Psychology 2800E Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Nomothetic, Classical Conditioning, Internal Validity

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2800E
• Professor: Doug Hazlewood

Document Summary

Part 1: reasons for using single participant experiments: group experiments tell us about groups of people, not individuals, group scores (means) can misrepresent the behaviour of specific individuals, group scores can misrepresent the behaviour of all individuals in the group. See w&m p. 297-298: fig 12. 1: gradual learning at group level, fig 12. 2: sudden learning at individual level. But study can be replicated with other participants (to see if the results generalize : so, also called small-n experiments, each replication (with single p) is a separate experiment (look for converging pattern) Note 2: has a long history in psychology. Pavlov"s studies of classical conditioning : studied one dog at a time then replicated in additional dogs; findings were generalizable; all dogs had the same effect. Skinner"s studies of operant conditioning : didn"t discover operant conditioning through groups of rats and averaging their responses together studied one rat at a time!