Why Study Psychology?

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Why Study Psychology?
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Do demos here..

• 1)Hindsight Bias
• Confirmation bias
• Overconfidence

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Why Study Psychology?

• Hindsight Bias
• we tend to believe, after learning an outcome,
  that we would have foreseen it
• the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon
• Overconfidence
• we tend to think we know more than we do

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How do we overcome bias?

• The Scientific Method

• Critical Thinking
• thinking that does not blindly accept arguments
  and conclusions

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Scientific Method

• State Problem
• Develop a Hypothesis
• Operationalize Definitions
• Identify Variables
• Identify Population sample size

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The Scientific Method

• Hypothesis
• a testable prediction or educated guess
• often implied by a theory/observable behavior

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The Scientific Method

• Operational Definition
• a statement of procedures (operations) used to
  define research variables
• example-
• intelligence may be operationally defined as what
  an intelligence test measures ( Stanford- Binet)
• Drug use?
• Self esteem?

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Experimentation

• Experiment
• An investigation seeking to understand the cause
  and effect relationship between two variables.

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Experimentation

• Independent Variable
• the experimental factor that is manipulated
• the variable whose effect is being studied
• Dependent Variable
• the experimental factor that may change in
  response to manipulations of the independent
  variable

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The Scientific Method

• Experimental Group- The group exposed to the
  independent variable
• Control Group- the group not exposed to the
  independent variable

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Experimentation

• Population- The total group of subjects available
  .
• Random Assignment of a sample
• assigning participants to experimental and
  control conditions by chance
• minimizes pre-existing differences between those
  assigned to the different groups