[Social Psychology Course Note] Ch 2

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Methodology: How Social Psychologists Do Research

How do researches develop theories and hypotheses ?

Fundamental principle

  • Social influence can be studied scientifically

Hindsight Bias 事後聰明偏誤

Tendency to exaggerate prediction of an outcome after knowing that it occured

  • Result of some experiments may seen obvious
    • Familiarity with the subject matter
      • Social influence
      • Social behavior
    • Hindsight bias

Formulating hypotheses and theories

  • Like other scientists, social psychologists
    • Develop theories
    • Derive hypotheses from theory
    • Test hypotheses
  • Previous theories and research
    • Science is cumulative
      • Dissatisfacation with behaviorism
  • Personal observation
    • Kitty Genovese

What are the strengths and weaknesses of various research designs that social psychologists use ?

The observational method

  • Researcher observes people and systematically records behavior
  • e.g.
    • Ethnography 民族誌: description from an “insider’s point of view”
    • Archival analysis: researcher examines accumulated documents (傾向 supplemental)
  • Interjudge reliability 評分者間信度
    • The level of agreement between two of more people who independently observe and code a set of data
    • Do you see what I see ?
    • Important to establish reliability when observation is used
  • Limits of the observational method
    • Certain behaviors difficult to observe
      • Rarely or private
    • Archival analysis
      • Original may not have all information researchers need
    • Does not allow prediction and explanation
      • Limited to description

The correlational method

  • Two or more variables are systematically measured and the relation between them is assessed
  • Correlation coefficient
    • How well you can predict one variable from another

Serveys

  • Representative sample of people asked about attributes or behavior
  • Correlations computed using responses to questions

Using surveys

  • A way ensuring that a sample of people is representative of a population by giving everyone in the population an equal chance of being selected for the sample

Advantages

  • Investigate relations between variables difficult to ibserve
  • Sample representative segments of population (取樣)

Disadvantages

  • Accuracy of responses: people may not know the answer - but they think they do

Limits of the correlational method

  • Correlation ≠ causation
  • Social psychology’s goal
    • Identify causes of social behavior

The experimental method

  • Researchers randomly assigns participants to different conditions
  • Conditions are identical except for the independent variables (the one thought to have causal effect on people’s responses)
    • Use to answer causal questions
  • Independent variable: to be manipulated
  • Dependent variable: to be measured

Internal validity in experiments 內在效度

  • Making sure that nothing besides independent variable can effect dependent variable
  • Increasing internal validity
    • Control extraneous variables
    • Randomly assign people to experimental conditions

Random assignment

  • Ensure all participants have equal chance of being in any experimental condition
  • Ensure that difference in participants’ personalities or backgrounds are distributed evenly across conditions

Probability level (p-value)

  • A number calculated with statistical techniques
  • Indicates likelihood results of experiment occured by chance instead of the IV(s)
  • The convention in science is to consider results significant when
    • Probability is less than 0.05 that the results might be dued to chance factors and not the IV

Limits of experimental method

  • Artificial
  • Distant from real life
    • Tradeoff with increasing control over the situation to make it similar for all participants

External validity in experiments 外在效度

  • The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people
  • Two kinds of external validity (generalizability)
    • Situations: the extent to which we can generalize from the experimental situation to real-lifr situations
      • Psychological realism 心理真實性
        • Psychological process triggered by experiments are similar to psychological process in real life
      • Cover story
        • A description of the purpose of a study, given to participants, that is different from its true purpose, used to maintain psychological realism
    • People: the extent to which we can generalize from the people who participated in the experiment to people in general
      • Random selection of participants from population
        • Impractical and expensive for most social psychology experiments
        • Address by studying basic, fundamental psychological processes that may be universal

Improving external validity

  • Field experiments 田野實驗
    • Advantages
      • Participants unaware that they are in an experiment
      • Participants more diverse than typical college sample

Trade-off between internal and external validity

  • Internal validity: randomly assign to conditions and control for extraneous variables
  • External validity: generalize to everyday life
  • Basic dilemma of the social psychologist
    • Too much control, generalizable ?
    • Too much like real life, control all extraneous variables ?
  • The way to resolve this basic dilemma is not to try to do everything in a single experiment

Test of internal and external validity

  • Replications 驗證性研究
    • Repeating a study, often with different subject populations or in different settings
    • Ultimate test of external validity
  • Meta-analysis 後設分析
    • A statistical technique that averages the results of two or more studies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable
    • Test of internal validity

Basic versus applied research

  • Basic research 基礎研究
    • Designed to find the best answer to why people behave as they do
    • Conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity 就是單純想研究
  • Applied research 應用研究
    • Designed to solve a particular social problem

What impact do cross-cultural studies, the evoluntionary approach, and social neuroscience research have on the way in which scientists investigate social behavior ?

Cross-cultural research

  • Conducted with different cultures, to see if psychological processes are present in both cultures or specific to the culture in which people were raised

Issues in cross-cultural research

  • Researchers must
    • Guard against imposing their own cultural viewpoints onto an unfamiliar culture
    • Ensure that IV and DV are understood in the same way in different cultures

The evolutionary approach

  • Evolutionary theory
    • 達爾文, explain how animals adapt to their environments
  • Natural selection
    • How heritable traits that promote survival in a particular environment are passed along to future generations
    • Organisms with those traits are more likely to produce offspring

Evolutionary psychology

  • Attempts to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that have evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection
  • Core idea
    • Social behavior prevalent today are due, in part, to adaptions to past environments
  • Impossible to test with experimental method

Social neuroscience

  • Examines the connection between biological processes and social behavior
  • Technologies used include:
    • Electroencephalography (EEG)
      • electrodes are placed on the scalp to measure electical activity in the brain
    • Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
      • in which people are placed in scanners that measure changes in blood flow in their brains

How do social psychologists ensure the safety and welfare of their research participants, while at the smae time testing hypotheses about the causes of social behavior ?

Two goals in conflict

  • Ethical dilemma
    • Create experiments that resemble the real world and are well controlled
    • Avoid causing participants stress, discomfort, or unpleasantness

Deception and debriefing

  • Deception
    • Misleading participants about the true purpose of a study or the events that will actually transpire(透露)
    • People do not object to mild discomfort and deception
    • Not all research in social psychology involves deception
  • Debriefing 釋疑面談
    • Explaining to participants, at the end of an experiment, the true purpose of the study and exactly what transpired

Guidelines for ethical research

  • Submit to institutional review board
  • Must include at least one scientist, one nonscientist, and one person who is not affiliated with the institution