Psychology Unit 1

Researcher

& Ramey, 2014].) Even big data from a million or a billion mothers and their offspring couldn't tell us. To find answers to such questions—to isolate cause and effect—researchers (a research method in which an investigator manipulates one or more factors (independent variables) to observe the effect on some behavior or mental process (the dependent variable).

What does a good theory do?

(1) It organizes observed facts. (2) It implies hypotheses that offer testable predictions and, sometimes, practical applications. (3) It often stimulates further research.

How do we describe data using the three measures of central tendency?

A measure of central tendency is a single score that represents a whole set of scores. Three such measures are the mode (the most frequently occurring score), the mean (the arithmetic average), and the median (the middle score in a group of data).

Identical twins (left) have the same genes. This makes them ideal participants in studies designed to shed light on hereditary and environmental influences on personality, intelligence, and other traits. Fraternal twins (right) have different genes but often share a similar environment. Twin studies provide a wealth of findings—described in later modules—showing the importance of both nature and nurture. What type of experiment is this?

A nature-made nature-nurture experiment We can, for example, ask: Are gender differences biologically predisposed or socially constructed? Is children's grammar mostly innate or formed by experience? How are intelligence and personality differences influenced by heredity and by environment? Are sexual behaviors more "pushed" by inner biology or "pulled" by external incentives? Should we treat psychological disorders—depression, for example—as disorders of the brain, disorders of thought, or both? Such debates continue. Yet over and again we will see that in contemporary science the nature-nurture tension dissolves: Nurture works on what nature provides. Our species is biologically endowed with an enormous capacity to learn and adapt. Moreover, every psychological event (every thought, every emotion) is simultaneously a biological event. Thus, depression can be both a brain disorder and a thought disorder.

What is the difference between random sample and random assignment?

A random sample is a diverse and has lots of different sources where you select people. A random assignment is how you put them in random groups (you want it to be totally random, then experimental or controlled, i.e. you would not want to set it up via gender as that could affect results

Naturalistic observation

A second descriptive method records behavior in natural environments. These naturalistic observations range from watching chimpanzee societies in the jungle, to videotaping and analyzing parent-child interactions in different cultures, to recording racial differences in students' self-seating patterns in a school lunchroom.

The survey

A survey looks at many cases in less depth, asking people to report their behavior or opinions. Questions about everything from cell-phone use to political opinions are put to the public. In recent surveys: • half of all Americans reported experiencing more happiness and enjoyment than worry and stress on the previous day (Gallup, 2010). • 1 in 5 people across 22 countries report believing that alien beings have come to Earth and now walk among us disguised as humans (Ipsos, 2010). • 68 percent of all humans—some 5 billion people—say that religion is important in their daily lives (Diener et al., 2011). But asking questions is tricky, and the answers often depend on how questions are worded and how respondents are chosen.

What does it mean when we say two things are correlated, and what are positive and negative correlations?

A. Correlation is the degree to which two variables are related, and how well one predicts the other. B. In a positive correlation, two factors increase or decrease together. In a negative correlation, one variable increases as the other decreases. C. A correlation coefficient describes the strength and direction of a relationship between two variables, from +1.00 (a perfect positive correlation) through zero (no correlation at all) to −1.00 (a perfect negative correlation). D. The relationship may be displayed in a scatterplot, in which each dot represents a value for the two variables.

How do psychologists use case studies, naturalistic observations, and surveys to observe and describe behavior, and why is random sampling important?

A. Description methods, which include case studies, naturalistic observations, and surveys, show us what can happen, and they may offer ideas for further study. B. The best basis for generalizing about a population is a representative sample; in a random sample, every person in the entire population being studied has an equal chance of participating. C. Descriptive methods describe but do not explain behavior, because these methods do not control for the many variables that can affect behavior.

The Scientific Attitude (curiosity)

A. Does it work? B. When put to the test, can it's predictions be confirmed? a. Example: Can some people read minds? Are stress levels related to health and well-being? No one has yet been able to demonstrate extrasensory mind-reading?

Representative samples are better than biased samples.

As noted in Module 5, the best basis for generalizing is not from the exceptional and memorable cases one finds at the extremes but from a representative sample of cases. Research never randomly samples the whole human population. Thus, it pays to keep in mind what population a study has sampled.

How is psychology a science, and why is it the "rat is always right"?

Psychology's findings are the result of careful observation and testing, and the so-called "rat" (as in a psychologist's maze, for example) is always right, because the facts are the facts even when we find them surprising.

Humanistic psychology

As the behaviorists had rejected the early 1900's definition of psychology, other groups rejected the behaviorist definition. In the 1960s, humanistic psychologists led by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, found both behaviorism and Freudian psychology too limiting. Rather than focusing on conditioned responses or childhood memories, the humanistic psychologists focused on our potential for personal growth. (More about the humanistic psychologists in Module 62.)

Less-variable observations are more reliable than those that are more variable.

As we noted earlier in the example of the basketball player whose game-to-game points were consistent, an average is more reliable when it comes from scores with low variability.

What are the three aspects of The Biopsychosocial approach?

Biological influence, Psychological influences, and Social-cultural influences, which are all behavior or mental processes

a factor other than the factor being studied that might influence a study's results

Confounding variables

Frequently asked questions in psychology

Does behavior depend on one's culture and gender? Why do psychologists study animals, and is it ethical to experiment on animals? Is it ethical to experiment on people? Is psychology free of value judgements?

If a scientific idea seems super crazy, what would the smarter thinker always ask?

Does it work? When put to the test, do the data support its predictions? Even if it seems so crazy, it can sometimes find support

Descriptive statistics: measures of central tendency

Mean, median, mode, standard deviation

Independent, dependent, and confounding variables

Here is a practical experiment: In a not yet published study, Victor Benassi and his colleagues gave college psychology students frequent in-class quizzes. Some items served merely as review—students were given questions with answers. Other self-testing items required students to actively produce the answers. When tested weeks later on a final exam, students did far better on material on which they had been tested (75 percent correct) rather than merely reviewed (51 percent correct). By a wide margin, testing beat restudy. This simple experiment manipulated just one variable: the study procedure (reading answers versus self-testing). We call this experimental factor the independent variable (in an experiment, the factor that is manipulated; the variable whose effect is being studied) because we can vary it independently of other factors, such as the students' memories, intelligence, and age. These other factors that can potentially influence a study's results are called confounding variables (a factor other than the factor being studied that might influence a study's results). Random assignment controls for possible confounding variables. Experiments examine the effect of one or more independent variables on some measurable behavior, called the dependent variable (in an experiment, the outcome that is measured; the variable that may change when the independent variable is manipulated) because it can vary depending on what takes place during the experiment. Both variables are given precise operational definitions, which specify the procedures that manipulate the independent variable (the review versus self-testing study method in this experiment) or measure the dependent variable (final exam performance). These definitions answer the "What do you mean?" question with a level of precision that enables others to replicate the study. (See Figure 6.3 for the previously mentioned British breast-milk experiment's design.)

Experimental method used to test hypotheses

Here, the researcher manipulates one or more factors (the independent variables) to observe the effect on some behavior or mental process (the dependent variable). By random sample AND random assignment of participants, the experimenter aims to control other relevant factors.

What cognitive illusion is The Yates Family?

Hindsight bias

What cognitive illusion is "I knew it all along..."?

Hindsight bias Example: 9/11 (the day before no one ever thought this would occur, but the day after people said that the evidence was right in front of them)

Three major cognitive illusions

Hindsight bias Overconfidence Perceiving order in random events

Why are the answers that flow from the scientific approach more reliable than those based on intuition and common sense?

Hindsight bias Perceiving order in random events Overconfidence

We can trace many of psychology's current questions back to...

Historic philosophical and physiological approaches. These early thinkers wondered: How does our mind work? How does our body relate to our mind? How much of what we know comes built in? How much is acquired through experience?

Functionalism

Hoping to assemble the mind's structure from simple elements was rather like trying to understand a car by examining its disconnected parts. Philosopher-psychologist William James thought it would be more fruitful to consider the evolved functions of our thoughts and feelings. Smelling is what the nose does; thinking is what the brain does. But why do the nose and brain do these things? Under the influence of evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin, James assumed that thinking, like smelling, developed because it was adaptive—it helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. Consciousness serves a function. It enables us to consider our past, adjust to our present, and plan our future. As a functionalist, James studied down-to-earth emotions, memories, willpower, habits, and moment-to-moment streams of consciousness. James' greatest legacy, however, came less from his laboratory than from his Harvard teaching and his writing. When not plagued by ill health and depression, James was an impish, outgoing, and joyous man, who once recalled that "the first lecture on psychology I ever heard was the first I ever gave." During one of his wise-cracking lectures, a student interrupted and asked him to get serious (Hunt, 1993). He loved his students, his family, and the world of ideas, but he tired of painstaking chores such as proofreading. "Send me no proofs!" he once told an editor. "I will return them unopened and never speak to you again" (Hunt, 1993, p. 145). James' writings moved the publisher Henry Holt to offer James a contract for a textbook on the new science of psychology. James agreed and began work in 1878, with an apology for requesting two years to finish his writing. The text proved an unexpected chore and actually took him 12 years. (Why are we not surprised?) More than a century later, people still read the resulting Principles of Psychology (1890) and marvel at the brilliance and elegance with which James introduced psychology to the educated public.

Psychology's Approaches: Social-cultural

How behavior and thinking very across situations and cultures —How are we alike as members of one human family? How do we differ as products of our environment?

Psychology's Approaches: Psychodynamic

How behavior springs from unconscious drives and conflicts —How can someone's personality traits and disorders be explained by unfulfilled wishes and childhood traumas?

Psychology's Approaches: Biological

How the body and brain enable emotions, memories, and sensory experiences; how genes combine with environment to influence individual differences —How do pain messages travel from the head to the brain? How is blood chemistry linked with moods and motives? To what extent are traits such as intelligences, personality, sexual orientation, and depression attributable to our genes? To our environment?

Psychology's Approaches: Evolutionary

How the natural selection of traits has promoted the survival of genes —How does evolution influence behavior tendencies?

Psychology's Approaches: Cognitive

How we encode, process, store, and retrieve information —How do we use information in remembering? Reasoning? Solving problems?

Psychology's Approaches: Behavioral

How we learn observable responses —How do we learn to fear particular objects or situations? What is the most effective way to alter our behavior, say, to loose weight?

Psychology's Approaches: Humanistic

How we meet out needs for love and acceptance and achieve self-fulfillment —How can we work toward fulfilling our potential? How can we overcome barriers to our personal growth?

What are the three main components of the scientific attitude?

Humility Skepticism Curiosity

An awareness of our own vulnerability to error and an openness to new perspectives

Humility (which is a scientific attitude that explains "the rat is always right."

a testable prediction, often implied by a theory

Hypotheses

perceiving a relationship where none exists, or perceiving a stronger-than-actual relationship

Illusory correlation

Regression toward the mean

Illusory correlations can feed an illusion of control—that chance events are subject to our personal control. Gamblers, remembering their lucky rolls, may come to believe they can influence the roll of the dice by again throwing gently for low numbers and hard for high numbers. The illusion that uncontrollable events correlate with our actions is also fed by a statistical phenomenon called regression toward the mean. Average results are more typical than extreme results. Thus, after an unusual event, things tend to return toward their average level; extraordinary happenings tend to be followed by more ordinary ones.

Charles Darwins principle of natural selection

In 1831, an indifferent student but ardent collector of beetles, mollusks, and shells set sail on a historic round-the-world journey. The 22-year-old voyager, Charles Darwin, pondered the incredible species variation he encountered, including tortoises on one island that differed from those on nearby islands. Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species explained this diversity by proposing the evolutionary process of natural selection: From among chance variations, nature selects traits that best enable an organism to survive and reproduce in a particular environment. Darwin's principle of natural selection most likely be passed on to succeeding generations.)—what philosopher Daniel Dennett (1996) has called "the single best idea anyone has ever had"—is still with us 150+ years later as biology's organizing principle. Evolution also has become an important principle for twenty-first-century psychology. This would surely have pleased Darwin, who believed his theory explained not only animal structures (such as a polar bear's white coat) but also animal behaviors (such as the emotional expressions associated with human lust and rage).

Prescientific psychology

In ancient Greece, the philosopher-teacher Socrates (469-399 b.c.e.) and his student Plato (428-348 b.c.e.) concluded that mind is separable from body and continues after the body dies, and that knowledge is innate—born within us. Unlike Socrates and Plato, who derived principles by logic, Plato's student Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) loved data. An intellectual ancestor of today's scientists, Aristotle derived principles from careful observations. Moreover, he said knowledge is not preexisting (sorry, Socrates and Plato); instead it grows from the experiences stored in our memories. The next 2000 years brought few enduring new insights into human nature, but that changed in the 1600s, when modern science began to flourish. With it came new theories of human behavior and new versions of the ancient debates. A frail but brilliant Frenchman named René Descartes [day-CART] (1595-1650) agreed with Socrates and Plato about the existence of innate ideas and mind's being "entirely distinct from body" and able to survive its death. Descartes' concept of mind forced him to wonder, as people have ever since, how the immaterial mind and physical body communicate. A scientist as well as a philosopher, Descartes dissected animals and concluded that the fluid in the brain's cavities contained "animal spirits." These spirits, he surmised, flowed from the brain through what we call the nerves (which he thought were hollow) to the muscles, provoking movement. Memories formed as experiences opened pores in the brain into which the animal spirits also flowed. Descartes was right that nerve paths are important and that they enable reflexes. Yet, genius though he was, and standing upon the knowledge accumulated from 99+ percent of our human history, he hardly had a clue of what today's average 12-year-old knows. Indeed, most of the scientific story of our self-exploration—the story told in this book—has been written in but the last historical eye-blink of human time. Meanwhile, across the English Channel in Britain, science was taking a more down-to-earth form, centered on experiment, experience, and commonsense judgment. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) became one of the founders of modern science, and his influence lingers in the experiments of today's psychological science. Bacon also was fascinated by the human mind and its failings. Anticipating what we have come to appreciate about our mind's hunger to perceive patterns even in random events, he wrote that "the human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds" (Novum Organuum, 1620). Some 50 years after Bacon's death, John Locke (1632-1704), a British political philosopher, sat down to write a one-page essay on "our own abilities" for an upcoming discussion with friends. After 20 years and hundreds of pages, Locke had completed one of history's greatest late papers (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding). In it he famously argued that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa—a "blank slate"—on which experience writes. This idea, adding to Bacon's ideas, helped form modern empiricism, the idea that what we know comes from experience, and that observation and experimentation enable scientific knowledge.

