PSYC 260 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Leon Festinger, Naturalistic Observation, Cognitive Dissonance
12 Sep 2013
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In the big picture, research methods help us as learners. 1. ) understanding the terminology and thought process helps you understand the field. 2. ) provides insight into the conclusions we can draw from a study (if we understand what a study is doing, we can understand what its telling us) 3. ) makes you an educated consumer of research. Example in class: you can undermine a person"s intrinsic motivation if you give them extrinsic reward. The gift and curse of social psychology-> topics seems familiar cause we can relate them (research) to ourselves. Outcomes can usually be reasoned either way ahead of time. Everything seems obvious in retrospect, hindsight is 20/20. Predict behaviour before it occurs not just explain it afterward. We need to find the answer through scientific research. * we can get conflicting evidence in many points (wisdom, advice from others) that we need science to explain so we can predict behaviour in advance->we create theories & hypotheses to test.
