PSYCH291 Lecture Notes - Serendipity
1 Oct 2013
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Document Summary
Context of discovery how an idea occurs to a man . Context of justification whether the idea is justified . Explaining anomalies (paradoxical incidents, surprising things we can"t explain) Use observations of world to gain insight to generate hypothesis. Variety of observations: intensive case studies of events/individuals. Anonymous observations (mystery cases eg. brutal prolonged murder of a female in full view of society) Close observation of the phenomenon (eg. carol dweck"s research on academic motivation and self- theories) Serendipity (accidental discovery that researcher didn"t anticipate in advance) Reconciling conflicting observations (eg. zajonc"s theory of social facilitation *performance declines in presence of others, but other studies found audiences enhanced performance. = zajonc proposed that patterns of effects depended on difficulty of past [difficult tasks = inhibited performance] because audience increases arousal] Taking ideas, thinking through ideas and manipulating concepts and then drawing new hypotheses. Taking phenomenon of interest and connecting to well understood phenomenon to guide hypothesis of interested phenomenon.
