PSYCH-101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Ecological Validity, Central Tendency, Data Science
9 Sep 2020
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When people do something that violates their view of themselves, this causes an uncomfortable state of dissonance that motivates a change in either attitudes or behavior (festinger, 1957): describes the behavior, makes predictions about future behavior. A good theory produces a testable prediction called a hypothesis. Operational definitions describe the procedure (operations) used to test the theory, so they can be replicated. Ex: good sleep makes you feel better. Positive: variables increase and decrease with one another. Negative: as one variable increases, another decreases. Experiments give us the opportunity for control. Central tendency = the value around which scores cluster; the typical score in a data set. Designed to summarize a set of data with a single number. Mean: numerical average for a distribution of scores, add up the values of all of the scores and divide by the # of scores. It is the most commonly used measure of central tendency.
