INTRODUCTION TO

EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Psychology 220
Chapter 1: Basics of Scientific Psychology

 Goals of Psychological Research

 Make you think like a scientist about behavior
 Better understand how to conduct research
 This allows use to test hypotheses
 This allows us to solve practical problems
 Better understand how to evaluate research
 This involves learning how apply critical thinking to research
 As a critic, you learn how to make an informed judgment about the
value of something
 This critique can result in either support or criticism of a theory or
hypothesis
Chapter 1 continued:
 We make informed decisions in science using Experiments
 In an experiment, we test a hypothesis (a very specific testable idea based
upon a theory—which is a collection of ideas whose purpose is to describe,
predict, or explain phenomena)
 In an experiment we manipulate the independent variable (IV) while
holding other potential IVs constant (control variables, or CVs), and then we
examine the effect of the IV(s) on the dependent variable (DV)—the
performance variable
 If the proper experimental design is not followed, then our results can be
confounded—e.g., fatigue or practice effects in a within-subjects design
Chapter 1 continued:
 Example of a theory: Cognitive aging is primarily a function of the brain
slowing down as a function of task complexity
 This is the “general slowing” theory of cognitive aging (e.g., Cerella, 1985;
Salthouse, 1996)
 An example of a hypothesis is that age differences will be proportional to task
complexity
 We can test this hypothesis using an experiment in which we vary word
frequency (high vs. low), case type (lowercase vs. mixed-case), and response
type (two-choice vs. go/no-go) on a lexical decision task (does a letter string
form a real word, or not?) testing younger and older adults
 What are the IVs, CVs, and DVs?
 After collecting our data, we test whether age differences in word frequency
and case type are consistent with processing speed.
 It turns out that there are no appreciable age differences in word frequency, but there
are large differences in case type and response type, even though older adults are
much slower—these results are inconsistent with general slowing (see Allen et al., 1993)
Chapter 1: Continued
 This type of experiment is designed to isolate age effects at
one, or multiple, information processing stages
 We cannot directly observe thinking, so we indirectly infer it
based upon the relation between stimulus conditions and
subject behavior
 This allows us to peer inside the “black box” of the human mind
 The mind is like trying to see what is present outside after dark when
you are sitting in a lighted room
 This is systems engineering of the mind
Chapter 1: Continued
 In our design, we are manipulating case type
(encoding), word frequency (lexical access), and
response type (response selection)
 We assume that humans go through sequential,
functionally discrete processing stages
 i.e.,
the tend to finish a stage before they begin
another stage
 Using this approach, we can determine whether age
differences are isolated at a given stage or
whether they are generalized across stages
Chapter 1 continued:
 These results are important because they suggest
that we do not simply “go down hill” as we age
 Indeed, in some situations, older adults actually perform
better than younger adults (e.g., Allen et al., 2002; Lien
et al., 2006)
 So it appears that aging is a combination of neural
degeneration (that hurts performance) and skill
acquisition (that helps performance)
Chapter 1 continued:
 Sources of Research Ideas—Where do research ideas come
from?
 Coming up with interesting, testable research ideas is probably the most
difficult part of science (including psychology). Scientists must be
creative, and they need to practice this skill
 Observation is a good place to begin generating research ideas (this
allows you to observe what the important pieces of the puzzle are, and
how they fit together)
 New scientific ideas need to extend the existing literature
 Conducting a literature search allows you to confirm that your idea is
novel so that you do not steal others’ ideas (plagiarism).
 Additionally, others’ work can give you good research ideas
 PsycINFO is an effective search engine (although Google works well in many
circumstances, as well)
Chapter 1 continued:
 Typical Steps in Research:
 Develop an idea (this is very difficult and takes creativity as well as a
comprehensive knowledge of the field)
 Formulate a testable hypothesis (make a statement about a presumed or
theoretical relation between two or more variables)
 This implies that these variables are measureable
