Scientific Thinking in Psychology

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Chapter 1

• Scientific Thinking in Psychology

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Why take Research Methods

• For your degree
• Research
• Foundation for other courses
• Informed and critical consumer of information
• Graduate school requires it

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Ways of KnowingPeirce

• Tenacity unquestioning faith
• Authority acceptance of facts because that
  person is highly respected
• Intuition coming to direct knowledge without
  reasoning
• Rationalization discourse and logic
• Empirism learning through experience

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Empirical Questions

• Questions that can be answered through systematic
  observations and experiences
• Ex Do men or women tend to be more
  conscientious?
• Some questions cannot be answered scientifically
• Ex Is there a God?

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Attributes of Scientific Thinking

• Determinism all events have causes
• Objectivity observation that can be verified by
  more than one observer
• Data-driven conclusions should be supported by
  data

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Pseudoscience

• Any field of inquiry that appears to use the
  scientific method, but is actually based on
  inadequate, unscientific methods and yields
  results that are false
• Recognizing pseudoscience
• Associates with true science
• Relies on anecdotal evidence
• Sidesteps disproof
• Reduces complexity to simplicity

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The role of research in psychology

• Describe behavior identify regularly occurring
  sequences of events
• Predicting behavior Laws of behavior
• Explaining behavior
• Determine what causes behavior
• Conducting experiments
• Controlling behavior ex jury research

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Scientific Method

• Develop Theory and Hypotheses
• Designing studies
• Collect data
• Analyze data
• Communicate the research results