PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Confirmation Bias, Descriptive Statistics, Scientific Method

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jill L Atkinson

Document Summary

Safety, benefits > risks, informed consent, lack of coercion, privacy. Have to rule out anything that will confound the results. We have preconceived notions of our theories and must critically remove these biases. Narrow down a research question to avoid bias" from others as well. Does not come naturally and takes repeated practise. Learn to compensate for those mental blind spots. When the subject believes they know what the experimenter is looking for and changes their behaviour. Demand artifacts: components of the study that inevitably give the hypothesis away, which can cause the subject expectancy effect. Observer-expectancy effect: confound where the observer has a bias towards the results, which then alters the measurements. Distinguish between the two main types of design and the conclusions that we can draw from each (correlation and causation????) Summarize the ethical issues involved in psychological research. Information: organized and long term data made useful. Data into info, data --> collapsing data --> conclusion/organization --> info.