PSYC 107 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Random Assignment

• School: Texas A&M University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 107
• Professor: Stacey Rieck

Document Summary

Randomly selecting participants from the population will ensure that our sample accurately represents the population. Randomly assigning participants to condition makes sure that our results aren"t due to indi(cid:448)idual difference variables (like height and intelligence) Most traits in the population are normally distributed. 68% of the population will score somewhat in the middle (cid:1010)(cid:1012)% (cid:1013)(cid:1009)% (cid:1013)(cid:1013)% Because this is an experiment, we need to randomly assign people to conditions. We know that the sample as a whole is pretty close match to the population, but we want to make sure that: the conditions each match the population pretty closely, the conditions match each other pretty closely. If the conditions are pretty close to one another on well-(cid:271)eing s(cid:272)ores, (cid:449)e (cid:272)an (cid:271)e pretty sure that any results (cid:449)e get (cid:449)on"t (cid:271)e due to differences in well-being. *on average, random assignment will wash out any differences between the groups. *do the best we can given time and financial constraints.