PSYCH 9A- Final Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam ( 55 pages long!)
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People do not use appropriate research methods in psychological research run a high risk of generating bs. Example: journal"s paper on esp expected to prompt outrage - precognition (ability to predict the future) The effect size is rather small (53% vs. 50% guessing rate). However, if there are many human research subjects with each running many trials, such an effect can reach statistical significance as determined by standard methods of inferential statistics. If you keep on running experiments of this sort, you will get something that looks like a result of just by chance. The more times an experiment is repeated, the less likely the result is due to chance alone. There is no result if it cannot be replicated. Basic principles of statistics: the more observations that you make, the more likely it is that you will observe patterns that couldn"t possibly occur by chance - even though they occur just by chance!
