okay welcome to psych terms where we describe and Define psychological terms that may be tricky to understand at first today we're talking about independent and dependent variables and we're going to be able to illustrate that for you so you might be able to understand it through some examples now an independent variable is the experimental factor that is manipulated this is the variable that the effect is being studied on or essentially the variable that you are changing while the dependent variable is the outcome Factor the variable that may change in response to manipulations of the independent variable so if you remember back in experiments you're trying to keep most of the variables the same uh you want to change only one of them because you want to test that you want to see if that variable has any influence on the results so let's use an example of uh plants growing in a garden uh let's say that uh our individual wants to make sure that the plants are going to grow and he wants to see how effective his fertilizer is so what he would do is he'd have three seeds and he would probably estimate that fertilizer is one of the key factors that goes into plant growth however he knows that there are other things like water Sunshine so first he lets there uh be enough Sunshine so that all the plants are getting the exact same amount for the exact same amount of time then he would control another Factor water he would give the the plants all the same amount of water because you want to keep those first two factors the same the last one fertilizer this is the one that he's changing so what he'd do is he would change the amount or the percentage of fertilizer for each plant to see if there actually is an impact so after a designated amount of time of waiting he would then measure the plants to see which ones grew higher and if the fertilizer had any effect on them so in this example the independent variable is the thing that you are influencing the thing that you are changing so if the experimental factor that is being manipulated is fertilizer then the independent variable would indeed be the fertilizer this is the thing that you are studying to see if it has an effect on the results while the dependent variable is the outcome Factor this is the variable that may change in response to the manipulations of the independent variable meaning this is what you are measuring so independent variable is the amount of fertilizer or the percentage of fertilizer on the plant while the dependent variable is how tall or how much the plants have grown and you're able to measure that measure the difference so dependent variable would be plant growth while independent variable would be the amount of fertilizer oh