Okay so, in, in, most of the rest of this course we're going to be talking about Psychology experiments. sometimes they will be experiments related to just humans in general. and sometimes they will be more specifically related to clinical sorts of issues. What we're really going to approach Psychology from a scientific perspective and so one of the first things I want to do then and, and we'll do over the next three lectures is to really make you very comfortable with the scientific method and to, to actually turn you guys into scientists yourself. So the next three lectures I'm just going to hit a few highlights of the scientific method and some of the, some of the approaches that we use along the way. and then in the activity at the end of this week, you're going to get your hands dirty. You're going to get in there with your own data. and I'm going to ask, allow you to ask some questions about yourselves and, and ultimately arrive at some answers. So I think it'll be a lot of fun and I think by the end of this process you'll feel really you know, confident and strong about your ability to think about science. And from there on we'll have a great base to consider a bunch of Psychology's coolest experiments. So, let's get into the science then. Week one, lecture six, truth seeking, I call it, because really, this is all about, trying to find the truth and the approach that most people believe now is the right approach. So let me go back a little bit in time, because there was a little bit of a philosophical battle, for a while. There was a school of, of thought called the Rationalists who believed that you could ultimately come to understand something simply by thinking about it well enough and deeply enough. And, and perhaps also by arguing with others about it. But through, you know, words and thoughts, you could eventually figure out the truth of some situation. so people who believed that were called the Rationalists. But they were challenged as we moved in the, in the 1700's and the 1800's by the empiricists. So a, a, a sort of new school of philosophers who thought that thinking and talking and arguing wasn't enough. That that would be a good way to arrive at a, a good sense of what the critical questions were, but if you really wanted to know the truth, you could only know that through your senses. They would say, and what they meant by that was by actually doing experiments by, you know, testing your theory in a very real way. And seeing if the predictions it makes holds up. So, that is what we now call the Empirical Approach. And that is really what defines anything as truly being a science. So, when we say Psychology is a science, what we're actually mean is, we drive truths by experimentation. That's how we come to believe we've learned something about human behavior or human mind through experiments. Experiments specifically designed to test theories. Okay, well, that's great. So, what we're really talking about now is some inner play of questions and answers, and I want to stress that a big part of the scientific process is coming up with the questions. So, you can never get to the truth until you know what truth you would like to know about and so you have to have some sense of what the question is that you're trying to answer. and in fact, often there are a couple, three facets that I'm going to highlight of the Scientific Approach. that can be linked separately to either the questions or the answers, although one's pretty ambiguous. So, specifically if you're seeking questions, you usually begin doing something called Observational Research. This could be very formal, or very informal. that's what we'll spend the rest of this lecture talking about. You can also do something called Correlational Research. Now, Correlational Research can sometimes seem as though it's providing answers. But it's very tricky in that regard the answer it provides are, are very open to alternative explanations and so it has this tendency sometimes correlational studies have seeming to have told you something really solid and scientific. But you have to be very careful about it so we're going to spend the second lecture in this series. Talking about Correlational Research. Now that'll actually be what the seventh in the first week. And then finally in the last lecture of this week we're going to talk about the real way to get at good solid answers and that's through experiments and contrasts. So a lot, you know, I've put the Correlational Research in with the seeking questions, because Correlational Research really does give us a good sense of potential realities. but if we want to really understand them well, we typically have to move on to an experimental approach. And we will spend the last lecture this week talking about the experimental approach and, and generally how you can look for contrasts across, levels of some variable and that, that can be very informative. Okay, but for now let's focus on Observational Reasearch and again firmly entrench the notion that this is about seeking questions. I think the best known the best example of Observational Research comes from Jane Goodall Eleanor work with chimpanzees. Jane literally she wanted to understand these sociology and, and the behavior of chimpanzees she wanted to know how they lived and she felt that the best way to learn that was to live with them. So she literally you know went with the chimpanzees, went, camped there in the same areas and tried to mingle with them. Tried to get, you know right in there so that she could watch their behavior and observe their behavior. Now of course, this is a very tricky thing to do. Observational Research is always tricky because the actual presence of the observer usually changes the behavior they're interested in. You know, so for example, imagine you and I are having this interplay right now and an alien