Hi, I'm Anderson Smith, and

the course is Experimental Research Methods in Psychology.

This course is part of a two-course sequence dealing with research

methodology.

The first course dealing with descriptive methods, in this course,

dealing with experimental methods.

Experimental methods really make up the core of what mean by scientific

psychology.

We know that psychology is a science, it is a science of behavior in the mind.

In that, what it studies is really what defines what a science is.

Now most people would argue that psychology is not a science,

it's a practice, it's helping, and that's true.

But the helping in the practice is based on a scientific core of information.

Now, we really share, psychology shares features that you'll find in all

the sciences whether you're dealing with biology or physics.

We share certain principles, certain features.

And those features are first, the feature of systematic empiricism.

The fact that scientists carefully observe what's going on in nature, measure it and

then analyze it to see whether or not it makes a difference or not.

And that is what we do, and we do it with behavior in the mind.

The second feature of important for

all science is that we ask empirical questions.

Questions that are important for understanding, and

questions where the answer can be achieved through experimental research.

And the third feature is public knowledge.

Science is a public enterprise.

It is very important for what we do in science,

the kinds of experiments that we do in the studies that we do, to be published.

So it's a part of the public knowledge collection of information.

And the reason that's important is because when you submit something to be

published to a journal, then it's reviewed by your peers.

It's reviewed by other scientists to see whether or not what you are proposing,

and what you are studying is valid and reliable and

should be a part of public knowledge.

Now, psychologists, like I said, engage in the study of behavior and

the mind, that's what we do.

That's the content of what we're looking at.

But, if you think about it, we all do that.

As humans, we constantly try to understand and measure and

predict and control the behavior of others.

Whether it's at parents, or at teachers, Or the people around us,

we're constantly trying to understand what's going on with their behavior and

what they're thinking about.

And they're trying to do the same with us.

The difference is that psychologists, scientific psychologists actually

study that material with systematic empiricism, with the scientific method.

Other people don't do that.

They're simply looking at their intuitions,

Some understanding of the experiences that they have based on their intuitions.

But we do it with empirical questions, with scientific method, and

that's the big difference.

So, we rely on our subjective knowledge as humans,

on an idiosyncratic experience that we've had,

on intuitions, on listening to pseudoscience.

But, the literature in scientific psychology represents those valid and

reliable studies that tell us what is really true about behavior in the mind.

Now I also teach a course in introductory psychology.

And actually a course that's here on Coursera.

And, when I teach that course,

I give a pre-test the very first class that we have in the course.

A pre-test, and

there are not many disciplines in science that you can give a pre-test on,

where you can ask questions about the content before you take the course.

But in behavior, we can do that because we've all seen behavior all of our lives.

The problem is that everyone can answer all the questions on the pre-test but

they don't do well.

The questions are all true/false, but on the average,

people only get about 17 trues.

We get 17 trues, but all the questions are false.

So let's look at some examples.

The right side of the brains is creative while the let side is analytic.

Most people would say true to that, it's part of pop psychology.

But in fact, and it's true that the brain is asymmetric.

And many things are located on the left side, like language, and

other things are located on the right side, like spatial analysis.

But something is complete is creativity or analytic thought,

really require all of the brain.

Some people don't dream.

I have yet to find somebody who doesn't dream.

We might not remember our dreams, but everyone dreams.

I have a great film of someone that's in a sleep laboratory,

a person that claims they don't dream, I've never dreamed a night in my life.

They go to sleep,

and then they start having REM sleep, that part of sleep where we're dreaming.

The eyes are moving, the body is very stiff, but the brain is very active, and

you wake them up and they say, wait, don't.

Don't get into that car, tell him not to get in the car, it's dangerous.

And he's like, calm them down, put them back to sleep.

The next morning the person wakes up and says, I told you I don't dream.

And you have to show them the dream to make them believe that they

really do dream, everybody dreams.

In operant conditioning, punishment is negative reinforcement.

No, they're very different.

In fact, there's a great Big Bang episode, if you know the TV program, where

the characters in the program sort of say that punishment is negative reinforcement.

So many psychology students called them up that several months later,

they had to another episode distinguishing between punishment

which is reducing behavior with a consequence.

And negative reinforcement, whereas,

increasingly behavior with negative, Consequence.

Another one, genius is related to mental illness.

You'll probably see the movie, Beautiful Mind, but in fact,

there's no correlation between intelligence and psychopathology.

