Transcript for:
Understanding Science and Research Methods

howdy today i'll introduce you to the basic rules of good science and review some of the serious costs of not understanding these basic rules the primary goal of this lesson is to give you some tools for interpreting the reports you hear in real life so that you can become a more effective consumer of information and avoid being manipulated by poorly presented information remember if you're hearing some report recent studies show via some popular media outlets such as a newspaper facebook radio and so on then someone's paying for you to hear their particular interpretation of that information and since they're paying for you to hear it they have an agenda to try and convince you to buy into the way that they interpret it and these popular media representations are often very biased indeed just imagine the same political event such as an election of president trump as discussed by cnn versus fox news very different interpretations of what the electoral versus popular vote outcomes meant this lesson is to give you better tools to make your own informed decisions about what you believe okay let's start with a little true false and see if we can get a baseline a little small idea of how solid your understanding of some basic scientific terms and popular beliefs is go ahead and pause this presentation and read through this list of statements and really think about whether you think they're true or false okay so now let's review these together real quick number one research tells us whether a theory is true or false this one is false because we don't actually run an experiment to test a theory we use theories to generate testable hypotheses and we test the hypotheses as you'll see later in this lecture theory is a collection of ideas for explaining something whereas a hypothesis is a specific prediction generated by the theory and we can experimentally test that one prediction with an experiment to either add support to the overall theory or else fail to support it in which case the overall theory then needs to be revised number two people can learn to fear objects such as a piece of toast this is true it's done through a process called conditioning which you'll hear about more in the learning chapter later in this semester number three the best way to train a behavior is to reward it consistently that's false again as you will discover in the learning chapter the best way to train some behavior is to reward it randomly that way your subject beat your pet your child your roommate your spouse whatever knows there's a reward for the behavior they just don't know when they'll get the reward but they want the reward so even though they don't get the reward every time they'll keep performing the behavior you want in hopes that this time will be the time think of gambling this is exactly how gambling works and exactly why people keep betting money even when they aren't winning number four the best way to get rid of a behavior is to punish it consistently this is also false punishment is not the best way to stop a behavior because one effect of punishment is that it teaches a person to lie to avoid the punishment in the future it also teaches people to hide the punished behavior rather than eliminate that behavior think about speeding tickets next darwin's idea of survival of the fittest means that the strongest animal is most likely to survive also false darwin's idea was actually that the animal that adapts the best survives humans are definitely not the strongest animals but as long as we continue to adapt and change our behaviors in response to threats such as climate change we will continue to survive something to think about finally six if observations are carefully done you'll be able to determine the causes of the behavior you're observing this is patently false and it represents one of the main distinctions you need to be able to make as a good consumer of science and a responsible future leader observations by definition are only descriptions of patterns of behavior that researchers observe without those researchers doing any experimentation or manipulation on the behaviors therefore observations can only provide us with correlational data never with cause effect answers cause and effect conclusions can only be produced by experiments we'll discuss this distinction in more detail during this lesson for now fix it in your mind that observations produce correlations whereas only experiments can produce cause and effect conclusions so let's talk about the price of not understanding research methods well sometimes science produces claims that are obviously wrong and other times you look at it and say well that's obviously right we've already talked about the problems with hindsight bias and overconfidence where you think you know something you really don't here we have something as much or even more harmful when you hear or believe something because you think it's obviously cause and effect but it's not true it's flat wrong one of the biggest culprits of research data being misunderstood is when people interpret correlational data to mean cause and effect research outcomes you read and hear in popular media are almost always presented in a way that suggests cause and effect even when the data are correlational for example there is a dangerous and insidious belief spreading right now the vaccinations cause autism in healthy children they absolutely do not but there is a correlational relationship between vaccinations and autism it's just not the relationship people expect specifically autism generally is not detected until a child's around two years old coincidentally this is shortly after most kids receive their last round of childhood vaccinations so there's a correlation between vaccination and autism in that the two are related in terms of timing the mistaken conclusion is that the vaccinations cause the autism but instead it turns out that autism is a brain disorder with a genetic basis kids are born with it they don't develop it because they were vaccinated the result of this terrible misinterpretation of research reports by the public is that preventable and deadly childhood diseases are making a comeback as more parents refuse to have their kids vaccinated about 10 percent of u.s parents are doing this now that may not sound like a lot but it is enough to open the door and allow these diseases back into our population very dangerous so how can we defend ourselves against making costly mistakes trying to figure out what research data actually mean after all you have scientific information as well as biased reporting thrown at you from different sources on a daily basis how do you wade through it all and decide what's worth keeping step one is understanding the basis of research methods as i said during the true pulse exercise at the beginning of this lesson observational research methods produce correlations whereas experimental research methods produce cause and effect relationships knowing the difference between a correlational study and a cause effects study will take you a long way toward understanding what the report you're hearing really means step two is to recognize that some true things may go against your intuition and perhaps even against your beliefs and wishes but using objective critical thinking and seeking out evidence based in science is the only way to find the truth knowing how science works to find