 It also specifies the relations among the variables
 Reviewing the literature—this term we will examine Time-of-Day effects
on cognition
 Conduct pilot research (to see if everything works)
 Complete your data collection (with a large enough sample size)
 Conduct statistical analyses (statistics is the language of science)
 Interpret your results
 Write up your results in an article
Chapter 1 Continued:
 Present Project: Age Differences in Naming
 Theory: Cognitive aging effects are a combination of
cognitive and sensory/motor loss and skill increases
 Hypothesis: Loss of visual acuity should make mixed-case
presentation stimuli particularly difficult for older adults
(compared to younger adults), but phonological regularity
effects should be relatively constant across age
 Method: have two sets of participants (younger and older
adults) tested on a naming task that varies word frequency,
phonological regularity, and case type
Chapter 1 continued:
 Research Pitfalls to avoid:
 Breaches of ethical practice (Chapter 12) (falsification, fabrication, plagiarism)
 The “golden rule” is not to do anything to a research subject that you would not do to yourself
 This is a VERY complicated issue and we will discuss it in detail (e.g., non-human animal research,
human research, research on impoverished individuals who participate just for the money)
 Biased research
 Inadvertent research bias—e.g., if your political beliefs resulted in you interpreting results in a
manner that went way beyond the data
 E.g., NPR caller that thought John McCain was too old to run for office and was showing signs of either MCI
or dementia
 Morton, skull size, intelligence and race (and Gould’s clarification)
 Double-blind design (both the researcher and the participant are blind to the treatment type)
 Avoiding anthropomorphizing with non-human animals
 Unreliable communication
 The cold war
 Science is inherently empirical, and it is important to have all the available data in order to make
our best conclusion about what theories work best
Chapter 2: Explanation in Scientific
Psychology
 Making Sense of the World—our attempt to
discover how and why things work the way they do
 SocialLoafing—people working in a group do not
work as hard as the same people working by
themselves
 Why does social loafing occur?
Chapter 2: continued:
 On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was attacked
and stabbed by Winston Moseley
 Mr. Moseley left for 15-60 minutes, and then returned to
finish murdering Kitty Genovese
 There were approximately 38 witnesses to one or both of
the stabbings, and no one called the police or went out to
help Kitty Genovese
 This phenomena in which groups of people seem more
unwilling to help people in need has been referred to as the
“unresponsive bystander” effect
Chapter 2 continued:
 The unresponsive bystander effect (or social loafing) has been explained by
the concept of “diffusion of responsibility”—people working by themselves
think that they are responsible for completing a task (or helping someone),
whereas people working in a group diffuse the responsibility for work to
the group as a whole (e.g., it is society’s responsibility)
 Mention Bib Latane’s “smoke study” in Ohio Stadium
 While there is some evidence that diffusion of responsibility can be
attenuated (or even eliminated) by observing individual behavior in when
someone is working in a group, this is still a powerful effect that can have
an impact on work productivity and helping behaviors for people in need
 This has implications for whether “team” approaches to work really can work as
well as an approach that emphasizes individual responsibility
Chapter 2 continued:
 Sources of Understanding
 Fixation of Belief—how we decide what we believe: The American philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce (1877) discussed four types of fixation of belief:
 Method of Authority—take someone else’s word on faith for deciding what you believe
(e.g., a priest’s or minister’s view)
 Method of Tenacity—when a person steadfastly refuses to alter acquired beliefs in
spite of evidence to the contrary (e.g., the earth is flat)
 A Priori Method—When something is believed without prior study or examination (an
extension of the Method of Authority, except now, it is not based on a particular
authority, but on a general cultural outlook
 Scientific Method—fixes belief on the basis of experience and evidence
 Science is repeatable and self-correcting (e.g., when results are not replicated consistently,
we likely had a “false positive”)
 Empirical observation and manipulation (with experimental control) means that in science,
fixation of belief is based at least in part on actual data
