PSYA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Karl Popper, Social Grooming, Naturalistic Observation
PSYA01 – Lecture 3: Finding Answers Begins by Questioning
Theories & Hypothesis:
- Scientific process, begins w/ theory (general) – good theories lead to hypotheses that can be
empirically tested in a way that might prove them to be incorrect (falsifiable)
- Freud’s theories of hua ehavior+ religious theories of eistee, are ofte ritiized for
being non falsifiable and impossible to test.
Karl Popper – push to look for data that discounts theories (white swans, find black swan)
- Theories come from naturalistic observation
o Diane Fossey
o Jane Goodal – 18 yr old; go to Africa with mama to live w/chimpanzees
▪ Wanted to watch the chimps to study but they kept leaving ; problems
w/observational theory
▪ She tried to fit in w/species so they would behave naturally – low stance, try to
sell ad ehave like the. Do’t look i the ees (hierarchy) became low
status, social grooming
▪ Confrontation w/ scientists for dehumanizing animals
- VARIABLE = refer to anything that can take on multiple values, can be categorical or continuous
depending on how it is measured.
STATISTICS
• Descriptive Statistics –
o Frequency distribution: organize them, graph to make more sense of the data collected
through histograms
o When more variables are added, more complicated so narrow down to 2 numbers
▪ Central tendencies:
• Mean – data point is min possible distance from all the other points in
sample (extreme values distort results)
• Median – data point that have the data points lie above, and half lie
below (not sensitive to actual values; preferred)
• Mode – the most frequently occurring data point (used in combination
w/histograms)
▪ Variablility:
• M.A.D – mean absolute deviation of each data point from the mean of
the numbers
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