answers comes with a lot of perks first by gaining an understanding of research methods and being a smart consumer of science you can get a better understanding of yourself in the world around you and why should you care about that well one to avoid being manipulated into believing things that aren't true also as a citizen a voter a potential future leader of our society you may be responsible for developing or deciding on strategies and policies that will impact a lot of people's lives i hope you can see why it is important that your decisions are based on truth and not anecdotal or folk wisdom or false beliefs generated by misinterpreting correlational reports and keep in mind that just because some idea has been around for years or even centuries doesn't mean it's true or good for us sometimes you have to break tradition to get at the truth and make progress okay everything so far in this lesson has been about the big picture of why you need to know the basics of research methods now let's get to the meat of it there are some words we're going to be using that you're responsible for knowing recall the goals of psychology we discussed in a previous lesson one of the first things that must be done is to find patterns in human thinking and behavior by simply observing people observational studies we naturally seek out patterns in the things we see whether it be numbers or events in the world or whatever we're driven to have things make sense so it's a natural starting point for scientific inquiry once we've observed a pattern next we come up with a logical explanation for it and this explanation can become what we call a theory the word theory gets thrown around a lot and it's often misused not all ideas and explanations or theories theories are logical explanations for a broad collection of information regarding some phenomenon and they have to be testable if they can't be tested they are worthless to science for example as public school teachers have become more involved in diagnosing add and adhd this has also come about during a time when video games and television have started becoming more violent and more kids have access to them a popular idea has been that watching violence causes children to become more defiant and misbehave more in other words that all the violence kids are accessing through games and television are actually contributing to more incidents of add and adhd this is an example of a theory it's logically sound it explains the data and it's testable okay so we can't just create a theory and say oh that makes sense i believe all of it we have to make specific predictions called hypotheses based on the theory so if watching violence causes violence logically those who watch violence will behave more violently than those who do not watch violence we have to design an experiment to test that so we have to expose some kids to watching violent tv shows and others to watching non-violent tv shows and then measure whether the group that watched the violent tv actually behaves more violently afterward as compared to behavior the kids who watched non-violent tv if we find out that's true then our hypothesis is supported by that experiment and that in turn supports the theory then more scientists have to run the same experiment and make sure it holds up now if we test a hypothesis that does not support the theory then the theory has to be revised so for instance if we found that the two groups of kids did not show a difference in violent behavior after the tv manipulation then we would need to revise our theory to look for another explanation and this is exactly what has happened long story short it turns out that personality characteristics have more to do with kids behavior in terms of violence than the kind of tv they watch but it took a lot of testing to get to that conclusion in part because it wasn't the intuitive easy explanation also it turns out that add adhd are actual atypical wiring in the brain and not something that's caused by tv or video games so the value of science is getting past our own intuition and assumptions about things work and jumping to conclusions about cause and effect another important thing to consider with science is the operational definition when you test a hypothesis you have to do so in a way that everyone else will be able to test it the same way you do so you hypothesize violent tv causes violent behavior go test it if you just go by that and have 10 scientists around the world do the test you'll have several different findings because you never gave an operational definition for violence the concept you're studying what defines violence hitting another kid sure what about bullying verbal threats where do you draw the line whatever definition you use in your study you have to justify why you're defining it that way so that other scientists can test your results if they define what you studied differently than you defined it then their results might not mean the same thing at all so this brings us to the importance of identifying and operationalizing your variables it might sound simple with something like violence but what about something more abstract let's say you want to know if people love attractive people more in this example attractiveness is your variable that is something that can change or vary and can be measured but how do you measure attractiveness objectively well maybe you operationalize attractiveness as wearing desirable clothing or having good teeth or having facial symmetry all these could work but you can see that everyone might not agree that each one of those is a solid measure of attractiveness this makes operationally defining your variables a critical and often very challenging part of a research psychologist's job there's lots of things about human nature that we would like to investigate but not all of them are as simple to define as something like violence nonetheless you have to identify and define your variable so that others can copy your test and so that others can make judgments about what your measure means and that brings us to the scientific method again i want you to notice how the goals of psychology explaining human thinking and behavior mirror the scientific method for doing quality research once you have your observation so you've established a pattern or correlation that shows some relationship between two variables next you have to make a prediction based on that relationship and then you test that prediction multiple times to see if it holds up the next step is to objectively interpret what your research outcomes mean and communicate them again objectively to other scientists in science we have to interpret and report without bias because other scientists are going to test our tests we're very careful to report only the facts and how they support or don't support the theory our hypothesis was testing this is in contrast to the way research is interpreted and communicated in the popular media where the test results are almost always reported in a way to bias you into interpreting the outcomes in one specific way that supports that media outlets agenda again knowing something about research methods gives you the tools to defend yourself against other people's biases and therefore to be more effective in making your own decisions about what things really mean and that allows you to become a more successful consumer of information a smarter leader and a better citizen thanks and giggum