Hello, this is the third in our series of What is Science? And in this one, we're going to be talking about... about some of the last set of assumptions that we use to guide research.
So again, these are the hidden things that sort of form the basis for how we conduct research in psychology. So why is it important to make assumptions? It's basically that there's so many ways to approach a problem that you kind of have to constrain the field. You have to have a way of limiting the type of things you're looking for, otherwise you would never get done or never get started.
So, a typical way to solve or deal with any problem is to go through a number of steps. And these are common steps, they're not just psychology, but you can use these in any place. And they are as follows.
One, you have to define the problem. Two, once you define that problem, you have to pick the right factors to examine. So, what is it about that problem that you're interested in? Because anything, particularly for behavior, is, as you can imagine, a super broad topic.
What is it about behavior? So you need to be a little bit more specific. Once you have your specific interest, what are the questions that you care about? What is it that you want to ask?
And so write in this case means what questions will give the information that you're looking for. Once you've developed those questions, the next thing is picking the right methodology for addressing those questions or generating your answer. What's the form of research? What's the type of manipulation you do?
What kind of data do you need to collect? in order to be able to address your question. And what helps guide these types of decisions are the assumptions you start with, what's important in the field, what are the things in general that you should be caring about.
So it's important to understand assumptions because it will help you understand why people, one, ask the question they ask, and two, approach the answer in the way that they do. And again, it's one of the most enlightening things. When you hear someone... me say, I'm doing this because I believe X. And, you know, I've had personal experience with this, you know, becoming a new scholar and wondering why people can have this other viewpoint.
And it wasn't until they explained what their assumptions were to go, oh, now that makes sense. I still didn't necessarily agree with it, but it now made sense. I can respect where you're coming from.
So being explicit in your assumptions as you're doing things. or explicitly seeking the assumptions that other people can have, can go a long way to help you understand their process. So what we're going to talk about are some of the general assumptions that have shaped science and psychology. And we're going to take a trip back and we're going to talk first about some of the early Greeks.
And they have three basic premises that kind of help shape the philosophy of science as it emerged. The first is that the world can be understood and predicted because it is systematic. That is. there's an order to nature and because there's an order that we can actually use that order to help us understand what's going on this is going to be formalized as something called determinism which we're going to talk about in about a minute. The second one is that humans are part of this world and thus can be studied in the same way so we grew up in this environment and given that we're governed by the same rules so we should be able to study the same way.
This particular piece or assumption gets lost during the quote-unquote dark ages when the rise of formalized religion and the setting of people as unique amongst the things on Earth. So it really separates us, and because of that separation, it meant that we couldn't study ourselves in the same way that we studied the rest of the world. The third assumption is that we are not the same.
or rule is that any explanations should be grounded in events in the world rather than magic. We've seen this now twice before in our other slides, and this is, again, positivism, the idea that you have to describe things in terms that you can. observe. And then later this gets more into logical positivism, which again, the reason why it was important because it allowed us to talk about the unseen things as long as we attach them to the unseen things that we can share.
So, again, if you need to go back and look at the other ones to get to refresh yourself on those, that's fine. And these three things are some of the reasons why psychology was so late, because it seemed to refute all of these. So what we're going to do, because we've talked about the last two already, we're going to go back and talk about number one, which is the side area of determinism. I'm going to break that down a little, because this is a huge assumption of mine. So the terminism asserts four things and if you bind to the first part we're going to move this to be more specific and it's going to get a little harder.
So the first is that nature or the universe is lawful. It's just what the Greeks said. Most people combine. And again, this was characterized kind of whimsically by Einstein in this quote.
The second is not only is it lawful, but the nature of that lawfulness is that if all phenomena have a cause, if you repeat that cause, you'll get the same phenomena. So essentially there's a specific cause and effect relationship between things that are happening in our environment. And so if you see that same set of causes, you should get the same outcome. Again, this is what poses problems for studying people.
of those thoughts that we didn't adhere to this. The third part, again, we're going on a rabbit hole here, is that not only are there specific causes, but there's only a finite number of them that can account for everything. So finite doesn't necessarily mean small.
It just means that there is a limit, that there's a subset of things that can be used to explain all of phenomenon. So again, this is a big assumption, not something we can directly take. or have the resources to do so. And probably the biggest one to accept is this fourth one, that these finite causes can be discovered and understood.
That is, that we can actually know what the causes of things are. And it is this belief that drives most of the research process. This is why we do research, because we believe if we can control the causal situation, then we can understand the outcome, or we can recreate it. the outcome or we can reduce the outcome. So all those kind of abilities are things that we do in research fall from these kind of assertions.