The arithmetic average of a distribution of scores is the _________. The score that shows up most often is the _________. The score right in the middle of a distribution (half the scores above it; half below) is the _________. We determine how much scores vary around the average in a way that includes information about the _________ of scores (difference between highest and lowest) by using the _________ _________ formula.

Mean; mode; median; range; standard deviation

The SQR3

The SQ3R (a study method incorporating five steps: Survey, Question, Read, Retrieve, Review) study method incorporates these principles (McDaniel et al., 2009; Robinson, 1970). SQ3R is an acronym for its five steps: Survey, Question, Read, Retrieve,2 Review. We have organized this book in a way that facilitates your use of the SQ3R study system.

How did psychology develop from early understandings of mind and body to the beginnings of modern science?

The ancient Greeks—Plato and Aristotle—pondered whether mind and body are connected or distinct, and whether human ideas are innate or result from experience. Descartes and Locke reengaged those ancient debates, with Locke offering his famous description of the mind as a "blank slate" on which experience writes. The ideas of Bacon and Locke contributed to the development of modern empiricism.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

The controversial ideas of this famed personality theorist and therapist have influenced humanity's self-understanding.

You hear the school basketball coach telling her friend that she rescued her team's winning streak by yelling at the players after an unusually bad first half. What is another explanation of why the team's performance improved?

The team's poor performance was not their typical behavior. The return to their normal—their winning streak—may just have been a case of regression toward the mean.

in an experiment, the group exposed to the treatment, that is, to one version of the independent variable

experimental group

T or F: Doubt big, round, undocumented numbers. If you read that there are one million missing children, two million homeless, or three million spouse abusers, you can be pretty sure that someone is guessing. If they want to emphasize the problem, they will be motivated to guess big. If they want to minimize the problem, they will guess small.

True

A key goal of experimental design is

Validity (the extent to which a test or experiment measures or predicts what it is supposed to), which means the experiment will test what it is supposed to test. In the rental housing experiment, we might ask, "Did the e-mail inquiries test the effect of perceived ethnicity? Did the landlords' response actually vary with the ethnicity of the name?"

a bar graph depicting a frequency distribution

histogram

in an experiment, the factor that is manipulated; the variable whose effect is being studied

independent variable

numerical data that allow one to generalize—to infer from sample data the probability of something being true of a population

inferential statistics

experimental results caused by expectations alone; any effect on behavior caused by the administration of an inert substance or condition, which the recipient assumes is an active agent

placebo effect

Replicate

repeating the essence of a research study, usually with different participants in different situations, to see whether the basic finding can be reproduced

a representation of scores that lack symmetry around their average value

skewed distribution

Empiricism

the idea that knowledge comes from experience and that observation and experimentation enable scientific knowledge

What is cognitive neuroscience?

the interdisciplinary study of the brain activity linked with cognition (including perception, thinking, memory, and language

What is natural selection?

the principle that inherited traits that better enable an organism to survive and reproduce in a particular environment will (in competition with other trait variations

What does introspection mean?

the process of looking inward in an attempt to directly observe one's own psychological processes

What is cognitive psychology?

the study of mental processes, such as occur when we perceive, learn, remember, think, communicate, and solve problems

What is evolutionary psychology?

the study of the evolution of behavior and the mind, using principles of natural selection

What is behavior ethics?

the study of the relative power and limits of genetic and environmental influences on behavior

What is hindsight bias?

the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it) (also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon)

Masters and Johnson Experiments

who: william masters, virginia johnson What: research conducted to study physiology of human sexuality When: 1957-1990s whether or not it is ethical to use humans as subjects for studies of intercourse : - Is it an invasion of privacy to observe humans? - Strongly encouraged subjects to engage in intercourse with strangers for the sake of the experiment

Examples of overconfidence as a cognitive illusion

"Man will never reach this moon...." "Impossible!" "Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within 10 years." "There is no reason for...."

A natural observer

"Observations, made in the natural habitat, helped to show that the societies and behavior of animals are far more complex than previously supposed," chimpanzee observer Jane Goodall noted (1998).

The Biopsychosocial approach: Psychological influences

-learned fears and other learned expectations -emotional responses -cognitive processing and perceptual interpretations

The Biopsychosocial approach: Biological Influences

-natural selection of adaptive traits -genetic predispositions responding to the environment -brain mechanisms -hormonal influences

The Biopsychosocial approach: Social-cultural influences

-presence of others -cultural, societal, and family expectations -peer and other group influences -compelling models (such as the media)

Is it ethical to experiment on humans? What are the five keep attributes to ethical experiments?

1. Participation should be voluntary 2. Participants must give their consent to the experimenters/study 3. Confidentiality 4. No harm done in the study 5. Debriefing

In deciding when it is safe to generalize from a sample, we should keep three principles in mind:

1. Representative samples are better than biased samples 2. Less variable observations are more reliable than those that are more variable 3. More cases are better than fewer

Scatterplots

A graphed cluster of dots, each of which represents the values of two variables. The slope of the points suggests the direction of the relationship between the two variables. The amount of scatter suggests the strength of the correlation (little scatter indicates high correlation) can be very revealing. Each dot in a scatterplot represents the values of two variables. The three scatterplots in Figure 6.1 illustrate the range of possible correlations from a perfect positive to a perfect negative. (Perfect correlations rarely occur in the real world.) A correlation is positive if two sets of scores, such as for height and weight, tend to rise or fall together. • Scatterplots, showing patterns of correlation: Correlation—abbreviated r—can range from +1.00 (scores for one variable increase in direct proportion to scores for another), to 0.00 (no relationship), to -1.00 (scores for one variable decrease precisely as scores rise for the other). Saying that a correlation is "negative" says nothing about its strength. A correlation is negative if two sets of scores relate inversely, one set going up as the other goes down. The correlation between standing people's height and the distance from their head to the ceiling is strongly (perfectly, in fact) negative.

A researcher is conducting a study and wants to ensure that the sample chosen to participate will yield good results. a. Why is it better to have a large sample of data instead of a small sample? b. What happens to reliability as sample size increases?

A larger sample will be less variable (for example, a large sample from a population with 40 percent women and 60 percent men will be more likely to be close to that demographic breakdown than a smaller sample). As the sample size increases, the results are more likely to be reliable (represent the opinions) of the population as a whole.

How do hindsight bias, overconfidence, and the tendency to perceive order in random events illustrate why science-based answers are more valid than those based on common sense?

A. Hindsight bias (also called the "I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon") is the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that we would have foreseen it. B. Overconfidence in our judgments results partly from our bias to seek information that confirms them. C. These tendencies, along with our eagerness to perceive patterns in random events, lead us to overestimate the weight of commonsense thinking. Although limited by the testable questions it can address, scientific inquiry can help us overcome such biases and shortcomings.

What are illusory correlations, and what is regression toward the mean?

A. Illusory correlations are random events that we notice and falsely assume are related. B. Regression toward the mean is the tendency for extreme or unusual scores to fall back toward their average.

What is the relative usefulness of the two measures of variation?

A. Measures of variation tell us how diverse data are. Two measures of variation are the range (which describes the gap between the highest and lowest scores) and the standard deviation (which states how much scores vary around the mean, or average, score). B. The range offers only a crude measure of how much the data vary; the standard deviation is far better at giving researchers a clear understanding of variation. C. Scores often form a normal (or bell-shaped) curve.

Why do we need statistics in psychology and in everyday life?

A. Psychological researchers use statistics to measure variables and interpret results. B. All of us benefit from a basic understanding of statistics, which helps us think smarter about medical advice and news reports of all kinds.

How would you know which research design to use?

A. Psychological scientists design studies and choose research methods that will best provide meaningful results. B. Researchers generate testable questions, and then carefully consider the best design to use in studying those questions (experimental, correlational, case study, naturalistic observation, twin study, longitudinal, or cross-sectional). C. Next, psychologists measure the variables they are studying, and finally they interpret their results, keeping possible confounding variables in mind.

How do theories advance psychological science?

A. Psychological theories are explanations that apply an integrated set of principles to organize observations and generate hypotheses—predictions that can be used to check the theory or produce practical applications of it. By testing their hypotheses, researchers can confirm, reject, or revise their theories. B. To enable other researchers to replicate the studies, researchers report them using precise operational definitions of their procedures and concepts. If others achieve similar results, confidence in the conclusion will be greater.

How do values affect psychological science?

A. Psychologists' values influence their choice of research topics, their theories and observations, their labels for behavior, and their professional advice. B. Applications of psychology's principles have been used mainly in the service of humanity.

The Scientific Attitude (humility)

A. Researchers must be willing to be surprised and follow new ideas. People and other animals don't always behave as our ideas and beliefs would predict. B. The rat is always right

What are descriptive statistics?

A. Researchers use descriptive statistics to measure and describe characteristics of groups under study, often using a histogram to display data. B. Descriptive statistics include measures of central tendency and measures of variation.

What are inferential statisitics?

A. Researchers use inferential statistics to determine the probability of their findings being also true of the larger population. B. Inferential statistics include ways of determining the reliability and significance of an observed difference between the results for different groups.

Why do psychologists study animals, and what ethical guidelines safeguard animal research subjects?

A. Some psychologists are primarily interested in animal behavior; others want to better understand the physiological and psychological processes shared by humans and other species. B. Government agencies have established standards for animal care and housing. Professional associations and funding agencies also have guidelines for protecting animals' well-being.

What is the biopsychosocial approach, and what are psychology's main theoretical perspectives?

A. The biopsychosocial approach integrates information from three differing but complementary viewpoints: biological, psychological, and social-cultural. B. This approach offers a more complete understanding than could usually be reached by relying on only one of psychology's theoretical perspectives (behavioral, biological, cognitive, evolutionary, humanistic, psychodynamic, and social-cultural).

How has contemporary psychology focused on cognition, biology and experience, culture and gender, and human flourishing?

A. The cognitive revolution in the 1960s led psychology back to its early interest in the mind, and its current definition as the science of behavior and mental processes. B. Our growing understanding of biology and experience has fed psychology's most enduring debate. The nature-nurture issue centers on the relative contributions of genes and experience, and their interaction in specific environments. C. Charles Darwin's view that natural selection shapes behaviors as well as bodies led to evolutionary psychology's study of our similarities because of our common biology and evolutionary history, and behavior genetics' focus on the relative power and limits of genetic and environmental influences on behavior. D. Cross-cultural and gender studies have diversified psychology's assumptions while also reminding us of our similarities. Attitudes and behaviors may vary somewhat by gender or across cultures, but because of our shared human kinship, the underlying processes and principles are more similar than different. E. Psychology's traditional focus on understanding and treating troubles has expanded with positive psychology's call for more research on human flourishing and its attempt to discover and promote traits that help people to thrive.

How can psychological principles help you learn, remember, and thrive, and do better on the AP® exam?

A. The testing effect shows that learning and memory are enhanced by actively retrieving, rather than simply rereading, previously studied material. B. The SQ3R study method—survey, question, read, retrieve, and review—applies principles derived from memory research and can help you learn and remember material. C. Four additional study tips are (1) distribute your study time, (2) learn to think critically, (3) process class information actively, and (4) overlearn. D. Psychological research has shown that people who live happy, thriving lives (1) manage their time to get a full night's sleep, (2) make space for exercise, (3) have a growth mindset, and (4) prioritize relationships.

What are the characteristics of experimentation that make it possible to isolate cause and effect?

A. To discover cause-effect relationships, psychologists conduct experiments, manipulating one or more variables of interest and controlling other variables. B. Using random assignment, they can minimize confounding variables, such as preexisting differences between the experimental group (exposed to the treatment) and the control group (given a placebo or different version of the treatment). C. The independent variable is the factor the experimenter manipulates to study its effect; the dependent variable is the factor the experimenter measures to discover any changes occurring in response to the manipulation of the independent variable. D. Studies may use a double-blind procedure to avoid the placebo effect and researcher's bias. E. An experiment has validity if it tests what it is supposed to test.

How do we know whether an observed difference can be generalized to other populations?

A. To feel confident about generalizing an observed difference to other populations, we would need to know that the difference was reliable and also significant. B. Reliable differences are based on samples that: a. are representative of the larger population being studied, b. demonstrate low variability, on average; and c. consist of many cases. C. We can say that an observed difference has statistical significance if the sample averages are reliable and when the difference between them is large.

The Scientific Attitude (skepticism)

A. What do you mean? B. How do you know? C. Shifting reality from fantasy requires a healthy skepticism— an attitude that is not cynical (doubting everything), but also not gullible (believing everything) a. Example: Do our facial expressions and body postures affect how we actually feel? Our facial expressions and body postures can affect how we feel. Do parental behaviors determine children's sexual orientation— or not? There is not a relationship between parental behaviors and a child's sexual orientation.

Descriptive statistics: measures of central tendency (mean)

Arithmetic average

The case study

Among the oldest research methods, the case study (a descriptive technique in which one individual or group is studied in depth in the hope of revealing universal principles) examines one individual or group in depth in the hope of revealing things true of us all. • Brain damage. Much of our early knowledge about the brain came from case studies of individuals who suffered particular impairments after damage to a certain brain region. • Children's minds. Jean Piaget taught us about children's thinking after carefully observing and questioning only a few children. • Animal intelligence. Studies of various animals, including only a few chimpanzees, have revealed their capacity for understanding and language.

