Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Social Desirability Bias, Naturalistic Observation, Operational Definition

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Laura Fazakas- De Hoog

Document Summary

Diffusion of responsibility- a psychological state in which each person feels decreased personal responsibility for intervening in a situation. Identify a question of interest: sparked by curiosity, often a why?". Gather information and form hypothesis: tentative explanation or prediction about some phenomenon, gather clues and logically analyze them, often in form if then ". Test hypothesis by conduction research: conduct research, gather evidence, perform experiment. Analyze data, draw tentative conclusions and report findings: making graphs, gathering statistics and interpreting raw data, possibly publishing research to scientific journal, etc. Build a body of knowledge; ask further questions; conduct more research; develop and test. Hypotheses: evidence mounts and more theories developed, theory: set of formal statements that explain how and why certain events are related to one another, broader than hypotheses, specify relationships between behaviors and their causes. Hindsight understanding arrive at explanations after-the-fact: major limitation is due to various explanations for behaviour with no sure way to determine correct alternative.