PSYA01H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Franz Mesmer, Psychosomatic Medicine, Gustav Fechner
Document Summary
Psychology: the scientific study of behavior, thought and experience. Scientific method: a way of learning about the world through collecting observations, proposing explanations for the observations, developing theories to explain, and using the theories to make predictions. Scientific thinking revolves around hypothesis and theories, they guide process and progress of science. Hypothesis: a testable prediction about processes that can be observed and measured. Hypothesis must be: confirmable or rejectable, testable, breaking these rules lead to field of astronomy and horoscopes. Pseudoscience: refers to ideas that are presented as science but do not use the principles of scientific thinking or procedure. Theory: an explanation for a broad range of observation that also generate new hypotheses and integrate numerous findings into a coherent whole. Theories must be: falsifiable: evidence that can be for but also against it, are different from beliefs or opinions, are not equally plausible, several theories for the same issue, no way to measure which theory is better.
