Research Methods

How know what claims

to accept?
 Claims about Human Behavior

Too often we were willing to accept statements about

human behavior based on the opinions of people who
have status and authority—called authoritative
evidence.

Regardless of a person’s position, they need to provide

observable and measurable evidence to support their
statements and conclusions—called empirical
evidence.
Goals of Research in Psychology

 Describe how people behave.

 Explain why they behave as they do.

 Determine how to improve human behaviors.

 Observational Studies

 Jane Goodall observing chimpanzees in the Rain

Forests and discovering their ability to use tools.

 Researchers observing how the pace of life among

31 countries varies significantly.

 John Gottman’s observations of how married

couples resolve conflict.
Jane Goodall observing Chimps
Gottman discovered that couples style of
resolving conflict had predictive power
 Case Studies: Study subjects who
have been through unique experiences

 Victor, the wild boy who was raised by

wolves as well as living in isolation

 People who have been blind throughout

childhood provided ability to see

 Phineas Gage who had a steel rod blow

through his brain and survived
Case Study of “Feral” Boy
Results of case studies of feral children and
animals who grow up with minimal social
interaction all have very similar results

 Exhibit no language or social skills

 Developmentally very slow

 Often violent and emotionally stunted

 Their brains’ are severely underdeveloped

Case study of Phineas Gage
 Case Studies of Blind People
Provided Visual Restoration

 Review of all case studies of blind people

given vision during adulthood have the same
results.

 Vision confusing, frustrating and tiring—an

avalanche of rapid but uninterpretable
impressions.
 Life becomes overwhelming and
depressing

 Only able to perceive color and motion

 One of the most striking overall findings is

that formerly blind people provided sight
suffer from depression and despair

 Find themselves between two worlds, at

home in neither—a torment cannot escape
 Correlational Studies

Collect data on two or more variables to see

if they occur together or not

Just because occur together in time does not

mean one is causing the other

Correlation does not mean causation

Examples of Correlational Studies

 The association between use of electronic media

and mood has negative or inverse relationship: when
one goes up, the other goes down and vice versa

 Association between class attendance and class

grade: positive correlation—when one goes up the
other goes up and vice versa

 What could be several explanations for both

correlations?
 Why can’t conclude cause-effect?

 Not control for personalities or situations so

not know what other factors influencing
moods

 What other factors than class attendance

could explain why students who attend do
well in classes?
 Lung Cancer and Smoking

 Very compelling, strong positive correlation between

smoking and lung cancer.

 Tobacco companies still claim for years that there

was no scientific support for the fact that smoking
causes cancer as a correlation between variables
might not be

 What other explanations could be used to explain

this strong positive correlation
Importance of Experimental Research: Able
to conclude cause-effect

 Control environment of subjects as assign at

random to control and experimental groups

 Expose experimental group to treatment but

not to control group for comparison purposes

 Compare behavior of subjects in both groups

after exposure to treatment
 Experiments prove smoking
causes lung cancer

 Control variables so can conclude cause-

effect
 Subjects were Beagles
 Randomly assign puppies to smoking versus
non-smoking group—the experimental and
control groups
 Beagles that smoked far more likely to get
lung cancer
Experiment with Beagles
 Experiments

 Have independent and dependent variables

 Independent variable is the treatment

 Dependent variable is the behavior that

results from the treatment
 Crucial need for critical thinking

 Ask for evidence for conclusions

 Trust empirical—observable & measurable

evidence--over authoritative opinions

 Be willing to critically evaluate the empirical

evidence: Are the replicable?