hi students this is unit one lesson five the scientific method in pychology in this lesson we'll describe research methods psychological scientists use really we're not going to get into that so much we will talk about the reasons why we need the scientific method in Psychology so let's begin with research and the reasons that we need to lay out systematic systems for thinking critically when it comes to human behavior and mental processes remember that psychology we're looking at Behavior we're looking at people's thinking we're examining their thinking and we need this because of things like hindsight bias hindsight bias is the tendency to believe after learning an outcome that one would have foreseen it so when we look back on critical events on big current events in in maybe US History we have this I knew it all along phenomenon known as hindsight bias and so here's a couple examples where people people might say ah I knew that was going to come so in 2001 there was a bubble which crashed and all these different businesses uh went kaput so leading up toou 2001 if we'd been paying attention to the economy you know some economists might look back on that and said yes of course the market was obvious obviously overdue for a correction duh you should have known it was coming or another example of uh hindsight bias is if we look at the 911 terrorist attack and the World Trade Center's North Tower was hit by commercial airliner and so some people will look at that and say hey you should have evacuated immediately but that is definitely the people in the South Tower should have evacuated um immediately but what we do when we when we look at those and kind of judge from our uh 20 years later seat is we discount the people who lived through those events and we don't put ourselves into their shoes and so hindsight bias causes us to bring our own like current judgments on past critical events and it's really not fair um when we look at those terrorist attacks and somebody says the people in the second tower should have immediately evacuated after the first was hit well we didn't know what was happening at the time and so those people who you know oh go back to work some people did and um they paid with their life for that unfortunately but it we cannot judge those people who did that because we never been weren't in that uh situation now another reason why we have to supply the scientific method and think critically is because of overconfidence and so I'm going to flash you some anagrams here where we like reorganize the letters to make them make more sense well to make them make sense themselves and see if you could predict like how long would it have taken you if you had that the the letters on the left how long would it have taken you to figure out you know just a few seconds uh 30 seconds or what well I'm going to give you another set of letters see if you can turn this into a word now you can pause here if you don't want to move on to the answer but typically it takes people two minutes if at all for them to figure out that this set of letters is actually the word chaos now one of the reasons why it's harder for us to put that together is it's not a word that we hear a lot and it's also got two vowels put together so it's not really ones that we uh are exposed to a lot so you may have overconfidently thought that you could put those letters into a word easily um but maybe you found out it took you a little bit longer than you really thought so reasons to think critically especially when it comes to human behavior and mental processes is that people don't think like us they don't act like us and so we have to use the scientific method to critically analyze other people's behavior without bringing bias without bringing our own judgments and uh keeping an open mind when it comes to other people's behavior because after all everybody's different yet everybody's the same so here are reasons why critical thinking is essential in the social sciences we when we use critical thinking we are examining assumptions which we should not have any assumptions until it's proven by research discerns uh hidden values evaluates evidence and assess conclusions when we think critically that's the things that we are doing in order to get ourselves to theories now in Psychology we look at a lot of different theories which are assembled based on observation and evaluation and Analysis so scientists will amass loads and loads of data and distill it down into a theory so if we have a theory such as as low self-esteem contributes to depression we observe people who uh perhaps have low self-esteem and then have to find out figure out whether or not they are depressed now this is a tricky uh kind of analysis and we'll talk more about it but using the scientific method to remind you about what the scientific method is and how a psychologist might use it number one they're going to make an observation and two they're going to form a hypothesis so the hypothesis might look like this people with low self-esteem score higher on a depression scale they're going to test that hypothesis by sending out surveys surveys might have questions like or statements maybe it's a likey scale it says I have good ideas and I am fun to be with and this will lead us to a depression diagnosis perhaps uh the fourth step here of the scientific method is where we collect those survey data and then analyze the results if it fails then we have to reform our hypothesis um if it passes then we can draw conclusions and the conclusions could be something like um yes these things are connected self-esteem and depression are connected we can make a prediction like if we boost people's self-esteem will their depression lift so we want to focus on um low self-esteem if this is our Theory one of the keys of the scientific method is that this has to be able to be replicated and there's one of the places where this observation and hypoth is is going to get a little bit tricky um you also have to have the same survey data like the same survey itself if you're sending out a different survey then it's all bogus but if it passes many times then it becomes a theory we'll watch the uh boys of The Big Bang Theory in class tomorrow um remember that the goals of psychology are to describe explain predict and control human behavior and you will see that these are similar goals in basic research we want to be able to describe uh low self-esteem and depression make predictions we can improve depression by improving self-esteem introduce enough controls over the variables then we would have to introduce an experiment rather than just a survey and explain the Phenomenon with some degree of confidence hopefully the scientific method you recall from your earlier sciencey careers because you've had it many times before so we have just described research methods that is the scientific method in Psych ology and we'll get into what sort of methods they use to apply the scientific research uh scientific methods in Psychology later in unit one