More cases are better than fewer

An eager high school senior visits two university campuses, each for a day. At the first, the student randomly attends two classes and discovers both instructors to be witty and engaging. At the next campus, the two sampled instructors seem dull and uninspiring. Returning home, the student (discounting the small sample size of only two teachers at each institution) tells friends about the "great teachers" at the first school and the "bores" at the second. Again, we know it but we ignore it: Averages based on many cases are more reliable (less variable) than averages based on only a few cases. After noticing that small schools were overrepresented among the most successful schools, several foundations invested in splitting larger schools into smaller ones—without realizing that small schools were also overrepresented among the least successful, because schools with fewer students have more variable outcomes (Kahneman, 2011). Again, more cases make for a more reliable average.

What is an unrepresentative sample, and how do researchers avoid it?

An unrepresentative sample is a group that does not represent the population being studied. Random sampling helps researchers form a representative sample, because each member of the population has an equal chance of being included.

How are animal subjects and human research participants protected?

Animal protection legislation, laboratory regulation and inspection, and local and university ethics committees (which screen research proposals) work to safeguard animal welfare. International psychological organizations urge researchers involving human participants to obtain informed consent, protect them from greater-than-usual harm and discomfort, treat their personal information confidentially, and debrief them fully at the end of the experiment.

What has been psychology's biggest and most persistent issue?

Are our human traits inherited, or do they develop through experience?

The nature-nurture issue

Are our human traits inherited, or do they develop through experience? This has been psychology's biggest and most persistent issue. As we have seen, the debate over the nature-nurture issue is ancient. The ancient Greeks debated this, with Socrates and Plato assuming that we inherit character and intelligence and that certain ideas are also inborn, and Aristotle countering that there is nothing in the mind that does not first come in from the external world through the senses. In the 1600s, philosophers rekindled the debate. Locke rejected the notion of inborn ideas, suggesting that the mind is a blank slate on which experience writes. Descartes disagreed, believing that some ideas are innate. Descartes' views gained support from a curious naturalist two centuries later.

The Scientific Method

At the foundation of all science is a scientific attitude that combines curiosity, skepticism, and humility (see Module 1). Psychologists arm their scientific attitude with the scientific method—a self-correcting process for evaluating ideas with observation and analysis. Psychological science welcomes hunches and plausible-sounding theories. And it puts them to the test. If a theory works—if the data support its predictions—so much the better for that theory. If its predictions fail, the theory gets revised or rejected. Chatting with friends and family, we often use theory to mean "mere hunch." Someone might, for example, discount evolution as "only a theory"—as if it were mere speculation. In science, a theory explains behaviors or events by offering ideas that organize observations. By using deeper principles to organize isolated facts, a theory summarizes and simplifies. As we connect the observed dots, a coherent picture emerges. A theory of how sleep affects memory, for example, helps us organize countless sleep-related observations into a short list of principles. Imagine that we observe over and over that people with good sleep habits tend to answer questions correctly in class and do well at test time. We might therefore theorize that sleep improves memory. So far so good: Our principle neatly summarizes a list of observations about the effects of a good night's sleep. Yet no matter how reasonable a theory may sound—and it does seem reasonable to suggest that sleep boosts memory—we must put it to the test. A good theory produces testable predictions, called hypotheses. Such predictions specify what results would support the theory and what results would disconfirm it. To test our theory about sleep effects on memory, our hypothesis might be that when sleep deprived, people will remember less from the day before. To test that hypothesis, we might assess how well people remember course materials they studied either before a good night's sleep or before a shortened night's sleep (Figure 5.1). The results will either support our theory or lead us to revise or reject it.

Descriptive methods used to test a hypothesis are done in three ways. What are the attributes and limitations of a case study?

Attributes -can be used as a source of insight and ideas -used to describe rare phenomena like presidential assassins or serial killers -can be used in psycho biographies to help better understand people like da Vinci, Gandhi, or F.D.R Limitations -no evidence provided to test behavioral theories (for wider groups- Andrea Yates was not typical mother behavior) -Singular observer/observee lends to bias and uniqueness (ex; father tries to understand mothers situation)

Descriptive method used to test a hypothesis are done in three ways. What are the attributes and limitations of survey?

Attributes -can gather large amount of data in a relatively short time -data results can offer a broad, high level view of behavior and/or thought processes Limitations -survey apprehension (not wanting to come across in a bad way) -the "wording effect" is powerful and will skew your results if not careful -must conduct random sampling of participants

Can you solve this puzzle? The registrar's office at the University of Michigan has found that usually about 100 students in Arts and Sciences have perfect grades at the end of their first term at the university. However, only about 10 to 15 students graduate with perfect grades. What do you think is the most likely explanation for the fact that there are more perfect grades after one term than at graduation (Jepson et al., 1983)?

Averages based on fewer courses are more variable, which guarantees a greater number of extremely low and high grades at the end of the first term.

Correlational research method

Basic purpose: to detect naturally occurring relationships; to assess how well one variable predicts another How conducted: collect data on two or more variables; no manipulation What is manipulated: nothing Strengths: works with large groups of data, and may be used in situations where an experiment would not be ethical or possible Weaknesses: does not specify cause and effect

Experimental research method

Basic purpose: to explore cause and effect How conducted: manipulate one or more variables; use random assignment What is manipulated: the independent variable(s) Strengths: specifies cause and effect, and variables are controlled Weaknesses: sometimes not feasible; results may not generalize to other contexts; not ethical to manipulate certain variables

Descriptive research method

Basic purpose: to observe and record behavior How conducted: do case studies, naturalistic observations, or surveys What is manipulated: nothing Strengths: case studies require only one participant; naturalistic observations may be done when it is not ethical to manipulate variables; surveys may be done quickly and inexpensively (compared with experiments) Weaknesses: uncontrolled variables mean cause and affect cannot be determined, single cases may be misleading

Psychology's first schools of thought

Before long, this new science of psychology became organized into different branches, or schools of thought, each promoted by pioneering thinkers. These early schools included structuralism, functionalism, and behaviorism, described here (with more on behaviorism in Modules 26-30), and two schools described in later modules: Gestalt psychology (Module 23) and psychoanalysis (Module 60).

What is psychology the study of?

Behavior and mental processes

Biological, Psychological, and Social-cultural influences are all

Behavior or mental processes

From the 1920s to the 1960s, the two major forces in psychology were ___________ and ___________ psychology.

Behavioralism; Freudian

What advantage do we gain by using the biopsychosocial approach in studying psychological events?

By incorporating these three key viewpoints, the biopsychosocial approach can provide a more complete view than any one perspective could offer.

Experimental and control group

By random assignment of participants, the experimenter aims to control other relevant factors.) must experiment. Experiments enable researchers to isolate the effects of one or more factors by (1) manipulating the factors of interest and (2) holding constant ("controlling") other factors. To do so, they often create an experimental group (in an experiment, the group exposed to the treatment, that is, to one version of the independent variable), in which people receive the treatment, and a contrasting control group (in an experiment, the group not exposed to the treatment; contrasts with the experimental group and serves as a comparison for evaluating the effect of the treatment) that does not receive the treatment.

When ideas compete, what occurs to see which one best matches the facts?

Careful testing

Descriptive methods used to test a hypothesis are done in three ways

Case Study Survey Naturalistic Observation

We cannot assume that case studies always reveal general principles that apply to all of us. Why not?

Case studies involve only one individual or group, so we can't know for sure whether the principles observed would apply to a larger population.

What are some strengths and weaknesses of the three different methods psychologists use to describe behavior—case studies, naturalistic observation, and surveys?

Case studies offer in-depth insights that may offer clues to what's true of others—or may, if the case is atypical, mislead. Naturalistic observation enables the study of behavior undisturbed by researchers. But the lack of control may leave cause and effect ambiguous. Surveys can accurately reveal the tendencies of large populations. But if the questions are leading, or if non-random samples are queried, the results can again mislead us.

Cognitive psychology + neuroscience=

Cognitive neuroscience

The science of brain

Cognitive neuroscience

The science of mind

Cognitive psychology

Psychology as an influence to modern culture

Psychology also influences modern culture. Knowledge transforms us. Learning about the solar system and the germ theory of disease alters the way people think and act. Learning about psychology's findings also changes people: They less often judge psychological disorders as moral failings, treatable by punishment and ostracism. They less often regard and treat women as men's mental inferiors. They less often view and raise children as ignorant, willful beasts in need of taming. "In each case," noted Morton Hunt (1990, p. 206), "knowledge has modified attitudes, and, through them, behavior." Once aware of psychology's well-researched ideas—about how body and mind connect, how a child's mind grows, how we construct our perceptions, how we learn and remember, how people across the world are alike (and different)—your mind may never again be quite the same. But bear in mind psychology's limits. Don't expect it to answer the ultimate questions, such as those posed by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1904): "Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?" Although many of life's significant questions are beyond psychology, some very important ones are illuminated by even a first psychology course. Through painstaking research, psychologists have gained insights into brain and mind, dreams and memories, depression and joy. Even the unanswered questions can renew our sense of mystery about things we do not yet understand. And, as you will see in Modules 4-8, your study of psychology can help teach you how to ask and answer important questions as you evaluate competing ideas and claims. Psychology deepens our appreciation for how we humans perceive, think, feel, and act. By so doing it can enrich our lives and enlarge our vision. Through this book we hope to help guide you toward that end. As educator Charles Eliot said a century ago: "Books are the quietest and most constant of friends, and the most patient of teachers."

double-blind procedure

Consider, then, how we might assess therapeutic interventions. Our tendency to seek new remedies when we are ill or emotionally down can produce misleading testimonies. If three days into a cold we start taking zinc tablets and find our cold symptoms lessening, we may credit the pills rather than the cold naturally subsiding. In the 1700s, bloodletting seemed effective. People sometimes improved after the treatment; when they didn't, the practitioner inferred the disease was too advanced to be reversed. So, whether or not a remedy is truly effective, enthusiastic users will probably endorse it. To determine its effect, we must control for other variables. And that is precisely how new medications and new methods of psychological therapy are evaluated (Modules 72 and 73). Investigators randomly assign participants in these studies to research groups. One group receives a treatment (such as a medication). The other group receives a pseudotreatment—an inert placebo (perhaps a pill with no drug in it). The participants are often blind (uninformed) about what treatment, if any, they are receiving. If the study is using a double-blind procedure (an experimental procedure in which both the research participants and the research staff are ignorant (blind) about whether the research participants have received the treatment or a placebo. Commonly used in drug-evaluation studies), neither the participants nor those who administer the drug and collect the data will know which group is receiving the treatment. Thus neither participants' or researchers' expectations can bias the results.

Correlational method used to test hypotheses

Correlational studies uncover naturally occurring relationships, assessing the statistical association (called the "correlation coefficient") between two factors which indicates how well one thing predicts the other.

Why do correlations enable prediction, but not cause-effect explanation?

Correlations enable prediction because they show how two factors are related—either positively or negatively. A correlation can indicate the possibility of a cause-effect relationship, but it does not prove the direction of the influence, or whether an underlying third factor may explain the correlation.

Illusory correlation

Correlations not only make visible the relationships we might otherwise miss, they also restrain our "seeing" nonexistent relationships. When we believe there is a relationship between two things, we are likely to notice and recall instances that confirm our belief. If we believe that dreams forecast actual events, we may notice and recall confirming instances more than disconfirming instances. The result is an illusory correlation.

Thinking that does not blindly accept arguments and conclusions. Rather, it examines assumptions, appraises the source, discerns hidden biases, evaluates evidence, and assesses conclusions

Critical thinking

The scientific attitude (which is curiosity + skepticism + humility) prepares us to think harder and smarter. This thinking style is called

Critical thinking -it examines assumptions, appraises the source, discerns hidden biases, evaluates evidence, and assesses conclusions.

How does critical thinking feed a scientific attitude, and smarter thinking for everyday life?

Critical thinking puts ideas to the test by examining assumptions, appraising the source, discerning hidden biases, evaluating evidence, and assessing conclusions.

the enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next

Culture

The Scientific Attitude (three basic attitudes helped make modern science possible); answers the question "what are the three key elements of the scientific attitude, and how do they support scientific inquiry?")

Curiosity, Skepticism, Humility

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Darwin argued that natural selection shapes behaviors as well as bodies

inferential statistics

Data are "noisy." The average score in one group (children who were breast-fed as babies) could conceivably differ from the average score in another group (children who were bottle-fed) not because of any real difference but merely because of chance fluctuations in the people sampled. How confidently, then, can we infer that an observed difference is not just a fluke—a chance result from the research sample? For guidance, we can use inferential statistics (numerical data that allow one to generalize—to infer from sample data the probability of something being true of a population) to determine how reliable and statistically significant the differences are. This way we will know if results can be generalized to a larger population.

the postexperimental explanation of a study, including its purpose and any deceptions, to its participants

Debrief

Correlation

Describing behavior is a first step toward predicting it. Naturalistic observations and surveys often show us that one trait or behavior tends to coincide with another. In such cases, we say the two correlate (a measure of the extent to which two factors vary together, and thus of how well either factor predicts the other). A statistical measure (the correlation coefficient—a statistical index of the relationship between two things (from −1.00 to +1.00) helps us figure how closely two things vary together, and thus how well either one predicts the other. Knowing how much aptitude test scores correlate with school success tells us how well the scores predict school success.

