PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Random Assignment, The Dilemma, Absenteeism
12 Dec 2011
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The results of some of the experiments you encounter will seem obvious, because the topic of social psychology is something with which we all intimately familiar social behaviour and social influence. When we study human behaviour, the results may appear to have been predictable in retrospect. Hindsight bias,: well known human tendency, where people exaggerate how much they could have predicted an outcome after knowing that is occurred. The opposite finding of an experiment might seem just as obvious as the results that actually were obtained. The trick is to predict what will happen in an experiment before you know how it turns out. Social psychology is an empirical science with a well-developed set of methods to answer questions about social behaviour, such as ones about violence with which we began this chapter. These methods are 3 types: observational method, correlational method, and experimental method. Science is a cumulative process, and researchers typically generate hypotheses from previous theories and research.
