PSY 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Naturalistic Observation, Standard Deviation, Operational Definition
Document Summary
Even in the face of facts, people tend to trust their gut feelings. "ignoring prior odds" mistake: gambler"s fallacy: the odds never change, despite your luck. Scientific method is an approach: detectives: gather facts, formulate hunch, sift through clues, discard/accept clues, psychologists: look at what is known, formulate hypothesis, study data, draw conclusions. Scientific theories: explain or model observations, make predictions, falsifiable: possible to gather evidence to confirm or contradict, parsimonious: relying on the fewest and simplest assumptions. Operational definition: establish an operational definition: objective, measurable description of variable. What"s a good measure: validity: to what extent are you getting the right answer, reliability: to what extent are your answers similar. Samples: convenient samples are not good samples, you should try your best to get a representative sample, cross cultural, the best sample is a random sample because a large random sample should represent the population well. Other methods to gather data: self-report, questionnaires.