Three methods used to test hypotheses

Descriptive (case study, survey, naturalistic observation) Correlational (not causation) Experimental

numerical data used to measure and describe characteristics of groups. Includes measures of central tendency and measures of variation

Descriptive statistics

Randomly assign

Earlier, we mentioned the place of random sampling in a well-done survey. Consider now the equally important place of random assignment in a well-done experiment. To minimize any preexisting differences between the two groups, researchers randomly assign (assigning participants to experimental and control groups by chance, thus minimizing preexisting differences between the different groups) people to the two conditions. Random assignment—whether with a random numbers table or flip of the coin—effectively equalizes the two groups. If one-third of the volunteers for an experiment can wiggle their ears, then about one-third of the people in each group will be ear wigglers. So, too, with age, attitudes, and other characteristics, which will be similar in the experimental and control groups. Thus, if the groups differ at the experiment's end, we can surmise that the treatment had an effect. (Note the difference between random sampling—which creates a representative survey sample—and random assignment, which equalizes experimental groups.)

How did behaviorism, Freudian psychology, and humanistic psychology further the development of psychological science?

Early researchers defined psychology as "the science of mental life." In the 1920s, under the influence of John B. Watson and the behaviorists, the field's focus changed to the "scientific study of observable behavior." Behaviorism became one of psychology's two major forces well into the 1960s. The second major force of Freudian psychology, along with the influence of humanistic psychology, revived interest in the study of mental processes.

Elena won the lottery last night. Afterward, she told her friends that she knew she was going to win. Her friends think that she is so lucky because she won the lottery last year as well. Explain how hindsight bias and the tendency to perceive patterns in random events apply to Elena's winnings.

Elena won the lottery last night. Afterward, she told her friends that she knew she was going to win. Her friends think that she is so lucky because she won the lottery last year as well. Explain how hindsight bias and the tendency to perceive patterns in random events apply to Elena's winnings. Pattern in random events: Elena's winnings are unconnected. The odds of winning make it seem like a person is "lucky" if they win, but the odds of winning the lottery twice are not that unrealistic when odds of winning are spread out across an entire population.

Describe what's involved in critical thinking

Evaluating evidence, assessing conclusions, and examining our own assumptions are essential parts of critical thinking.

Wording effects

Even subtle changes in the order or wording of questions can have major effects. People are more approving of "aid to the needy" than of "welfare," of "not allowing" televised pornography than of "censoring" it, of "gun safety" laws than of "gun control" laws, and of "revenue enhancers" than of "taxes." Because wording is such a delicate matter, critical thinkers will reflect on how the phrasing of a question might affect people's expressed opinions.

Two experimental method groups and what they are

Experimental group (the group that is exposed to the treatment/one version of the independent variable) Control group (the group that is not exposed to the treatment/independent variable. Control group serves as a comparison for study

To discern causation, psychologists control for confounding variables by randomly assigning some participants to an experimental group, others to a control group. Measuring the dependent variable (later intelligence test score) will determine the effect of the independent variable (type of milk).

Experimentation

Perceiving order in random events

For most people, a random, unpredictable world is unsettling (Tullett et al., 2015). We therefore have a built-in eagerness to make sense of our world. People may see a face on the Moon, hear satanic messages in music, perceive the Virgin Mary's image on a grilled cheese sandwich. Even in random data, we often find patterns, because—here's a curious fact of life—random sequences often don't look random (Falk, R. et al., 2009; Nickerson, 2002, 2005). Flip a coin 50 times and you will likely be surprised at the streaks of heads or tails—much like supposed "hot" and "cold" streaks in basketball shooting and baseball hitting. In actual random sequences, patterns and streaks (such as repeating digits) occur more often than people expect (Oskarsson et al., 2009). That also makes it hard for people to generate random-like sequences. When embezzlers try to simulate random digits when deciding how much to steal, their nonrandom patterns can alert fraud experts (Poundstone, 2014). Some happenings, such as winning a lottery twice, seem so extraordinary that we find it difficult to conceive an ordinary, chance-related explanation. "But with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen," noted statisticians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller (1989). An event that happens to but 1 in 1 billion people every day occurs about 7 times a day, more than 2500 times a year.

The need for statistics

For psychologists using descriptive, correlational, experimental, and other research designs, statistics are the tools that allow them to measure variables and then interpret results. Yet, accurate statistical understanding benefits everyone. To be an educated person today is to be able to apply simple statistical principles to everyday reasoning. We don't need to memorize complicated formulas to think more clearly and critically about data. Off-the-top-of-the-head estimates often misread reality and mislead the public. Someone throws out a big, round number. Others echo it, and before long the big, round number becomes public misinformation. Two examples: • Ten percent of people are gay or lesbian. Or is it 3 to 4 percent, as suggested by various national surveys (Module 50)? • We ordinarily use only 10 percent of our brain. Or is it closer to 100 percent (Module 12)?

What do psychologists do after choosing their question?

Having chosen their question, psychologists then select the most appropriate research design—experimental, correlational, case study, naturalistic observation, twin study, longitudinal, or cross-sectional—and determine how to set it up most effectively. They consider how much money and time are available, ethical issues, and other limitations. For example, it wouldn't be ethical for a researcher studying child development to use the experimental method and randomly assign children to loving versus punishing homes. Next, psychological scientists decide on an operational definition—how to measure the behavior or mental process being studied. For example, researchers could measure aggressive behavior by measuring participants' willingness to blast a stranger with supposed intense noise. Researchers want to have confidence in their findings, so they carefully consider confounding variables—factors other than those being studied that may affect their interpretation of results. Psychological research is a creative adventure. Researchers design each study, measure target behaviors, interpret results, and learn more about the fascinating world of behavior and mental processes along the way.

placebo effect

In double-blind studies, researchers can check a treatment's actual effects apart from the participants' and the staff's belief in its healing powers. Just thinking you are getting a treatment can boost your spirits, relax your body, and relieve your symptoms. This placebo effect (experimental results caused by expectations alone; any effect on behavior caused by the administration of an inert substance or condition, which the recipient assumes is an active agent) is well documented in reducing pain, depression, and anxiety (Kirsch, 2010). Athletes have run faster when given a supposed performance-enhancing drug (McClung & Collins, 2007). Decaf-coffee drinkers have reported increased vigor and alertness—when they thought their brew had caffeine in it (Dawkins et al., 2011). People have felt better after receiving a phony mood-enhancing drug (Michael et al., 2012). And the more expensive the placebo, the more "real" it seems to us—a fake pill that costs $2.50 worked better than one costing 10 cents (Waber et al., 2008). To know how effective a therapy really is, researchers must control for a possible placebo effect.

Sampling bias

In everyday thinking, we tend to generalize from samples we observe, especially vivid cases. Given (a) a statistical summary of auto owners' evaluations of their car make and (b) the vivid comments of two frustrated owners, our impression may be influenced as much by the two unhappy owners as by the many more summarized evaluations. The temptation to succumb to the sampling bias— to generalize from a few vivid but unrepresentative cases—is nearly irresistible.

What questions are off limits in psychology?

In psychological research, no questions are off limits, except untestable (or unethical) ones: Does free will exist? Are people born evil? Is there an afterlife? Psychologists can't test those questions. But they can test whether free will beliefs, aggressive personalities, and a belief in life after death influence how people think, feel, and act

Psychology science matures

In psychology's early days, many psychologists shared with the English essayist C. S. Lewis the view that "there is one thing, and only one in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation." That one thing, Lewis said, is ourselves. "We have, so to speak, inside information" (1960, pp. 18-19). Wundt and Titchener focused on inner sensations, images, and feelings. James also engaged in introspective examination of the stream of consciousness and of emotion. For these and other early pioneers, psychology was defined as "the science of mental life."

The Stanford Prison Experiment

In the 70's at Stanford, college students were asked to stay in a (Who, what, makeshift prison. They flipped a coin to figure out who was warden and prisoners. The guards could do essentially whatever they wanted to do, but they got so out of hand everyone went insane and suffered from extreme physiological issues. They were trying to see the effects of what power has on people. When the students were brought in, the assigned wardens were given a "cop car" to arrest students from their house to make it more realistic. The idea of this experiment was to see the effect power plays as a warden and a prisoner. The people being studied chose to be part of the experiment, but when they were tormented and their sanity was questioned, they were released after less than a week with severe psychological damage. They even had to bring in a priest to talk to the assigned prisoners.

Our theory will be useful if...

In the end, our theory will be useful if it (1) organizes observations, and (2) implies predictions that anyone can use to check the theory or to derive practical applications. (Does people's sleep predict their retention?) Eventually, our research may (3) stimulate further research that leads to a revised theory that better organizes and predicts. Or, our research may be replicated and supported by similar findings. (This has been the case for sleep and memory studies, as you will see in Module 17.)

giving potential participants enough information about a study to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate

Informed consent

The case study in real life

Intensive case studies are sometimes very revealing, and they often suggest directions for further study. But atypical individual cases may mislead us. Both in our everyday lives and in science, unrepresentative information can lead to mistaken judgments and false conclusions. Indeed, anytime a researcher mentions a finding (Smokers die younger: 95 percent of men over 85 are nonsmokers), someone is sure to offer a contradictory anecdote (Well, I have an uncle who smoked two packs a day and lived to be 89). Dramatic stories and personal experiences (even psychological case examples) command our attention and are easily remembered. Journalists understand that, and often begin their articles with compelling stories. Stories move us. But stories can mislead. Which of the following do you find more memorable? (1) "In one study of 1300 dream reports concerning a kidnapped child, only 5 percent correctly envisioned the child as dead" (Murray & Wheeler, 1937). (2) "I know a man who dreamed his sister was in a car accident, and two days later she died in a head-on collision!" Numbers can be numbing, but the plural of anecdote is not evidence. A single story of someone who supposedly changed from gay to straight is not evidence that sexual orientation is a choice. As psychologist Gordon Allport (1954, p. 9) said, "Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub." • Freud and Little Hans: Sigmund Freud's case study of 5-year-old Hans' extreme fear of horses led Freud to his theory of childhood sexuality. He conjectured that Hans felt unconscious desire for his mother, feared castration by his rival father, and then transferred this fear into his phobia about being bitten by a horse. As Modules 60 and 61 will explain, today's psychological science discounts Freud's theory of childhood sexuality but does agree that much of the human mind operates outside our conscious awareness.

How did the cognitive revolution affect the field of psychology?

It recaptured the field's early interest in mental processes and made them legitimate topics for scientific study.

Random sample

It's often not possible to survey the whole group. So how do you obtain a representative sample—say, of the students at your high school? How could you choose a sample that would represent the student population (all those in a group being studied, from which samples may be drawn—Note: Except for national studies, this does not refer to a country's whole population), the whole group you want to study and describe? Typically, you would seek a random sample in which every person in the entire group has an equal chance of participating. You might number the names in the general student listing and then use a random number generator to pick your survey participants. (Sending each student a questionnaire wouldn't work, because the conscientious people who returned it would not be a random sample.) Large representative samples are better than small ones, but a smaller representative sample of 100 is better than a larger unrepresentative sample of 500.

William James (1842-1910) and Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930)

James was a legendary teacher-writer who authored an important 1890 psychology text. He mentored Calkins, who became a pioneering memory researcher and the first woman to be president of the American Psychological Association.

Psychology's first women

James' legacy stems from his Harvard mentoring as well as from his writing. In 1890, thirty years before American women had the right to vote, he admitted Mary Whiton Calkins into his graduate seminar—over the objections of Harvard's president (Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987). When Calkins joined, the other students (all men) dropped out. So James tutored her alone. Later, she finished all of Harvard's Ph.D. requirements, outscoring all the male students on the qualifying exams. Alas, Harvard denied her the degree she had earned, offering her instead a degree from Radcliffe College, its undergraduate "sister" school for women. Calkins resisted the unequal treatment and refused the degree. She nevertheless went on to become a distinguished memory researcher and in 1905 became the first female president of the American Psychological Association (APA)—a national organization of professional and academic psychologists.

-Behavioralism = emphasized that the science of psychology should dismiss introspection. **Only focus on observable behavior! -"Little Albert" experiments. (Fear the rat!!!) -"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, tendencies, abilities, and race." Watson 1929 -Viewpoints later adopted by B.F. Skinner, perhaps the most influential psychologist of the 20th century

John B. Watson; John Hopkins (psychology professor 1913)

Measures of variation

Knowing the value of an appropriate measure of central tendency can tell us a great deal. But the single number omits other information. It helps to know something about the amount of variation in the data—how similar or diverse the scores are. Averages derived from scores with low variability are more reliable than averages based on scores with high variability. Consider a basketball player who scored between 13 and 17 points in each of the season's first 10 games. Knowing this, we would be more confident that she would score near 15 points in her next game than if her scores had varied from 5 to 25 points.

When is an observed difference significant?

Let's say you compared men's and women's scores on a laboratory test of aggression and found a gender difference. But individuals differ. How likely is it that the difference you observed was just a fluke? Statistical testing can estimate the probability of the result occurring by chance. Here is the underlying logic: When averages from two samples are each reliable measures of their respective populations (as when each is based on many observations that have small variability), then their difference is probably reliable as well. (Example: The less the variability in women's and in men's aggression scores, the more confidence we would have that any observed gender difference is reliable.) And when the difference between the sample averages is large, we have even more confidence that the difference between them reflects a real difference in their populations. In short, when sample averages are reliable, and when the difference between them is relatively large, we say the difference has statistical significance (a statistical statement of how likely it is that an obtained result occurred by chance). This means that the observed difference is probably not due to chance variation between the samples. In judging statistical significance, psychologists are conservative. They are like juries who must presume innocence until guilt is proven. For most psychologists, proof beyond a reasonable doubt means not making much of a finding unless the odds of its occurring by chance, if no real effect exists, are less than 5 percent. When reading about research, you should remember that, given large enough or homogeneous enough samples, a difference between them may be "statistically significant" yet have little practical significance. In one study of nearly 700,000 Facebook users, researchers exposed people to status updates with more or with less positive words. Given the supersized sample's "statistical power," the tweaking produced a "statistically significant" but trivial effect. For example, those who received fewer posts with positive words responded with 0.1 percent fewer positive words themselves—a "statistically significant" effect, though one too tiny to be meaningful in the real world (Morin, 2014). Comparisons of intelligence test scores among hundreds of thousands of first-born and later-born individuals indicate a highly significant tendency for first-born individuals to have higher average scores than their later-born siblings (Rohrer et al., 2015; Zajonc & Markus, 1975). But because the scores differ only slightly, this "significant" difference has little practical importance.