Now this isn't the perfect system because there are some things that don't necessarily negate this assumption but make it make us think harder about it and so we'll start with those so there's three that we're going to talk about the first one is probabilistic or probabilism and as you that we can never completely know the causes. So this is part D before this is raising issues with that. And that's partially because we don't have infinite resources. We can't have every instance.
Our instruments may not be perfect. So there's always present some error. And it does mean there aren't causes. It just means that we may not always be able to figure them out.
This has also caused statistical determinism. Again, the idea is that there are still causes, but we can't be sure what those causes are. The next confinement, if you will, is this idea of chaos theory, or the idea of nonlinear systems. And that is that small differences in industrial conditions can have...
large and varied effects on later processes. So that means that a small change in one place can lead to very different outcomes further down the line. This does not negate determinism again, but it just says that we have to be really, really precise in how we describe things. Even small changes in how we set up the situation can change the outcome dramatically. The third thing is this thing called uncertainty theory, or for those Breaking Bad fans, the Heisenberg principle.
And that is the very act of measuring something changes it. So, for instance, if you are studying position, you can't at the same time study movement. If you are doing tests on people and you remove blood from them, the blood that you remove is no longer behaving the same way it did when it was in the body.
So, the very act of trying to... describe it may actually alter it. So that means that getting that description part right may be difficult because if we can't get that right, then it means we can't also get the relationship right as we go through.
And in fact, people realize this, and it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing in Star Trek for their wives, that Star Trek actually had a system that was a Heisenberg compensator to account for this problem as we go through. So those are some of the large things. And again, most of these are not testable, but we still have the resources for that.
But there are some things that are a little bit smaller scale, but... also things that have influenced psychology. And that's these four things here.
Mechanism, dualism, reductionism, and the idea of construction and representation. Mechanism is the idea that you can treat people or mental processes in the same way that you treat any other mechanical. system.
Dualism gets us in trouble a little bit because this is an assumption that the mind and the physical brain are related to separate entities. So why that causes problems. problems, particularly if you're into neuroscience, is that it suggests that even knowing the function and structure of the nervous system does not necessarily give you an idea about experience or consciousness.
So this is, again, a constant debate that is fought. Reductionism is the idea that it's an approach to study things where you look at the smallest part that you can, understand that part, and then build your way up to the larger whole. Again, this is...
probably from physics and philosophy, the idea of chemistry is looking at the component parts and compounds, breaking those out into the smallest units and studying those units and building your way back up. In many ways, this is how people have tried to approach psychology as well, which has given us our last one, this idea of construction and representation. And what that is is that representation is the internal model in our heads.
Construction are the processes that build that internal model. Why is that necessary? because there's an assumption about the relationship between the world and what we perceive.
So if we have this blackout here in the world it's going to generate stimulation. and gulf energy our senses can pick that up but the assumption is what we pick up is not the same as the object that is broken up or distorted or changed or missing for various reasons but that we what we perceive is the coherent object so it's got to be something that brings us from this jumble back to this coherent piece that here is this idea of construction this is the representation we use this to guide outward behaviors. So for particularly cognitive psychology, experimental psychology, this relationship between the jumble and the internal model has become the important thing.
That's the thing that we need to say. That's the assumption we're making. That's important.
Interestingly, I was trained differently that we start from here, we don't have the middle box, and we don't really need the internal box either. But it's a conversation for a different time as you go through. through. So all of these have in common, they're kind of large assumptions that don't typically get talked about, but they all have shape the way in which we do research. What I want to leave you with are things that we actually can test, and these are more of the practical aspects of doing research.
So I'm just going to list these, and then we'll talk about them. So what all these suggest, these are things that we can actually verify ourselves. So whether there's bias in the data, whether the data are accurate, whether they've been analyzed correctly, whether there are unknown assumptions, and always.
There's always unsaved assumptions, but you can ask the researchers about that. It's a great thing. The technology we're engaged in now, it's really easy to reach out to people. Relationships are trustworthy.
That's what replication is about. If you describe it well enough, we can repeat it and hopefully get the same outcomes. Whether or not the beings we find in the lab have meaning beyond the lab. Are they generalizable? Do they tell something about behavior in general?
And that's, again, something we can look at. And then the last one is really more of an opinion piece. And this is something that academics always get asked. Does this contribute to theory?
Does this help us build a better framework from that? And it can be very subjective. in that case but these are all things that we actually account for and try to test in our daily research world so this is going to finish up that this initial series And at the end of this one is actually a discussion. So you're going to be doing a discussion instead of a lecture or a quiz. So we will see you next time.
We'll be looking at different types of research. And until then, take care.