SCIENTIFIC METHOD: The power of systematic research methods to uncover truths that would be difficult if not impossible to uncover through intuition or causal observation.
METAPHYSICAL OR SUPERNATIONAL EXPLANATIONS: belief in insight gained by means of a private experience such as an altered state of consciousness, a transcendental experience, a spiritual encounter, or more simply, a high or a trip.
PHILOSOPHY: Refers to the study of knowledge, behavior, and the nature of reality by making use of logic, intuition, and empirical observations.
EMPIRICISM: the idea that the best way to learn about the world is to make observations and to learn from experience
Mid to late 1800s -à Germany -à Wundt (pysiologist) à Experimental Method
CANONS:
fundamental principles that are more or less accepted on faith. There appear to be at least four such fundamental principles that are accepted by almost all scientists.
1. DETERMINISM: Causal thinking: The doctrine that the universe is orderly: the idea that all events have meaningful, systematic causes.
2. EMPIRICISM: The best method, according to most scientists, to find out how the orderly principles are. This is to make observations.
3. PARSIMONY: "stinginess" A good scientist will always prefer a simple explanation to a more complex one, other things being equal.
4. TESTABILITY: Perhaps the most important. Scientific theories should be testable (confirmable or disconfirmable) using currently available research techniques.
Falsifiability: scientists should go a step beyond putting their theories to some kind of test by actively seeking out tests that could prove their theories wrong.
Operational definitions: definitions of theoretical constructs that are stated in terms of concrete, observable procedures.
FOUR WAYS OF KNOWING ABOUT THE WORLD:
1. INTUITION: "gut" - spontaneous perception or judgement not based on reasoned mental steps.
2. LOGIC: reasoning through the problem.
3. AUTHORITY: asking someone who knows about the query, status or prestige, typically based on authority or expertise when making day to day decisions.
4. OBSERVATION: learning through experience
LAWS, THEORIES, HYPOTHESES, AND PARADIGMS:
THEORIES: general statements about why people think, feel, and behave as they do and a statement about the causal relation between two or more variables. It is typically stated in abstract terms, and it usually has some degree of empirical support.
SCIENTIFIC LAWS: are coherent (and typically precise), well-developed explanations that have a great deal of empirical support.
HYPOTHESES: are aspiring theories because hypotheses are even more limited in scope than theories, and they often have little or no direct empirical support
THREE APPROACHES TO HYPOTHESIS TESTING
POSITIVE TEST BIAS: refers to the tendency for people who are evaluating hypotheses to attempt to confirm rather than to disconfirm these hypotheses.
BEHAVIORAL CONFIRMATION: the tendency for social perceivers to elicit behaviors from a person that are consistent with their initial expectancies of the person.
1. VALIDATION: most common approach. Researchers attempt to gather evidence that supports or confirms a theory or hypothesis.
2. FALSIFICATION: Researchers attempt to gather evidence that invalidates or disconfirms a theory or hypothesis.
3. QUALIFICATION: An approach to hypothesis testing in which researchers try to identify the conditions under which a theory or hypothesis is or is not true.
THE EXPERIMENTAL PARADIGM
EXPERIMENTATION: refers to an approach to scientific investigation in which researchers manipulate one or more variables to examine their effect on some other variable or variables.
EXPERIMENT: refers to a particular study in which the researcher has made use of experimentation.
PARADIGM: refers to a widely shared set of guiding assumptions and research methods that makeup a scientific research tradition.
SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUES
MANIPULATION: Manipulating variables to examine their effects on other variables. The variables an experimenter manipulates have come to be known as independent variables, and the variables they are expected to influence have come to be known as dependent variables.
RANDOM SAMPLING: a technique for deciding which participants make it into your study in the first place, making sure that the people in your study are exactly like the people in the real world
RANDOM ASSIGNMENT - this is a technique for assigning participants to conditions in an experiment such that every participant has an equal chance of being assigned to any of the conditions of the experiment.
STATISTICAL TESTING: Decisions about what to infer from a set of research findings need to be made in a logical, unbiased fashion. It involves the use of objective, mathematical decision rules to determine whether or not an observed set of research findings is "real."