Case study and naturalistic observation

Like the case study, naturalistic observation does not explain behavior. It describes it. Nevertheless, descriptions can be revealing. We once thought, for example, that only humans use tools. Then naturalistic observation revealed that chimpanzees sometimes insert a stick in a termite mound and withdraw it, eating the stick's load of termites. Such unobtrusive naturalistic observations paved the way for later studies of animal thinking, language, and emotion, which further expanded our understanding of our fellow animals. Thanks to researchers' observations, we know that chimpanzees and baboons use deception: Psychologists repeatedly saw one young baboon pretending to have been attacked by another as a tactic to get its mother to drive the other baboon away from its food (Whiten & Byrne, 1988). • A funny finding. We humans laugh 30 times more often in social situations than in solitary situations (Provine, 2001). (Have you noticed how seldom you laugh when alone?) • Sounding out students. What, really, are college psychology students saying and doing during their everyday lives? To find out, Matthias Mehl and his colleagues (2010) equipped 79 such students with electronic recorders. Using this experience sampling method, the researchers then eavesdropped on more than 23,000 half-minute life slices of students' waking hours. Was happiness related to having simple talks or deeply involved conversations? The happiest participants avoided small talk and embraced meaningful conversations. Happy people would also rather talk than tweet. Does that surprise you? • Culture and the pace of life. Naturalistic observation also enabled Robert Levine and Ara Norenzayan (1999) to compare the pace of life—walking speed, accuracy of public clocks, and so forth—in 31 countries. Their conclusion: Life is fastest paced in Japan and Western Europe, and slower paced in economically less-developed countries.

Examples of perceiving order in random events as a cognitive illusion

Lottery tickets Coin tosses Music shuffle Deck of cards

Studying and protecting animals

Many psychologists study nonhuman animals because they find them fascinating. They want to understand how different species learn, think, and behave. Psychologists also study animals to learn about people. We humans are not like animals; we are animals, sharing a common biology. Animal experiments have therefore led to treatments for human diseases—insulin for diabetes, vaccines to prevent polio and rabies, transplants to replace defective organs. Humans are complex. But some of the same processes by which we learn are present in rats, monkeys, and even sea slugs. The simplicity of the sea slug's nervous system is precisely what makes it so revealing of the neural mechanisms of learning. Sharing such similarities, should we not respect our animal relatives? The animal protection movement protests the use of animals in psychological, biological, and medical research. "We cannot defend our scientific work with animals on the basis of the similarities between them and ourselves and then defend it morally on the basis of differences," noted Roger Ulrich (1991). Out of this heated debate, two issues emerge. The basic one is whether it is right to place the well-being of humans above that of other animals. In experiments on stress and cancer, is it right that mice get tumors in the hope that people might not? Should some monkeys be exposed to an HIV-like virus in the search for an AIDS vaccine? Humans raise and slaughter 56 billion animals a year (Worldwatch Institute, 2013). Is our use and consumption of other animals as natural as the behavior of carnivorous hawks, cats, and whales? For those who give human life top priority, a second question emerges: What safeguards should protect the well-being of animals in research? One survey of animal researchers gave an answer. Some 98 percent supported government regulations protecting primates, dogs, and cats, and 74 percent also supported regulations providing for the humane care of rats and mice (Plous & Herzog, 2000). Many professional associations and funding agencies already have such guidelines. British Psychological Society (BPS) guidelines call for housing animals under reasonably natural living conditions, with companions for social animals (Lea, 2000). American Psychological Association (APA) guidelines state that researchers must provide "humane care and healthful conditions" and that testing should "minimize discomfort" (APA, 2012). The European Parliament also mandates standards for animal care and housing (Vogel, 2010). Most universities screen research proposals, often through an animal care ethics committee, and laboratories are regulated and inspected. Animals have themselves benefited from animal research. One Ohio team of research psychologists measured stress hormone levels in samples of millions of dogs brought each year to animal shelters. They devised handling and stroking methods to reduce stress and ease the dogs' transition to adoptive homes (Tuber et al., 1999). Other studies have helped improve care and management in animals' natural habitats. By revealing our behavioral kinship with animals and the remarkable intelligence of chimpanzees, gorillas, and other animals, experiments have also led to increased empathy and protection for them. At its best, a psychology concerned for humans and sensitive to animals serves the welfare of both.

Skewed

Measures of central tendency neatly summarize data. But consider what happens to the mean when a distribution is lopsided, when it's skewed (a representation of scores that lack symmetry around their average value) by a few way-out scores. With income data, for example, the mode, median, and mean often tell very different stories (Figure 8.2). This happens because the mean is biased by a few extreme incomes. When Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates sits down in an intimate café, its average (mean) customer instantly becomes a billionaire. But the median customer's wealth remains unchanged. Understanding this, you can see why, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, nearly 65 percent of U.S. households have "below average" income. The bottom half of earners receive much less than half the national income cake. So, most Americans make less than average (the mean). Mean and median tell different true stories.

Descriptive statistics: measures of central tendency (median)

Middle score

The Experiments of Stanley Milgram

Milgram wanted to see how far people would go in obeying an instruction, if it involved violence. Milgram brought in 40 participants. In the experiment, where, when, a participant would be assigned the role of "teacher" by default, while confederate of Milgram posing as a participant would assume the role of the "learner". The "teacher" was instructed to ask the learner a series of questions and shock the "learner" each time he made a mistake; the magnitude of each shock grew larger with each incorrect answer. "Learners" (members of the study in disguise) purposely answered questions incorrectly to test the limits of the "teacher". When: July 1961, Where: Yale Interaction Library he used electric shocks which had a ranging level of voltage, ultimately trying to enforce a negative reaction from the participant when they gave an incorrect answer - participants were unaware of the real nature of the study - participants were exposed to very stressful situations that have the potential to cause psychological harm

Descriptive methods used to test a hypothesis are done in three ways. People watching is considered an example of

Naturalistic observation

Naturalistic observation technology

Naturalistic observation has mostly been "small science"—science that can be done with pen and paper rather than fancy equipment and a big budget (Provine, 2012). But new technologies, such as smart-phone apps, body-worn sensors, and social media, are enabling "big data" observations. Using such tools, researchers can track people's location, activities, and opinions—without interference. The billions of people on Facebook, Twitter, and Google have also created a huge new opportunity for big-data naturalistic observation. One research team studied the ups and downs of human moods by counting positive and negative words in 504 million Twitter messages from 84 countries (Golder & Macy, 2011). As Figure 5.2 shows, people seem happier on weekends, shortly after waking, and in the evenings. (Are late Saturday evenings often a happy time for you, too?) Another study found that the proportion of negative emotion (especially anger-related) words in 148 million tweets from 1347 U.S. counties predicted the counties' heart disease rates. Moreover, it did so even better than other predictors such as smoking and obesity rates (Eichstaedt et al., 2015). • Twitter Message moods, by time and by day: This illustrates how, without knowing anyone's identity, big data enable researchers to study human behavior on a massive scale. It now is also possible to associate people's moods with, for example, their locations or with the weather, and to study the spread of ideas through social networks.

a descriptive technique of observing and recording behavior in naturally occurring situations without trying to manipulate or control the situation

Naturalistic observations

Is correlational causation?

No, correlation is not causation

Does each individual psychology perspective give us the whole picture?

No, the perspectives are helpful, but each by itself fails to reveal the whole picture

Descriptive statistics: measures of central tendency (mode)

Occurs the most

descriptive statistics

Once researchers have gathered their data, they may use descriptive statistics (numerical data used to measure and describe characteristics of groups. Includes measures of central tendency and measures of variation) to measure and describe characteristics of the group under study—similar to the way teachers use descriptive statistics to assess how their students have performed. One way to do this is to convert the data into a simple bar graph, called a histogram (a bar graph depicting a frequency distribution), as in Figure 8.1, which displays a distribution of different brands of trucks still on the road after a decade. When reading statistical graphs such as this one, take care. It's easy to design a graph to make a difference look big (Figure 8.1a) or small (Figure 8.1b). The secret lies in how you label the vertical scale (the y-axis).

Distribute your study time

One of psychology's oldest findings is that spaced practice promotes better retention than massed practice. You'll remember material better if you space your time over several study periods—perhaps one hour a day, six days a week—rather than cram it into one week-long or all-night study blitz. For example, rather than trying to read an entire module in a single sitting, read just one main section and then turn to something else. Interleaving your study of psychology with your study of other subjects boosts long-term retention and protects against overconfidence (Kornell & Bjork, 2008; Taylor & Rohrer, 2010). Spacing your study sessions requires a disciplined approach to managing your time. At the beginning of this text, Richard O. Straub explains time management in a helpful preface.

Psychology was super male, white dominant before

Over the past half century, psychology has shifted from a mostly white, male discipline to one where women now receive most Ph.D.s. Pioneering female psychologists, such as Inez Beverly Prosser (the first African-American woman to receive a psychology Ph.D., in 1933) and Eleanor Gibson (the only woman in this photo from the 1964 Society of Experimental Psychologists—the group that had barred Margaret Floy Washburn), helped pave the way. In 1971, Kenneth Clark became the APA's first African-American president, and psychology has since then increasingly flourished in diverse communities around the world.

Why did introspection fail as a method for understanding how the mind works?

People's self-reports varied, depending on the experience and the person's intelligence and verbal ability, and because we often don't know why we think or feel the way we do!

Psychology's first laboratory

Philosophers' thinking about thinking continued until the birth of psychology as we know it. That happened on a December day in 1879, in a small, third-floor room at Germany's University of Leipzig. There, two young men were helping an austere, middle-aged professor, Wilhelm Wundt, create an experimental apparatus. Their machine measured how long it took for people to press a telegraph key after hearing a ball hit a platform (Hunt, 1993). Curiously, people responded in about one-tenth of a second when asked to press the key as soon as the sound occurred—and in about two-tenths of a second when asked to press the key as soon as they were consciously aware of perceiving the sound. (To be aware of one's awareness takes a little longer.) Wundt was seeking to measure "atoms of the mind"—the fastest and simplest mental processes. So began the first psychological laboratory, staffed by Wundt and by psychology's first graduate students. (In 1883, Wundt's American student G. Stanley Hall went on to establish the first formal U.S. psychology laboratory, at Johns Hopkins University.

all those in a group being studied, from which samples may be drawn—Note: Except for national studies, this does not refer to a country's whole population), the whole group you want to study and describe? Typically, you would seek a random sample

Population

the scientific study of human flourishing, with the goals of discovering and promoting strengths and virtues that help individuals and communities to thrive

Positive psychology

What is contemporary psychology's position on the nature-nurture issue?

Psychological events stem from the interaction of nature and nurture, rather than from either of them acting alone.

The science of behavior and mental processes

Psychology The key word in psychology's definition is science. Psychology is less a set of findings than a way of asking and answering questions. Our aim, then, is not merely to report results but also to show you how psychologists play their game. You will see how researchers evaluate conflicting opinions and ideas. And you will learn how all of us, whether scientists or simply curious people, can think harder and smarter when experiencing and explaining the events of our lives. Psychology has roots in many disciplines and countries. The young science of psychology developed from the more established fields of philosophy and biology. Wundt was both a philosopher and a physiologist. James was an American philosopher. Freud was an Austrian physician. Ivan Pavlov, who pioneered the study of learning, was a Russian physiologist. Jean Piaget, the last century's most influential observer of children, was a Swiss biologist. These "Magellans of the mind," as psychology historian Morton Hunt (1993) called them, illustrate the diversity of psychology's origins. Like those pioneers, today's estimated 1+ million psychologists are citizens of many lands (Zoma & Gielen, 2015). The International Union of Psychological Science has 82 member nations, from Albania to Zimbabwe. In China, the first university psychology department was established in 1978; by 2016 there were some 270, not counting AP® Psychology courses now taught in some secondary schools (Zhang, 2016). Moreover, thanks to international publications, joint meetings, and the Internet, collaboration and communication cross borders more than ever. Psychology is growing, and it is globalizing. The story of psychology—the subject of this book—continues to develop in many places, at many levels, with interests ranging from the study of nerve cell activity to the study of international conflicts. Contemporary psychology, shaped by many forces, is particularly influenced by our understanding of biology and experience, culture and gender, and human flourishing.

Positive psychology

Psychology's first hundred years often focused on understanding and treating troubles, such as abuse and anxiety, depression and disease, prejudice and poverty. Much of today's psychology continues the exploration of such challenges. Without slighting the need to repair damage and cure disease, Martin Seligman and others (2002, 2005, 2011) have called for more research on human flourishing. These psychologists call their approach positive psychology. They believe that happiness is a by-product of a pleasant, engaged, and meaningful life. Thus, positive psychology uses scientific methods to explore the building of a "good life" that engages our skills and a "meaningful life" that points beyond ourselves.

