PSYC 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Falsifiability

• School: UBC
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 102
• Professor: Darko Odic

Document Summary

Science gathers knowledge through observation (experiences), rather than intuition or authority. Science give us tools and rules: tools: operational definitions, instruments, data, descriptive stats, rules: openness, falsifiable hypothesis double-blind experiments, ethics. To get over disagreements and biases, psychologists follow a few rules when asking questions and gathering data. Openness: psychology is for everyone and by everyone. Falsifiable hypothesis: when asking questions, psychologists formulate inflexible predictions that can clearly be shown to be false with some observation. Double-bind: neither the participant nor the person getting the data should be aware of what the hypothesis is. Ethics: data is acquired in a manner that is fair to the participants; data is not faked, plagiarized or altered in any way. Experimental methods: a set of rules and procedures we should follow in order to gather data. Observing participants in a natural habitat and noting down their behaviours in response to various everyday situations.