PSY 105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Free Recall

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 105
• Professor: William Huggon

Document Summary

Science: the universe operates according to certain natural laws (that are discoverable and testable) Scientific theory: an explanation for a large number of findings in the natural world. Identify questions of interest and review the literature. We found these results, they were opposites to the hypothesis, we"re rejecting the hypothesis : seek scientific review, public and replicate, build a theory. While controlling for other relevant causes (zs) We set up experiments to find out. Uses inductive and deductive and hypothetico-deductive reasoning: inductive: observe first, make predictions based on that, then make a theory, deductive: theory, then predictions, then observation/experiment, hypothetico-deductive: hypothesis, then observation/experiment, then hypothesis supported/not supported (theory built) Types of variables: independent variable: the one that you manipulate, dependent variable: the one that you measure. Operational definitions: how we (the researcher) decide to measure our variables. There are often hundreds of ways to measure a variable (e. g. aggression, depression)