The testing effect

Psychology's research also shows how we can learn and retain information. Many students assume that the way to cement new learning is to reread. What helps even more—and what this book therefore encourages—is repeated self-testing and rehearsal of previously studied material. Memory researchers Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke (2006) call this phenomenon the testing effect (enhanced memory after retrieving, rather than simply rereading, information. Also referred to as a retrieval practice effect or test-enhanced learning). They note that "testing is a powerful means of improving learning, not just assessing it." In one of their studies, English-speaking students recalled the meaning of 40 previously learned Swahili words much better if tested repeatedly than if they spent the same time restudying the words (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008). Many other studies, including in college classrooms, confirm that frequent quizzing and self-testing boosts students' retention (McDaniel et al., 2015; Trumbo et al., 2016).

a sample that fairly represents a population because each member has an equal chance of inclusion

Random sample Political pollsters sample voters in national election surveys just this way. Using some 1500 randomly sampled people, drawn from all areas of a country, they can provide a remarkably accurate snapshot of the nation's opinions. Without random sampling (also called random selection), large samples—including unrepresentative call-in or website polls—often give misleading results.

assigning participants to experimental and control groups by chance, thus minimizing preexisting differences between the different groups

Randomly assign

The Experiments of Joseph zMengele

Referred to as the "Angel of Death," stood on train platforms deciding which, prisoners would be sent to gas chambers or Auschwitz. He often studied twins using one as a control group while the other endured days of horrendous experiments. - He was particularly interested in identical twins, people with heterochromiairidum (eyes of two different colors), dwarfs, and people with physical abnormalities. - He conducted no ethical considerations whatsoever because he chose innocent people to be murdered at the Auschwitz extermination camp during world war two. - He did not have any considerations for the health and safety of his human subjects. - For example he performed unnecessary amputation of limbs, intentionally infecting one twin with typhus or some other disease, and transfusing the blood of one twin into the other.

the tendency for extreme or unusual scores or events to fall back (regress) toward the average

Regression toward the mean The point may seem obvious, yet we regularly miss it: We sometimes attribute what may be a normal regression (the expected return to normal) to something we have done. Consider two examples: • Students who score much lower or higher on an exam than they usually do are likely, when retested, to return to their average. • Unusual ESP subjects who defy chance when first tested nearly always lose their "psychic powers" when retested. Failure to recognize regression is the source of many superstitions and of some ineffective practices as well. After berating an employee for poorer-than-usual performance a manager may—when the employee regresses to normal—feel rewarded for the "tough love." After lavishing praise for an exceptionally fine performance, the manager may be disappointed when the employee's behavior again migrates back toward his or her average. Ironically, then, regression toward the average can mislead us into feeling rewarded after criticizing others and feeling punished after praising them

Correlational method used to test hypotheses (graphs— 3 types)

Relationship between two quantities such that when one changes the other does Graph types -negative (semi-spread out) -zero (completely spread out, no line) -positive (really close) This is not cause and effect/causation Scatterplots showing negative, zero, and positive correlation. Note: the use of the words "positive" and "negative" refer only to the direction of the correlation, NOT whether the relationship is desirable.

a statistical statement of how likely it is that an obtained result occurred by chance). This means that the observed difference is probably not due to chance variation between the samples.

Statistical significance

What measures do researchers use to prevent the placebo effect from confusing their results?

Research designed to prevent the placebo effect randomly assigns participants to an experimental group (which receives the real treatment) or to a control group (which receives a placebo). A double-blind procedure prevents participants' and researchers' beliefs and hopes from affecting the results, because neither the participants nor those collecting the data know who receives the placebo. A comparison of the results will demonstrate whether the real treatment produces better results than belief in that treatment.

How can simplified laboratory conditions illuminate everyday life?

Researchers intentionally create a controlled, artificial environment in the laboratory in order to test general theoretical principles. These general principles help explain everyday behaviors.

A study method incorporating five steps: Survey, Question, Read, Retrieve, Review

SQR3

a flawed sampling process that produces an unrepresentative sample

Sampling bias

What event defined the start of modern scientific psychology?

Scientific psychology began in Germany in 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychology laboratory.

Cognitive psychology and neuroscience

Simultaneous with humanistic psychology's emergence, psychologists in the 1960s pioneered a cognitive revolution. This led the field back to its early interest in cognition—how our mind processes and retains information. Cognitive psychology today continues its scientific exploration of how we perceive, process, and remember information and of how thinking and emotion interact in anxiety, depression, and other disorders. The marriage of cognitive psychology (the science of mind) and neuroscience (the science of brain) gave birth to cognitive neuroscience. This specialty, with researchers in many disciplines, studies the brain activity underlying mental activity.

The _________ perspective in psychology focuses on how behavior and thought differ from situation to situation and from culture to culture, while the _________ perspective emphasizes observation of how we respond to and learn in different situations.

Social-cultural; behavioral

Common sense can be wrong. Explain this

Some people suppose that psychology is mere common sense—documenting and dressing in jargon what people already know: "You get paid for using fancy methods to prove what my grandmother knows?" Indeed, Grandma is often right. As the baseball great Yogi Berra (1925-2015) once said, "You can observe a lot by watching." (We have Berra to thank for other gems, such as "Nobody goes there any more—it's too crowded," and "If the people don't want to come out to the ballpark, nobody's gonna stop 'em.") Because we're all behavior watchers, it would be surprising if many of psychology's findings had not been foreseen. Many people believe that love breeds happiness, for example, and they are right (we have what Module 55 calls a deep "need to belong"). But sometimes Grandma's common sense, informed by countless casual observations, is wrong. In many other modules, we will see how research has overturned popular ideas—that familiarity breeds contempt, that dreams predict the future, and that most of us use only 10 percent of our brain. We will also see how research has surprised us with discoveries about how the brain's chemical messengers control our moods and memories, about other animals' abilities, and about the effects of stress on our capacity to fight disease. Other things seem like commonsense truth only because we so often hear them repeated. Mere repetition of statements—whether true or false—makes them easier to process and remember, and thus more true-seeming (Dechêne et al., 2010; Fazio et al., 2015). Easy to remember misconceptions ("Vitamin C prevents the common cold") can therefore overwhelm hard truths. This power of familiar, hard-to-erase falsehoods is a lesson well known to political manipulators and kept in mind by critical thinkers. Three roadblocks to critical thinking—hindsight bias, overconfidence, and perceiving patterns in random events—help illustrate why we cannot rely solely on common sense.

Who would view critical thinking as a threat?

Some religious people may view critical thinking and scientific inquiry, including psychology's, as a threat. Yet many of the leaders of the scientific revolution, including Copernicus and Newton, were deeply religious people acting on the idea that "in order to love and honor God, it is necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork"

Nonhuman animals are often subjects in psychological experiments. Provide three reasons why a psychologist might use animals instead of humans in a study.

Some researchers use nonhuman animals because they are interested in understanding the animals themselves, including their thinking and behaviors. Others use nonhuman animals to reduce the complexity that is part of human research. They hope to understand principles that may be similar to those that govern human psychological phenomena. Researchers also study nonhuman animals in order to apply the findings in ways that will help both humans and the other animals.

Structuralism

Soon after receiving his Ph.D. in 1892, Wundt's student Edward Bradford Titchener joined the Cornell University faculty and introduced structuralism. Much as chemists developed the periodic table to classify chemical elements, Titchener aimed to classify and understand elements of the mind's structure. He engaged people in self-reflective introspection (looking inward), training them to report elements of their experience as they looked at a rose, listened to a metronome, smelled a scent, or tasted a substance. What were their immediate sensations, their images, their feelings? And how did these relate to one another? Alas, structuralism's technique of introspection proved somewhat unreliable. It required smart, verbal people, and its results varied from person to person and experience to experience. Moreover, we often just don't know why we feel what we feel and do what we do. Research suggests that people's recollections frequently err. So do their self-reports about what, for example, has caused them to help or hurt another (Myers, 2002). As introspection waned, so did structuralism.

Statistical illiteracy

Statistical illiteracy also feeds needless health scares (Gigerenzer, 2010). In the 1990s, the British press reported a study showing that women taking a particular contraceptive pill had a 100 percent increased risk of blood clots that could produce strokes. This caused thousands of women to stop taking the pill, leading to a wave of unwanted pregnancies and an estimated 13,000 additional abortions (which also are associated with increased blood-clot risk). And what did the study actually find? A 100 percent increased risk, indeed—but only from 1 in 7000 to 2 in 7000. Such false alarms underscore the need to teach statistical reasoning and to present statistical information more transparently.

What can statistics help us see?

Statistics can help us see what the naked eye sometimes misses. To demonstrate this for yourself, try an imaginary project. You wonder if tall men are more or less easygoing, so you collect two sets of scores: men's heights and men's temperaments. You measure the heights of 20 men, and you have someone else independently assess their temperaments from 0 (extremely calm) to 100 (highly reactive). If we fail to see a relationship when data are presented as systematically as in Table 6.1, how much less likely are we to notice them in everyday life? To see what is right in front of us, we sometimes need statistical illumination. We can easily see evidence of gender discrimination when given statistically summarized information about job level, seniority, performance, gender, and salary. But we often see no discrimination when the same information dribbles in, case by case (Twiss et al., 1989). See Table 6.2 to test your understanding further.

The school ___________ of used introspection to define the mind's makeup; ___________ focused on how mental processes enable us to adapt, survive, and flourish.

Structuralism; functionalism

a descriptive technique for obtaining the self-reported attitudes or behaviors of a particular group, usually by questioning a representative, random sample of the group

Survey

What does the acronym SQ3R stand for?

Survey, question, read, retrieve, review

Enhanced memory after retrieving, rather than simply rereading, information. Also referred to as a retrieval practice effect or test-enhanced learning

Testing effect

The _________ _________ describes the enhanced memory that results from repeated retrieval (as in self-testing) rather than from simple rereading of new information.

Testing effect

At the end of this course, you will probably be taking the AP® Psychology exam. Explain how you could use the following concepts to help you succeed on that test. a. Testing effect b. Spaced practice c. SQ3R

Testing effect: Students should frequently test themselves, over the course of the year, on the material they are currently learning as well as the material they have already learned. Spaced practice: Studying should be spaced out over the entire span of the course and not crammed into the last days or hours before the AP® exam. SQ3R: Students should use the Survey-Question-Read-Retrieve-Review method in order to most effectively learn the material for the entire course. This will allow them to process the information on a deeper level and retain it better over the course of the year.

Behaviorism

That definition endured until the 1920s, when the first of two provocative American psychologists appeared on the scene. John B. Watson, and later B. F. Skinner, dismissed introspection and redefined psychology as "the scientific study of observable behavior." After all, they said, science is rooted in observation: What you cannot observe and measure, you cannot scientifically study. You cannot observe a sensation, a feeling, or a thought, but you can observe and record people's behavior as they are conditioned—as they respond to and learn in different situations. Many agreed, and behaviorism (the view that psychology (1) should be an objective science that (2) studies behavior without reference to mental processes. Most psychologists today agree with (1) but not with (2).) was one of two major forces in psychology well into the 1960s.

What ethical guidelines safeguard human research participants?

The APA ethics code outlines standards for safeguarding human participants' well-being, including obtaining their informed consent and debriefing them later.

Margaret Floy Washburn (1871-1939)

The first woman to receive a psychology Ph.D., Washburn synthesized animal behavior research in The Animal Mind (1908). The honor of being the first official female psychology Ph.D. later fell to Margaret Floy Washburn, who also wrote an influential book, The Animal Mind, and became the second female APA president in 1921. Her thesis was the first foreign study Wundt published in his psychology journal, but Washburn's gender barred doors for her, too. She could not join the all-male organization of experimental psychologists (who explore behavior and thinking with experiments), despite its being founded by Titchener, her own graduate adviser (Johnson, 1997). What a different world from the recent past—1997 to 2017—when women were 10 of the 20 elected presidents of the science-oriented Association for Psychological Science. In the United States, Canada, and Europe, most psychology doctorates are now earned by women.

What is the nature-nurture issue?

The longstanding controversy over the relative contributions that genes and experience make to the development of psychological traits and behaviors. Today's science sees traits and behaviors arising from the interaction of nature and nurture.

Who was the Amazing Randi?

The magician James Randi exemplifies skepticism. He has tested and debunked supposed psychic phenomena.

Standard deviation

The more useful standard for measuring how much scores deviate from one another is the standard deviation (a computed measure of how much scores vary around the mean score) It better gauges whether scores are packed together or dispersed, because it uses information from each score (Table 8.1). The computation assembles information about how much individual scores differ from the mean, which can be very telling. Another example: If your high school serves a community where most families have similar incomes, family income data will have a relatively small standard deviation compared with a community with more diverse incomes.

Evolutionary psychology and behavior genetics

The nature-nurture issue recurs throughout this text as today's psychologists explore the relative contributions of biology and experience. They ask, for example, how are we humans alike because of our common biology and evolutionary history? That's the focus of evolutionary psychology. And how do we individually differ because of our differing genes and environments? That's the focus of behavior genetics.

Mode, mean, median

The next step is to summarize the data using some measure of central tendency, a single score that represents a whole set of scores. The simplest measure is the mode (the most frequently occurring score(s) in a distribution), the most frequently occurring score or scores. The most familiar is the mean (the arithmetic average of a distribution, obtained by adding the scores and then dividing by the number of scores), or arithmetic average—the total sum of all the scores divided by the number of scores. The midpoint—the 50th percentile—is the median (the middle score in a distribution; half the scores are above it and half are below it). On a divided highway, the median is the middle. So, too, with data: If you arrange all the scores in order from the highest to the lowest, half will be above the median and half will be below it. In a symmetrical, bell-shaped distribution of scores, the mode, mean, and median scores may be similar.

Freudian (psychoanalytic) psychology

The other major force was Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic psychology, which emphasized the ways our unconscious mind and childhood experiences affect our behavior. (In later modules, we'll look more closely at Freud's teachings, including his theory of personality and his views on unconscious sexual conflicts and the mind's defenses against its own wishes and impulses.)

Range

The range (the difference between the highest and lowest scores in a distribution) of scores—the gap between the lowest and highest—provides only a crude estimate of variation. A couple of extreme scores in an otherwise similar group, such as the $950,000 and $1,420,000 incomes in Figure 8.2, will create a deceptively large range.

