PSY 205 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Advantageous, Stopwatch, Confounding

• School: Syracuse University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 205
• Professor: Shannon Houck

Document Summary

2. 1 - looking for laws: the scientific approach to behavior. Three interrelated goals: measurement and description, understanding and prediction, and application and control. Develop techniques that make it possible to describe behavior clearly and precisely. Scientists understand events when they can explain the reasons for their occurrence. Tentative statement about the relationship between two or more variables. Any measurable conditions, events, characteristics, or behaviors that are controlled or observed in a study. The profession of psychology attempts to apply research findings to practical problems in schools, businesses, factories, and mental hospitals. Theory: system of interrelated ideas used to explain a set of observations, theories permit psychologists to make the leap from the description of behavior to the understanding of behavior. Also guides future research by generating new predictions and suggesting new lines of inquiry: theories must be testable. If findings support a hypothesis, confidence in the theory grows. If findings don"t support a hypothesis, confidence in the theory diminishes.