Experimental Psychology and The Scientific Method Quiz

Scientific Methodology

• Observations must be objective to ensure strong agreement among raters.
• Measurement is the process of assigning numbers to objects, events, or their characteristics.
• Experimentation involves testing hypotheses and establishing cause-and-effect relationships.
• Experimentation requires creating at least two treatment conditions and randomly assigning subjects to these conditions.

Philosophy and Physiology

• Hermann von Helmholtz was a German physicist and physiologist who made significant contributions to physiology, particularly in vision, hearing, and nerve conduction.
• He also made contributions to physics, especially in the conservation of energy.

Common Sense vs. Scientific Method

• Scientific methodology involves collecting and evaluating data using scientific techniques.
• Common sense psychology relies on non-scientific data gathering and non-scientific inference.
• Examples of non-scientific thinking include the gambler's fallacy, stereotyping, overconfidence bias, and overusing trait explanations.

Characteristics of Modern Science

• The scientific mentality assumes that behavior follows a natural order and can be predicted.
• Data are empirical when observed or experienced.

Early Psychology

• Wilhelm Wundt conducted introspective experiments to understand how people interpret visual stimuli based on personal experiences and mental associations.
• Hermann Ebbinghaus pioneered memory research, demonstrating the forgetting curve and the importance of spaced repetition.

Schools of Psychology

• Structuralism: aimed to understand the basic elements of consciousness and how they come together to form complex mental experiences.
• Functionalism: emphasized studying how mental processes and behaviors help individuals adapt to their environment and achieve goals.

Modern Trends

• Cognitive Psychology: influences modern trends in technology design, education strategies, behavioral economics, healthcare interventions, and neuroscience research.
• Neuroscience: enhances cognitive psychology by studying how the brain's structure and activity relate to cognitive functions.

Non-Experimental Designs

• Non-experimental approaches analyze how variables interact without creating levels of an independent variable or randomly assigning subjects.
• Examples include studying how memory, attention, social interactions, emotions, and motivation play functional roles in real-world environments.

Behaviorism and Gestalt Psychology

• Behaviorism: focuses on studying observable behaviors influenced by external stimuli, emphasizes objective and measurable data, and introduces concepts like conditioning.
• Gestalt Psychology: focused on how humans perceive the world as meaningful wholes rather than individual parts, studying perceptual organization and insight in problem-solving.