Researchers surveyed 800 high school students enrolled in AP® Psychology to determine whether students with higher scores on anxiety scales had lower scores on standardized tests. Students with higher scores on anxiety scales were indeed found to have lower scores on standardized tests. Explain how each of the following terms or phrases applies to the situation described above: a. Random sampling b. Generalization c. Correlation does not mean causation

The researchers could use random sampling to choose the 800 students for their survey. The names could, for example, be chosen in such a way (say, every fiftieth name of those taking the course) to ensure that every test taker has the same chance of being selected. If the random sample is used, it will be representative of the wider population from which it was drawn. Thus, the researchers will be able to generalize the results from their sample to the wider population of AP® Psychology students. The results of the survey would only apply to AP® Psychology students, not high school students in general. Even if anxiety and test scores correlate positively, the researchers would not be able to say that anxiety caused the lower standardized test scores.

What are the three key elements of the scientific attitude, and how do they support scientific inquiry?

The scientific attitude equips us to be curious, skeptical, and humble in scrutinizing competing ideas or our own observations.

A self-correcting process for asking questions and observing nature's answers

The scientific method

Description

The starting point of any science is description. In everyday life, we all observe and describe people, often drawing conclusions about why they think, feel, and act as they do. Professional psychologists do much the same, though more objectively and systematically, through • case studies (in-depth analyses of individuals or groups). • naturalistic observations (recording the natural behavior of many individuals). • surveys and interviews (asking people questions).

The Scientific Method

Theories/idea lead to hypotheses, which leads to research and observations (testing whether the hypotheses is true or false), and finally confirm, reject, or revise

an explanation using an integrated set of principles that organizes observations and predicts behaviors or events

Theory

A teacher wants to know if nightmares are more common than dreams. He asks volunteers from his second-period class to report how many dreams they had last week. He asks volunteers from his third-period class to report the number of nightmares they had last week. Describe two things wrong with the design of this study.

There is no hypothesis stated. In asking for volunteers, the teacher is taking a nonrandom sample that is probably not representative of the population of interest. Neither "dreams" nor "nightmares" are operationally defined, so they might be interpreted differently by later researchers.

This hindsight bias

This hindsight bias is easy to demonstrate by giving half the members of a group some purported psychological finding and giving the other half an opposite result. Tell the first group, for example: "Psychologists have found that separation weakens romantic attraction. As the saying goes, 'Out of sight, out of mind.'" Ask them to imagine why this might be true. Most people can, and after explaining it nearly all will then view this true finding as unsurprising. • Ex: When drilling its Deepwater Horizon oil well in 2010, BP employees took shortcuts and ignored warning signs, without intending to harm the environment or their company's reputation. After the resulting Gulf oil spill, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the foolishness of those judgments became obvious.

What is natural selection?

This is the process by which nature selects from chance variations the traits that best enable an organism to survive and reproduce in a particular environment.

B. F. Skinner (1904-1990)

This leading behaviorist rejected introspection and studied how consequences shape behavior.

Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927)

Titchener used introspection to search for the mind's structural elements

Independent Variable (IV)

To determine this, ask yourself, "what do the researchers hope will cause the DV in this study?"

Dependent Variable (DV)

To determine this, ask yourself, "what is the research measuring or looking for in this study?"

T or F: Before accepting survey findings, think critically. Consider the sample. The best basis for generalizing is from a representative sample. You cannot compensate for an unrepresentative sample by simply adding more people.

True

T or F: Behavior is anything an organism does—any action we can observe and record.

True

T or F: Critical thinkers wince when people make factual claims based on gut intuition: "I feel like climate change is [or isn't] happening." "I feel like self-driving cars are more [or less] dangerous." "I feel like my candidate is more honest." Such beliefs (commonly mislabeled as feelings) may or may not be true. Critical thinkers are open to the possibility that they might be wrong. Sometimes, they know, the best evidence confirms their intuitions. Sometimes it challenges them and beckons them to a different way of thinking.

True

Studying modules

To study a module, first survey, taking a bird's-eye view. Scan the headings, and notice how the module is organized. Before you read each main section, try to answer its numbered Learning Target (for this section: "How can psychological principles help you learn, remember, and thrive, and do better on the AP® exam?"). Roediger and Bridgid Finn (2010) have found that "trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning." Those who test their understanding before reading, and discover what they don't yet know, will learn and remember better. Then read, actively searching for the answer to the question. At each sitting, read only as much of the module (usually a single main section) as you can absorb without tiring. Read actively and critically. Ask questions. Take notes. Make the ideas your own: How does what you've read relate to your own life? Does it support or challenge your assumptions? How convincing is the evidence. Having read a section, retrieve its main ideas: "Active retrieval promotes meaningful learning," says Karpicke (2012). So test yourself. This will not only help you figure out what you know, the testing itself will help you learn and retain the information more effectively. Even better, test yourself repeatedly. We offer many self-testing opportunities throughout each module—for example, in the Check Your Understanding sections. After answering the Test Yourself questions there, you can check your answers in Appendix E at the end of this text and reread as needed. • More learning tips: To learn more about the testing effect and the SQ3R method, view the 5-minute animation "Make Things Memorable," at tinyurl.com/HowToRemember. Finally, review: Read over any notes you have taken, again with an eye on the module's organization, and quickly review the whole module. Write or say what a concept is before rereading to check your understanding. The Module Review provides answers to the learning target questions along with helpful review questions. The Part and Unit Reviews offer Key Terms and Key Contributors, along with AP® Exam Practice Questions. In addition to learning psychology's key concepts and key people, you will also need to learn the style of writing that is required for success on the exam. The sample grading rubrics provided for some of the Free-Response Questions (essay-style questions) in the module, part, and unit reviews will help get you started.

Today's psychology

Today's psychology builds on the work of many earlier scientists and schools of thought. To encompass psychology's concern with observable behavior and with inner thoughts and feelings, we now define psychology as the science of behavior and mental processes. Let's unpack this definition. Behavior is anything an organism does—any action we can observe and record. Yelling, smiling, blinking, sweating, talking, and questionnaire marking are all observable behaviors. Mental processes are the internal, subjective experiences we infer from behavior—sensations, perceptions, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.

T or F: A. double-blind procedure: controls for the placebo effect; neither researchers nor participants know who receives the real treatment B. random sampling: helps researchers generalize from a small set of survey responses to a larger population C. random assignment: helps minimize preexisting differences between experimental and control groups

True

T or F: A correlation coefficient, which can range from −1.0 to +1.0, reveals the extent to which two things relate. The closer the score gets to −1 or +1, the stronger the correlation. Although correlational research helpfully reveals relationships, it doesn't explain them

True

T or F: A variable is anything that can vary (infant nutrition, intelligence, TV exposure—anything within the bounds of what is feasible and ethical to measure). Experiments aim to manipulate an independent variable, measure a dependent variable, and control confounding variables. An experiment has at least two different conditions: an experimental condition and a comparison or control condition. Random assignment works to minimize preexisting differences between the groups before any treatment effects occur. In this way, an experiment tests the effect of at least one independent variable (what we manipulate) on at least one dependent variable (the outcome we measure).

True

T or F: Always note which measure of central tendency is reported. If it is a mean, consider whether a few atypical scores could be distorting it.

True

T or F: As a check on their biases, psychologists report their research with precise, measurable operational definitions used in a research study. For example, human intelligence may be operationally defined as what an intelligence test measures) of procedures and concepts. Sleep deprived, for example, may be defined as "X hours less" than the person's natural sleep. Using these carefully worded statements, others can replicate (repeat) the original observations with different participants, materials, and circumstances. If they get similar results, confidence in the finding's reliability grows. The first study of hindsight bias, for example, aroused psychologists' curiosity. Now, after many successful replications with differing people and questions, we feel sure of the phenomenon's power. Replication is confirmation. And lack of replication may enable us to revise our understanding.

True

T or F: Experiments can also help us evaluate social programs. Do early childhood education programs boost impoverished children's chances for success? What are the effects of different antismoking campaigns? Do school sex-education programs reduce teen pregnancies? To answer such questions, we can experiment: If an intervention is welcomed but resources are scarce, we could use a lottery to randomly assign some people (or regions) to experience the new program and others to a control condition. If later the two groups differ, the intervention's effect will be supported (Passell, 1993).

True

T or F: Individual cases can suggest fruitful ideas. What's true of all of us can be glimpsed in any one of us. To find those general truths, we must employ other research methods.

True

T or F: Naturalistic observation offers interesting snapshots of everyday life, but it does so without controlling for all the factors that may influence behavior. It's one thing to observe the pace of life in various places, but another to understand what makes some people walk faster than others. Nevertheless, descriptions can be revealing: The starting point of any science is description.

True

T or F: Our intuition, while powerful, oftentimes fails us!

True

T or F: Our theories can bias our observations. Having theorized that better memory springs from more sleep, we may see what we expect: We may perceive sleepy people's comments as less accurate. The urge to see what we expect is ever-present, both inside and outside the laboratory, as when people's views of climate change influence their interpretation of local weather events.

True

T or F: Psychological science focuses less on specific behaviors than on revealing general principles that help explain many behaviors. And remember: Although psychological principles may help predict behaviors for groups of people, they more faintly predict behavior for an individual in any given situation. Knowing students' ages may clue us to their average vocabulary level, but individual students' word power will vary.

True

T or F: Smart thinkers are not overly impressed by a few anecdotes. Generalizations based on a few unrepresentative cases are unreliable.

True

T or F: Statistical significance indicates the likelihood that a result could have happened by chance. But this does not say anything about the importance of the result.

True

T or F: The point to remember: Hindsight bias, overconfidence, and our tendency to perceive patterns in random events tempt us to overestimate the value of commonsense thinking. But scientific inquiry can help us sift reality from illusion.

True

T or F: Think smart. When viewing graphs, read the scale labels and note their range.

True

T or F: Together, the biological, psychological, and social-cultural viewpoints form an integrated biopsychosocial approach (an integrated approach that incorporates biological, psychological, and social-cultural viewpoints and this integrated approach incorporates three viewpoints to offer a more complete picture of any given behavior or mental process).

True

T or F: Unlike correlational studies, which uncover naturally occurring relationships, an experiment manipulates a variable to determine its effect.

True

T or F: When a fluctuating behavior returns to normal, fancy explanations for why it does so are probably wrong. Regression toward the mean is probably at work.

True

T or F: When contemplating such issues, critical thinkers will also consider the credibility of sources. They will also look at the evidence (Do the facts support them, or are they just makin' stuff up?). They will recognize multiple perspectives. And they will expose themselves to news sources that challenge their preconceived ideas.

True

True or False: In science, there is a passion to explore and understand without misleading or being misled. Some questions (i.e. is there life after death?) are beyond science and answering them would require a leap of faith. In other situations though, the facts can speak for themselves

True

T or F: It is also true, however, that our shared biological heritage unites us as a universal human family. The same underlying processes guide people everywhere

True Some examples: • People diagnosed with specific learning disorder (formerly called dyslexia) exhibit the same brain malfunction whether they are Italian, French, or British (Paulesu et al., 2001). • Variation in languages may impede communication across cultures. Yet all languages share deep principles of grammar, and people from opposite global hemispheres can communicate with a smile or a frown. • People in different cultures vary in feelings of loneliness (Lykes & Kemmelmeier, 2014). But across cultures, loneliness is magnified by shyness, low self-esteem, and being unmarried (Jones et al., 1985; Rokach et al., 2002).

T or F: As later modules illustrate, critical inquiry sometimes also debunks popular presumptions.

True Also, the study of psychology and its critical thinking strategies have helped prepare people for varied occupations, as illustrated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (who studied psychology and computer science while at Harvard) and Natalie Portman (who majored in psychology and co-authored a scientific article at Harvard—and on one of her summer breaks was filmed for Star Wars: Episode I).

T or F: Such errors in people's recollections and explanations show why we need psychological research. It's not that common sense is usually wrong. Rather, common sense describes, after the fact, what has happened better than it predicts what will happen.

True More than 800 scholarly papers have shown hindsight bias in people young and old from across the world (Roese & Vohs, 2012). As physicist Niels Bohr reportedly jested, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

T or F: Even when specific attitudes and behaviors vary by gender or across cultures, as they often do, the underlying processes are much the same.

True (i.e. men and women are actually very similar)

T or F: Survey wording and the way a question is phrased can produce a wildly different answer

True (money amount can influence response, anchored)

Values in psychology

Values affect what we study, how we study it, and how we interpret results. Researchers' values influence their choice of research topics. Should we study worker productivity or worker morale? Sex discrimination or gender differences? Conformity or independence? Values can also color our observations and interpretations; sometimes we see what we want or expect to see (Figure 7.1). Even the words we use to describe traits and tendencies can reflect our values. In psychology and in everyday speech, labels describe and labels evaluate: One person's rigidity is another's consistency. One person's undocumented worker is another's illegal alien. One person's faith is another's fanaticism. One country's enhanced interrogation techniques become torture when practiced by an enemy. Our labeling someone as firm or stubborn, careful or picky, discreet or secretive reveals our own attitudes. Popular applications of psychology also contain hidden values. If you defer to "professional" guidance about how to live—how to get along with parents, how to achieve self-fulfillment, how to respond to sexual feelings, how to succeed in school—you are accepting value-laden advice. A science of behavior and mental processes can help us reach our goals. But it cannot decide what those goals should be. If some people see psychology as merely common sense, others have a different concern—that it is becoming dangerously powerful. Might psychology be used to manipulate people? Knowledge, like all power, can be used for good or evil. Nuclear power has been used to light up cities—and to demolish them. Persuasive power has been used to educate people—and to deceive them. Although psychology does have the power to deceive, its purpose is to enlighten. Every day, psychologists explore ways to enhance learning, creativity, and compassion. Psychology speaks to many of our world's great problems—war, overpopulation, prejudice, family crises, crime—all of which involve attitudes and behaviors. Psychology also speaks to our deepest longings—for nourishment, for love, for happiness. Psychology cannot address all of life's great questions, but it speaks to some mighty important ones.

