PSYC 1010 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Scatter Plot
20 May 2018
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PSYC 1010 Chapter 5 Notes
Introduction
Regression toward the Mean
• The study of University of Nevada students discussed earlier found their reports of inner
speech correlated negatively (-.36) with their reported psychological distress.
• Those who reported more inner speech tended to report somewhat less psychological
distress.
• Statistics can help us see what the naked eye sometimes misses.
• To demonstrate this for yourself, try an imaginary project.
• You wonder if tall men are more or less easygoing, so you collect two sets of scores:
e’s heights ad e’s teperaets.
• You measure the heights of 20 men, and you have someone else independently assess
their temperaments from 0 (extremely calm) to 100 (highly reactive).
• With all the relevant data right in front of you can you tell whether the correlation
between height and reactive temperament is positive, negative, or close to zero?
• Comparing the columns, most people detect very little relationship between height and
temperament.
• In fact, the correlation in this imaginary example is positive, +.63, as we can see if we
display the data as a scatterplot
• If we fail to see a relationship when data are presented as systematically
• How much less likely are we to notice them in everyday life?
• To see what is right in front of us, we sometimes need statistical illumination.
• We can easily see evidence of gender discrimination when given statistically
summarized information about job level, seniority, performance, gender, and salary.
• But we often see no discrimination when the same information dribbles in, case by case
(Twiss et al., 1989).
• The point to remember: A correlation coefficient helps us see the world more clearly by
revealing the extent to which two things relate.
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