kind of beams into the room beside you and, but, but says to you somehow, hey, don't worry about me. I'm just here to watch. I, I'm just going to sit here and watch you guys interact. So, pretend I'm not here. Well, sometimes, you just can't pretend somebody's not there. And if an alien were sitting right behind you, your behavior would likely change. Just like the chimps' behavior, likely changed, with Jane Goodall, being among them. Now Jane tried everything she could, in terms of being very submissive, being very non-intimidating. Trying to adorn herself with the same smells and scents that they were adorned in. So rolling around on the ground, you know, covering herself with feces if necessary. And really trying to be just non-intrusive. Trying to be just sort of something in the corner. I'm hoping that, that would minimize the, the effect on their behavior, but that's the real problem with Observational Research. It, it's really good for generating questions for kind of getting an idea of what you think might be going on. But there is always that fact that the observer is there and, and that always makes any answers pretty tenuous at best. So more on the question side of things. In Psychology, you know, here are some things I want you to think about. We are all Informal Observational Researchers. We all watch the world around us, we watch people behave and we sort of drive ideas or hypotheses. So here are some I'd like you just to think about, based on your experience as a human being. Do you think males or females are better at math? Do you think males or females are better singers? Do you think memory gets worse with, with age? And what about language abilites, do they get worse with age? Do you think old people are more likely then young people to be depressed? And what, whatever answer you get, would that be culturally invariant? Would it be true of every culture? Or do you think maybe that's true in some cultures, but not others, okay? These are all just things I throw out there where you could imagine a human being kind of observing the world around them, and observing things, and, and kind of forming questions in their mind. Hm, I wonder if it's true. It seems to be the case that. I wonder if this is true. so that's the real role Observational Research plays. Generating that question and, and sort of driving the mind to now try to come up with a more formal way of arriving at an answer, okay? I want to just at the end of this to give you a nice little tasty morsel, tell you though, that Observational Research can go a little further. And this is a really interesting example, Rosehan's being sane in insane places. He and about nine of his friends, well he had this original doubt that stemmed from observational work itself. He felt like he was not sure that clinical psychologists of his day could distinguish between people who really were and really were not mentally ill. So he and nine of his friends agreed that they would go to an admissions clinic at, at a psychiatric hospital, and tell the person that interviewed them basically everything truthfully. So they answered every question truthfully. But they, except for the following. First of all they said they were hearing voices in their head. That they couldn't quite always hear but they think it might of said something like empty or thud something like that. but otherwise they didn't, they, they just answered every question completely honestly. they, they probably lied about what their profession was and, and perhaps changed their name. but otherwise, the only real deception was saying they heard these voices. Now, not, they were all committed to the Psychiatric hospital. Nine of them with with the label of being schizophrenic. so they were all admitted and they weren't allowed to leave. One of the questions, you know that was the point when Rosenhan was really interested in. Okay, now at this point, when we're in the mental hospital, because he thought they would get admitted. How long does it take for the people that work there to recognize that a sane person is a sane person. So everybody that was admitted was told, once you're in, act as sane as you can act, answer every question honestly, be very cooperative and let's just see how long it takes them to realize that you're sane. The answer is, people got admitted as early as nine days after admission but as long as fifty two days so some people just had a really hard time getting out of the mental hospital. the, the staff the people they worked with did not believe them when they said they felt better. They weren't experiencing any symptoms, and they thought they were fine. The funny thing is, a lot of the patients did detect that they really were not insane, that they did not belong there. But a lot of the staff and such, did not. So, Rosenhan wrote a paper about this, talked to the media a lot and it was, at that time, a pretty strong blow to Clinical Psychology. and you know, fascinating example of an observational study that went another step. What would happen if and so we tried something, fascinating, okay. So that gives you a feel for for the role of Observational Research and the scientific process. I've got some links for you. One is a general research methods good for the section we're doing now. and I've got one that talks about how they use Observational Research in marketing, realms to, to sell you stuff. a reading about Observational Research as well. And then I have a link to a short article on that, Being Sane in Insane Places, in case I wet your appetitite and you'd like to know more. Follow that. But now that we have this general heading we're going to move forward. And, let's go to the next lecture where we start talking about associations between variables and how they so tempt us to believe we found a truth but how dangerous they actually are in that respect.
