PSY 005 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Dependent And Independent Variables, Internal Validity, External Validity

• School: College of The Sequoias
• Department: Psychology (PSY)
• Course: PSY 005
• Professor: Fulmer

Document Summary

Experimental method: the method in which he researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable (the one though to have a causal effect on people"s responses) The experimental method always involves direct intervention on the part of the researcher. Hypothesis that the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely it is that any given individual will intervene. By carefully changing one aspect of the situation (e. g. , group size), they could test whether this aspect is the cause of the behaviour in question (e. g. , whether people help in an emergency) This does propose ethical and practical dif culties. They did this experiment in a cubicle environment where one of the participants started seizing. Only 31% of the participants tried to help the victim. Independent variable: the variable a researcher changes or varies to see it has an effect on some other variable.