 By self-correcting, we mean that science offers methods for establishing the superiority of one
belief over another
Chapter 2 continued:
 Nature of Scientific Explanation
 Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is credited with developing much of the
conceptual basis of empiricism—the empirical and self-correcting aspects of
science
 All accepted approaches to science share the same basic elements—data
(empirical observations collected under experimental control) and theory
(organization of concepts that permit prediction and explanation of data)
 Induction is working from data to theory (reasoning from specific to general), and
deduction is working from theory to data (reasoning from general to specific)
 It is important to note that induction is probabilistic and that deduction is completely
deterministic
 In a very real sense, there is no need for data in deduction (logic is used instead
 Laws in science almost involve deductive logic, but even laws do not always hold—
particularly in psychology!
Chapter 2 continued:
 Nature of Scientific Explanation Continued:
 Falsifiability—because of the temporary, probabilistic nature of science, Popper
(1961) has argued that negative evidence is more important than positive
evidence, and that one can disprove a theory but cannot prove it
 *This is the null hypothesis testing approach to science, but your professor heartily
disagrees (people do not win Nobel Prizes for disproving a theory—it is usually for
providing evidence in favor of a theory)
 Direct hypothesis testing (why you did not remember some of what you learned in Statistics)
 This is why we need to have better quantitative skills is psychology
 Theory->Deduction->Data->Induction->Theory
 Strong Inference—eliminating possible alternative explanations by pitting two
(or more) possible explanations (theories) against each other in a series of
experiments in which each theory makes different predictions
 We will discuss converging operations later on
Chapter 2 continued:
 Nature of Scientific Explanation Continued:
 From Theory to Hypothesis—theories typically cannot be
tested directly because they are too broad
 Instead theories generate very specific testable statements
(hypotheses) that can be evaluated based upon observable data
from an experiment
 Generalization—a broader statement (than a hypothesis) that cannot
be tested directly but tends to come in between a theory (even more
general) and hypotheses (more specific)
 E.g., Older adults slow down compared to younger adults (theory), older
adults are unsafe drivers at any speed (generalization), drivers older
than 65 have a higher incidence of left-turn accidents across oncoming
traffic than do younger adults (hypothesis)
Chapter 2 continued:
 Nature of Scientific Explanation Continued:
 What is a theory?—it is a set of related statements that explains a
variety of occurrences. The more the occurrences and the fewer the
statements, the better the theory (at least, in terms of parsimony)
 A theory in psychology performs at least three functions: organization (a
framework for the systematic and orderly display of data), prediction (it
allows the scientist to generate predictions for situations in which no data
have been obtained), and explanation (it allows the scientist to interpret
results)
 Explanation cannot occur directly from prediction—it can occur only on the
basis of an experiment (sometimes several)
 Inferring causality requires not only relating two or more variables, but also
maintaining experimental control to rule out alternative causes
Chapter 2 continued:
 Nature of Scientific Explanation Continued:
 Intervening variables—these link independent variables
(IVs) to dependent variables (DVs) even though we cannot
directly observe them (e.g., perception and attention occur
between a stimulus and a response—we can directly
observe the latter two, but not the former two, although the
intervening variables are required for a complete
explanation
 Cognitive Psychology is based largely on unobservable intervening
variables—”systems engineering of the mind” (see Garner, Hake, and
Erickson, 1956)
Chapter 2 continued:
 Evaluating theories:
 Parsimony—the simplest theory is the best (Occam’s razor)
 Precision—theories based upon math equations or computer
programs have many advantages because they are more
precise than verbal statements
 Precision has advantages over parsimony in mature sciences because
it allows you to account for more results
 Testability—even some precise theories cannot be tested,
and this means they are not scientific theories
 Testability is the hallmark of science
Chapter 2 continued:
 The Science of Psychology:
 hard and soft science
 Applied versus basic research