Descriptive statistics: measures of central tendency (standard deviation)

Vary from the mean

Psychology's research ethics

We have reflected on how a scientific approach can restrain biases. We have seen how case studies, naturalistic observations, and surveys help us describe behavior. We have also noted that correlational studies assess the association between two variables, showing how well one predicts another. We have examined the logic that underlies experiments, which use control conditions and random assignment of participants to isolate the effects of an independent variable on a dependent variable. Yet, even knowing this much, you may still be approaching psychology with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. So before we go any further, let's entertain some common questions about psychology's ethics and values.

Overconfidence

We humans tend to think we know more than we do. Asked how sure we are of our answers to factual questions (Is Boston north or south of Paris?), we tend to be more confident than correct. About how many seconds do you think it would have taken you to unscramble each of these? Did hindsight influence you? Knowing the answers tends to make us overconfident. (Surely the solution would take only 10 seconds or so?) In reality, the average problem solver spends 3 minutes, as you also might, given a similar anagram without the solution: OCHSA.2. Are we any better at predicting social behavior? Psychologist Philip Tetlock (1998, 2005) collected more than 27,000 expert predictions of world events, such as the future of South Africa or whether Quebec would separate from Canada. His repeated finding: These predictions, which experts made with 80 percent confidence on average, were right less than 40 percent of the time. Nevertheless, even those who erred maintained their confidence by noting they were "almost right": "The Québécois separatists almost won the secessionist referendum."

Why, after friends start dating, do we often feel that we knew they were meant to be together?

We often suffer from hindsight bias—after we've learned a situation's outcome, that outcome seems familiar and therefore obvious.

Studying and protecting humans

What about human participants? Does the image of white-coated scientists seeming to deliver electric shocks trouble you? Actually, most psychological studies are free of such stress. Blinking lights, flashing words, and pleasant social interactions are more common. Moreover, psychology's experiments are mild compared with the stress and humiliation often inflicted in reality TV shows. In one episode of The Bachelor, a man dumped his new fiancée on camera, at the producers' request, for the woman who earlier had finished second (Collins, 2009). Occasionally, though, researchers do temporarily stress or deceive people, but only when they believe it is essential to a justifiable end, such as understanding and controlling violent behavior or studying mood swings. Some experiments won't work if participants know everything beforehand. (Wanting to be helpful, the participants might try to confirm the researcher's predictions.) The ethics codes of the APA and Britain's BPS urge researchers to (1) obtain potential participants' informed consent (giving potential participants enough information about a study to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate) to take part, (2) protect participants from greater-than-usual harm and discomfort, (3) keep information about individual participants confidential, and (4) fully debrief (the postexperimental explanation of a study, including its purpose and any deceptions, to its participants) people (explain the research afterward, including any temporary deception). As with nonhuman animals, most university ethics committees (sometimes called institutional review boards) also have guidelines that screen research proposals and safeguard human participants' well-being.

cross-cultural and gender psychology

What can we learn about people in general from psychological studies done in one time and place—often with participants from what psychologists have called the WEIRD cultures (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic [Henrich et al., 2010])? As we will see time and again, culture —shared ideas and behaviors that one generation passes on to the next—matters. Our culture shapes our behavior. It influences our standards of promptness and frankness, our attitudes toward premarital sex and varying body shapes, our tendency to be casual or formal, our willingness to make eye contact, our conversational distance, and much, much more. Being aware of such differences, we can restrain our assumptions that others will think and act as we do.

Operational

What is it that you are testing

What does structuralism mean?

an early school of thought prompted by Wundt and Titchener; used introspection to reveal the structure of the human mind). Much as chemists developed the periodic table to classify chemical elements, Titchener aimed to classify and understand elements of the mind's structure.

Why is replication so important?

When other investigators are able to replicate an experiment with the same (or stronger) results, scientists can confirm the result and become more confident of its reliability.

How can laboratory conditions illuminate everyday life?

When you see or hear about psychological research, do you ever wonder whether people's behavior in the lab will predict their behavior in everyday life? For example, does detecting the blink of a faint red light in a dark room say anything useful about flying a plane at night? Imagine that, after playing violent video games in the lab, teens become more willing to push buttons that they think electrically shock someone. Would this indicate that playing shooter games makes someone more likely to commit violence in everyday life? Before you answer, consider: The experimenter intends the laboratory environment to be a simplified reality—one that simulates and controls important features of everyday life. Just as a wind tunnel lets airplane designers re-create airflow forces under controlled conditions, a laboratory experiment lets psychologists re-create psychological forces under controlled conditions. An experiment's purpose is not to re-create the exact behaviors of everyday life but to test theoretical principles (Mook, 1983). In aggression studies, deciding whether to push a button that delivers a noise blast may not be the same as slapping someone in the face, but the principle is the same. It is the resulting principles—not the specific findings—that illuminate everyday behaviors. When psychologists apply laboratory research on aggression to actual violence, they are applying theoretical principles of aggressive behavior, principles they have refined through many experiments. Similarly, it is the principles of the visual system, developed from experiments in artificial settings (such as looking at red lights in the dark), that researchers apply to more complex behaviors such as night flying. And many investigations show that principles derived in the laboratory do typically generalize to the everyday world (Anderson et al., 1999).

Learn to think critically

Whether you are reading or in class, note people's assumptions and values. What viewpoint or bias underlies an argument? Evaluate evidence. Is it anecdotal? Or is it based on informative experiments? (More on this in Module 6.) Assess conclusions. Are there alternative explanations?

The Tuskegee Experiment

Who: 600 black men in Tuskegee Alabama, 399 with syphilis, 201 people who didn't have the diseases What:Syphilis treatment's effectiveness Where: In Tuskegee, Alabama at Tuskegee institute (now university). When: This began in 1932. In 1947, penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis but the workers still continued to give the patients placebo pills. In the mid 1960s an investigator found out about the study and expressed his concerns. Why: The researchers wanted to track the progression of syphilis during a time when there was no cure. The study took place without the informed consent of the patients. Some of the men with syphilis were barred from receiving treatment, even when they were on the verge of death. It was wrong that the patients were lied to about the true nature of the experiment. The government's reparations of lifetime medical benefits, burial services, and money does not make up for the unjust loss of life.

Project MK Ultra

WhoWhat: Chinease, and North Korea were using mind control to brainwash the United States prisoners that were being held in North Korea To see if they can get information out of people Who: MK-Ultra CIA project Where: Across the united states When: 1953-1973 Why: To see if the use of LSD and other drugs could affect psychological torture, mind control and information gathering Whether or not the use of humans as subjects for cruel experiments was right or wrong. Most people experienced extreme paranoia, violent tendencies, and panic after the experiments. - An investigation of the illegal activities of the CIA took place in 1975 - Some people volunteered. However, there were also some reports that they did not receive consent for some people and participated in illegal spying on U.S. citizens

What were some important milestones in psychology's early development?

Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychological laboratory in 1879 in Germany. Two early schools of thought in psychology were structuralism and functionalism. Structuralism, promoted by Wundt and Titchener, used self-reflection to learn about the mind's structure. Functionalism, promoted by James, explored how behavior and thinking function.

-Fun loving, joyful Harvard professor. Godfather was Ralph Waldo Emerson and good friends with Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud -Functionalism=emphasized the exploring of the mind including emotions, memories, and streams of consciousness. -First to admit a woman, Mary Calkins, into Harvard's Psychology program. -"Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look around cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can."

William James (influenced early psychologist; Hardvard University 1880s; Grandfather of Psychology)

Explain why each of the following people were significant in the history of psychology: a. William James b. Mary Whiton Calkins c. Margaret Floy Washburn

William James was a key proponent of the functionalist school of thought. He authored the first psychology textbook and courageously mentored Mary Whiton Calkins. Mary Whiton Calkins was the first woman to complete the work necessary for a psychology Ph.D. (from Harvard), though she was denied that degree due to her gender. She was a distinguished memory researcher and was the first female president of the American Psychological Association (APA). Margaret Floy Washburn earned the first official psychology Ph.D. She wrote an influential book, The Animal Mind, and was the second female president of the APA.

John B. Watson (1878-1958) and Rosalie Rayner (1898-1935)

Working with Rayner, Watson championed psychology as the scientific study of behavior. In a controversial study on a baby who became famous as "Little Albert," he and Rayner showed that fear could be learned.

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)

Wundt established the first psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig, Germany.

Can we test our hypotheses and refine our theories in several ways?

Yes • Descriptive methods describe behaviors, often by using case studies, surveys, or naturalistic observations. • Correlational methods associate different factors, or variables. (You'll see the word variable often in descriptions of research. It refers to anything that contributes to a result.) • Experimental methods manipulate variables to discover their effects. To think critically about popular psychology claims, we need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of these methods and the conclusions they allow.

Culture and kissing crosses cultures

Yet how we do it varies. Imagine yourself kissing someone on the lips. Do you tilt your head right or left? In Western cultures, in which people read from left to right, about two-thirds of couples kiss right, as in William and Kate's famous kiss, and in Auguste Rodin's sculpture, The Kiss. In one study, 77 percent of Hebrew- and Arabic-language right-to-left readers kissed tilting left

Normal curve

You can grasp the meaning of the standard deviation if you consider how scores naturally tend to be distributed in nature. Some data have no clear pattern, whereas other data may take the form of a bimodal distribution, which means that it has two peaks or humps (modes). We can imagine a simple behavioral example—a town's intersection's traffic volume across 24 hours, with peaks at the morning and evening rush hour. However, large numbers of data—heights, weights, intelligence scores, grades (though not incomes)—often form a symmetrical, bell-shaped distribution called a normal distribution. Most cases fall near the mean, and fewer cases fall near either extreme. This bell-shaped distribution is so typical that we call the curve it forms the normal curve ((normal distribution) a symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many types of data; most scores fall near the mean (about 68 percent fall within one standard deviation of it) and fewer and fewer near the extremes). As Figure 8.3 shows, a useful property of the normal curve is that roughly 68 percent of the cases fall within one standard deviation on either side of the mean. About 95 percent of cases fall within two standard deviations. Thus, as Module 38 notes, about 68 percent of any group of people taking an intelligence test will score within ±15 points of 100. About 95 percent will score within ±30 points. • The Normal Curve: Scores on aptitude tests tend to form a normal, or bell-shaped, curve. For example, the most commonly used intelligence test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, calls the average score 100.

Operational definitions

a carefully worded statement of the exact procedures (operations

What does humanistic psychology mean?

a historically significant perspective that emphasized human growth potential

Correlate

a measure of the extent to which two factors vary together, and thus of how well either factor predicts the other

To sift reality from fantasy, sense from nonsense, verified facts from fake news, therefore requires...

a scientific attitude: being skeptical but not cynical, open but not gullible.

correlation coefficient

a statistical index of the relationship between two things (from −1.00 to +1.00

biopsychosocial approach

an integrated approach that incorporates biological, psychological, and social-cultural viewpoints and this integrated approach incorporates three viewpoints to offer a more complete picture of any given behavior or mental process

Variables

anything that can vary and is feasible and ethical to measure) are related: ——For example, how closely related are the extraversion scores of identical twins? How well do intelligence test scores predict career achievement? How closely is stress related to disease?

What is functionalism?

an early school of thought promoted by James and influenced by Darwin; explored how mental and behavioral processes function—how they enable the organism to adapt, survive, and flourish

an experimental procedure in which both the research participants and the research staff are ignorant (blind) about whether the research participants have received the treatment or a placebo. Commonly used in drug-evaluation studies

double-blind procedure

By using random assignment, researchers are able to control for __________ __________, which are other factors besides the independent variable(s) that may influence research results.

confounding variables

in an experiment, the group not exposed to the treatment; contrasts with the experimental group and serves as a comparison for evaluating the effect of the treatment

control group

in an experiment, the outcome that is measured; the variable that may change when the independent variable is manipulated

dependent variable

_________ statistics summarize data, while _________ statistics determine if data can be generalized to other populations.

descriptive; inferential

Tips to living a happy life

• Get a full night's sleep. Unlike sleep-deprived people, who live with fatigue and gloomy moods, well-rested people live with greater energy, alertness, and productivity. • Make space for exercise. Aerobic activity not only increases health and energy, it also is an effective remedy for mild to moderate depression and anxiety. • Set long-term goals, with daily aims. Successful people take time each day to work toward their goals, such as exercising or sleeping more, or eating more healthfully. Over time, they often find that their daily practice becomes a habit. • Have a "growth mindset." Rather than seeing their abilities as fixed, successful people view their mental abilities as like a muscle—something that grows stronger with effortful use. • Prioritize relationships. We humans are social animals. We flourish when connected in close relationships. We are both happier and healthier when supported by (and supporting) caring friends.

Process class information actively

• Listen for the main ideas and sub-ideas of a lesson. Write them down. Ask questions during and after class. In class, as with your homework, process the information actively, and you will understand and retain it better. As psychologist William James urged a century ago, "No reception without reaction, no impression without ... expression." Make the information your own. Relate what you read to what you already know. Tell someone else about it. (As any teacher will confirm, to teach is to remember.) • Also, take notes by hand. Handwritten notes, in your own words, typically engage more active processing, with better retention, than does verbatim note taking on laptops (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014).

Overlearn

• Psychology tells us that overlearning improves retention. We are prone to overestimating how much we know. You may understand a module as you read it, but that feeling of familiarity can be deceptively comforting. By using the Check Your Understanding questions, you can test your knowledge and overlearn in the process. • Memory experts Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork (2011) offer simple, scientifically-supported advice for how to improve your retention and your grades: ◦ Spend less time on the input side and more time on the output side, such as summarizing what you have read from memory or getting together with friends and asking each other questions. Any activities that involve testing yourself—that is, activities that require you to retrieve or generate information, rather than just representing information to yourself—will make your learning both more durable and flexible.