PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Mental Chronometry, Operational Definition, External Validity

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jaime Palmer

Document Summary

Science is an approach to asking and answering questions about the universe through reason, intuition, and common sense, religion and spirituality, the arts and the teachings of family, friends and others. Identify, gather info & form hyp. , test, analyze, build. Theory: set of formal statements that explain how and why certain evets are related to one another. Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards. (soren. Understanding behaviour in our everyday lives after it happened. Theory development is the strongest test of scientific understanding because good theories generate an integrated network of predictions. Existing facts and observations organizes info in a meaningful way. It satisfied our curiosity, increases knowledge and generates principles that we can apply to new situations. Variable: any characteristic or factor that can vary from one person to another and over time. Many variables represent abstract concepts that cannot be observed directly. Operational definition: variable in temps of specific procedures used to produce or measure it.