 The importance of realism

 You must have internal validity to do science (ecological
validity is not required, but external validity is)
Chapter 3: Exploring the Literature in
Psychology
 How to do a literature search:
 Psychological Abstracts—contains brief abstracts of articles (150 words or less)
pertinent to psychology
 PsycINFO—an electronic reference service that covers more than 1300 journals
in psychology and related fields (e.g., neuroscience)
 Google—is a useful search engine for your beginning search on a topic
 Social Sciences Citation Index—can be used to search for articles or to
determine how many times and an article has been cited (this is used to evaluate
scholarship—e.g., for promotion processes)
 Academic Search Complete (EBSCO)—a very broad electronic reference service
for all of science (4,400 peer-reviewed journals)
 Use Advanced Search, though
Chapter 3 continued:
 Parts of an article:
 Title: Provides an idea of what the article is about
 Authors: knowing the authors’ past theoretical orientation can frequently
provide you with an idea of the approach that will be taken in this
article
 Abstract: “
A brief comprehensive summary of the contents of an article …” (p. 12,
Publication manual of the APA).
 Introduction: Specifies the problem to be studied, some shortcomings in
the present level of understanding, and how this study will attempt to
overcome some of these shortcomings
 It also specifies the hypotheses to be tested and the rationale behind these
predictions
 This is typically the most difficult portion of the paper to write
Chapter 3 continued:
 Parts of an article continued:
 Method—describes in detail the operations to be performed in the study. This section is
usually printed in smaller type than the rest of the article, but not always (e.g., JML)
 Contains subject, apparatus, materials, and procedures sections
 Results—describes the outcome of your experiment(s) and reports the statistical analyses
of your data
 Figures are easier to interpret, but they are not as precise for archival data purposes
 Discussion—this is the portion of the article in which the author restates the results in a
manner that allows readers to understand how the present results impacted upon theory,
and the theoretical implications of the study
 Frequently the Intro goes from general to specific, but the Discussion goes from specific (your results
in this study) to general (what implications these results have for broader theoretical issues)
 References—this is the section in which references are listed alphabetically, the first line is
not indented, but subsequent lines are
 This is a time-consuming part of writing a paper, but references are used as proof for your
contentions
 It is typically good to average at least two references per page of text
Chapter 4: Observational Research in
Psychology:
 Descriptive Observations—examine what behaviors occur and
in what frequency
 Four Types of Descriptive observations:
 Naturalistic observations: description of naturally occurring events
without intervention on the part of the investigator
 Ethology—the study of naturally occurring behavior (typically in the “wild”),
is the most common type of naturalistic observation
 Simply observing behavior is a good way to generate new research ideas,
but more systematic methods are typically needed in order to explain
naturally occurring phenomena
 E.g., how does a honey bee’s “waggle dance” specifiy the location and distance
of a food source?
Chapter 4 continued:
 Ethologists observe systematically by identifying different categories of
experience for the organism under study by recording the number of times
the organism engages in each behavior, the intensity of the interaction, and
the outcome
 These behaviors might be sub-divided into mating, grooming, fighting, eating,
and social hierarchies
 These behaviors are recorded in an ethogram—a relatively complete inventory of
specific behaviors performed by one species of animal
 Timberlake and Silva (1994) have argued that ethograms should be designed to
answer certain research questions rather than to describe and classify behavior
completely
 However, you cannot answer research questions using just observation—because you do not
have the experimental control to rule out alternative explanations
 E.g., the honey bee might fly in a certain direction because of the wind rather than to
show other bees where food is—or, perhaps, the bee is performing a “location” dance,
but is warning other bees of danger rather than the location of food
Chapter 4 continued:
 Ethology continued:
 Inter-observer reliability—this method is used to increase
the reliability of observations—it is when the observations
of two or more observers yield similar results when they
simultaneously observe the same behavior (using a
correlation coefficient)
 When anthropologists are studying people, though, it is
difficult to remain unbiased
 Frequently ethologists do not passively observe—instead they
actively observe (e.g., by becoming part of a tribe or a gorilla
hierarchy)
 In both passive and active approaches, it is difficult to prevent bias
from affecting results
Chapter 4 continued:
 Ethology: Examples:
 Tinbergen’s stickleback fish and sign stimuli and the
resulting fixed action patterns
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_action_pattern

 Lorenz’ geese and imprinting

Chapter 4 continued:
 The Case Study: an intense investigation of a particular instance of some behavior
(the “method clinique” of Piaget)
 While this approach is certain descriptive and may provide ideas for more careful
research (with better experimental control), it does NOT allow inferences of case-and-
effect
 E.g., child show different levels of conservation skills depending on the familiarity of the context (if
they are tested at home, they perform better than if they are tested in an unfamiliar setting)
 Deciding how cognitive development works based upon observing one’s own children is complicated
because of observer bias (e.g., Piaget thought that most children would develop formal operations,
but up to 50% of adults apparently do not)
 Deviant-case analysis—attempts to minimize the difficulties of making inferences by comparing two
similar cases that differ in specific ways
 The goal is to pinpoint, through careful comparison of two cases, the factors that are responsible for the
different outcome
 But you still have no experimental control to equate the two cases except for one IV
 H.M. and his loss of the ability to form new long-term episodic memories
 But it is probably difficult to generalize from H.M. to “normal” humans because of his brain damage
 In other words, we do not know if everything thing else is the same in H.M. except for his lesion (we
have no experimental control)
Chapter 4 continued:
 Survey Research—the techniques of obtaining a
limited amount of information from a large number of
people, usually through random or stratified sampling
 Proctor and Gamble example of detergent preferences
 See response styles below, though, for limitations

