Chapter One

1
Chapter One

• Thinking Critically in the Social Sciences

2
History of Psychology

• Wilhelm Wundt (1879)
• G. Stanley Hall (1883)
• Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885)
• William James (1890)
• Edward Thorndike (1898)
• Sigmund Freud (1900)
• Alfred Binet (1905)
• Ivan Pavlov (1906)
• John Watson (1913)
• B.F. Skinner (1960)

3
Perspectives of Psychology

• Neuroscience
• Evolutionary
• Behavior Genetics
• Psychodynamic
• Behavioral
• Cognitive
• Humanistic
• Social-Cultural

4
Subfields of Psychology

• Basic Research
• Applied Research
• I/O, Social, Personality
• Clinical
• Counseling
• Psychiatry

5
Why Science?

• Isnt Psychology the study of stuff that we
  already know?
• Hindsight Bias
• Example
• Systematic and Replicable
• Amazing Randi
• Critical Thinking
• Theory vs. Law

6
Scientific Method

• Form a Question
• Operational Definitions
• Develop a hypothesis
• Carry out Experiment
• Analyze Results
• Draw Conclusions
• Ask New Questions

7
Types of Research

• The Case Study
• Uses one single case to draw generalizations
• Genie
• The Survey
• If you want to know just ask
• False consensus effect
• Population Sampling
• Good Subject Bias

8
Long Term Studies

• Longitudinal
• Select one group of subjects and follow them over
  a period of time
• Cross-sectional
• Select one group of subjects at the various age
  levels that you want to study and conduct the
  study on them
• Flynn Effect

9
More Research

• Naturalistic Observation
• Jane Goodall
• Laboratory Experiment
• Dependent Variable vs. Independent Variable
• Single Blind vs. Double Blind
• Placebo Effect

10
Lies, Damned Lies and . . .

• Statistics
• Correlation
• Correlation is not causation
• Measures of Central Tendency
• Normal Curve
• Area under the curve
• Central Tendency
• Mean, Median, Mode
• Standard Deviation
• Range
• Statistical Significance
• Reliability vs. Validity

11
Ethics in the Lab

• Animal Studies
• Should we injure animals?
• How much?
• When?
• Human Studies
• Should we mislead humans?
• How much?
• When?