Another is that schizophrenia means split personality, no.

Split personality is a dissociative disorder.

Schizophrenia means you're split but you're sort of split into your own world.

You're living in a different reality that you shape yourself,

not just different personalities.

Hypnosis is a useful technique for retrieving forgotten memories.

No, you cannot remember things that you've forgotten under hypnosis.

You can make it easier for remembering to occur but

it's not a technique that allows you to remember.

In fact, there is something called the false memory syndrome,

where people remember things under hypnosis like child abuse.

And then, remember that while they were in therapy.

And the idea now we know is that, that's probably a therapeutic resolution and

not something that actually happens in memory, false memory syndrome.

Next, exercising the brain with intellectual games and

tasks can improve your efficiency and intelligence.

There are commercial things, you see them on TV, where people make a lot of money

to try to convince you of this, but it's simply not true.

I can exercise you on a particular task, and you'll do better in that task.

But it will not generalize to things like intelligence and brain efficiency.

In fact, the company that did that was fined by the Federal Trade Commission of

the United States, and told to desist and stop doing those kinds of advertising.

So as you can see, there are, Descriptive techniques and

there's also knowledge which is based on things that happen to us,

but not necessarily through causal research.

These are descriptions of the different kinds of descriptive methods that allows

you to look at frequency, description, association.

Things like case studies, the individual study of people,

observation studies, like watching what people do in a natural setting.

Or what animals do in a natural setting, participant observation where in order

to really observe, you need to be a part of a situation.

So for example, if I want to know what happens at a psychiatric hospital.

I really should be a psychiatric nurse in that hospital studying what's going on.

Surveys and polls allow us to look at correlational studies, but are not really

allow us to make causal relationships between what we're surveying about.

Experimental methods, on the other hand, allow us to look at causation.

And we do that by following scientific procedures called,

the experimental method.

And in that, we manipulate variables and we compare things.

Now that manipulation, then looking at comparison, we can reach causation.

So let's look at this scientific or experimental method.

First, you have to have some rationale for doing the experiment, and

we do that by looking at the research literature.

What have other people done in other experiments?

What are the findings that we want to elaborate on or

theory about how things work?

And so we want to test that theory to see whether it's false or

true by doing experiments.

There may be practical problems we're trying to solve.

What's the best keyboard to use for someone whose 80 years old and

is that going to be different for someone whose 20 years old.

And we can do experimental studies to look at that to solve that practical problem.

Or we can simply be looking at the observations that we made from descriptive

methods, to try to now look at much more explanatory

things about the domain that we are in and what we are studying.

So remember, we are looking at the rationale.

What's the basis for doing the experimental study?

And if it's a theory, whatever we're testing must be falsifiable.

One of the biggest theories in psychology is called psychoactive theory by Freud.

And psychodynamic theory and psychoactive theory is a very important

in psychoanalysis, the technique used Freud as treatment.

But the nature of the theory is such that it doesn't lead to testable hypothesis,

so its not admittable to experimental verification.

The theory must be falsifiable in order to apply experimental

techniques to look at whether or not it's active and it's actual true or not.

Second, once we looked at the sort of what the rush job of doing this experiment.

We have to come up with the actual hypothesis,

what is the question that we're actually going to ask to get an answer to?

And the hypothesis has to be stated in a way which really looks at the nature of

the experiment.

We make a manipulation based on that hypothesis,

and that's the empirical study, the empirical question.

And we test whether or not the hypothesis is correct or not.

Then, and remember that when we manipulate something,

we have to make sure that's the only thing being manipulated.

That's called control.

And so the manipulation must be control.

Then we do a data analysis to see whether or not the difference that we observe,

if there is a difference, is actually significant or not,

it's meaningful or not.

And that really ask the question, is the difference that we're observing,

could it be due to chance, or is it really a real difference?

And statistics give us those answers.

And then we make interpretations and conclusions based on the data analysis,

and that feeds back into the research literature.

That's what I meant about public knowledge and public domain.

And so that is the experimental method.

Having a rationale based on observations or theory or research literature.

Following a hypothesis, doing a manipulation,

to test the hypothesis, analyzing what you find.

And then reaching conclusions that could feed back into the research literature,

or solve the problem, or test the theory.

Thank you.

Lesson 1A: Scientific Knowledge

Experimental Research Methods in Psychology

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