 Political poles show how hard it is to get respondents to

reply truthfully
Chapter 4 continued:
 Meta-Analysis—a relatively objective statistical
method for summarizing across the results of many
studies investigating a single topic
 Meta-analysis can help determine the external validity and
relative strength of a given phenomenon
 Psychological Bulletin is a psychology journal that emphasizes meta-
analyses
 Verhaeghen’s work on vocabulary performance and aging
Chapter 4 continued:
 Advantage of descriptive methods—this approach is useful in the early stages of research to
help generate research hypotheses
 However, it lacks the required experimental control to infer causality
 Also, while naturalistic observation emphasizes ecological validity (realism), this does not mean that it
has either internal validity or external validity
 Sources of Error in Descriptive Methods:
 It does not allow one to assess relations among events (determining antecedent conditions cannot be
done because there was no manipulation to determine this)
 Researcher bias is a problem because of the tendency to try to interpret the results rather than to
describe them
 Anthropomorphizing—attributing human characteristics to non-human animals that the non-human
animals do not possess
 Reactivity—when observations are influenced by (or are a reaction to) the detected presence of the
investigator
 This results in subject roles (a demand characteristic) that puts pressure on subjects to respond in a certain way
 In naturalistic observation, unobtrusive observation can be difficult to obtain
 Participant observation (when the observer become “one of the gang) causes at least as many problems as an
attempted solution
 Case Studies—are retrospective and thus typically involve both unmotivated (memory failure) and
motivated (repression) forgetting
Chapter 4 continued:
 Sources of Error in Descriptive Methods continued:
 Surveys,interviews, and tests can be biased by
response styles:
 Response acquiescence
 Response deviation
 Social desirability
 Volunteer problem
Chapter 5: Relational Research
 Relational Research—how two or more variables are related
to each other
 Usually relational (or correlational) research does not involve the
manipulation of variables (as is done in experiments), so data are
related ex post facto (or after-the-fact)
 The relationship occurs because of naturally occurring evens and not
necessarily because one variable causes another
 Without experimental control, you do not know whether some other variable
is mediating the relationship between the two variables that you are
observing
 E.g., our noted relationship between ice cream consumption and the probability
of murdering someone
 The third unobserved variable—temperature—is likely mediating the
relationship between ice cream consumption and the probability of murder
Chapter 5 continued:
 Types of relational research:
 Contingency Table Research (chi-square test of independence)—is used
when both of your variables are categorical (e.g., the relation between
major type and gender type)
 This method employs a tabular presentation of all combinations of categories
of two variables (which allows the relationships between the two variables to
be examined)
 A chi-square test of independence is used to determine whether these two
variables are independent, or not
 The null hypothesis is that major type and gender type are not related
(independent)
 The alternative hypothesis is that major type and gender type are related
(dependent)
 You do not know whether one variable caused the other, you just know if
they are related
Chapter 5 continued:
 Types of Relational Research continued:
 Correlational research methods and analysis are used when your two
variables are continuous (quantitative variables)—but you still do not
have experimental control
 This method allows one to determine both the degree (magnitude) and
direction of the relationship between two variables
 Correlation coefficient—a measure of the degree and direction of the
relationship between two variables
 It can vary from -1.00 to 0 (no relationship) to 1.00.
 The magnitude of the correlation coefficient indicates the degree of the
relationship between the two variables (e.g., .80 is stronger than .60)
 The sign of the correlation (positive or negative) indicates the direction of the
relationship (for positive, as x increases, y increases; for negative, as x increases,
y decreases)
Chapter 5 continued:
 Correlations continued:
 Examine the scatter diagram of plotted data points in x- and y-space to
make sure that there is a linear relationship (because you are using the
general linear model in least-squares estimation)
 If you have a linear scatter plot, then you can see whether you have a
positive correlation (positive slope) or a negative correlation (negative slope
 Correlation does not imply causation—it simply implies the existence of
a relationship
 Low correlations can occur because there is no effect, because you have
a non-linear scatter plot, because you have a truncated range, or
because you do not have enough statistical power to detect the effect
(i.e., you need a larger sample size
 examples
Chapter 5 continued:
 Correlations continued:
 Complex correlation procedures: cross-lagged-panel
correlations
 See example on TV watching and aggressive behavior
 In spite of this, though, we still do not know if some uncontrolled
third variable caused the relationship
Chapter 5 continued:
 Inferences of Causation require that internal validity holds (i.e., that you IV
really does cause the change on the DV)
 The real utility of correlational methods is their ability to predict, not to
explain
 In determining causation, things can get quite complicated because we can
have many proximate causes (immediate cause of death such as a heart
attack) but a hopefully a single ultimate cause (atherosclerosis)
 Therefore, we frequently are careful in not over-stating causes (because we are
not sure that we have the ultimate cause isolated in our experiment—it could just
be a proximate cause)
 E.g., time is the not the ultimate cause of aging decrements—processing that occur over
time are, but time is such a handy variable that we still use it as a label for
developmental causes