Sources of Belief and Science

• Here are some study notes for the exam review

Sources of Belief

• Method of Experience: Believing something because it seems true in your personal life.
• Method of Intuition: Believing something because it "feels right".
• Motivated Cognition: Not challenging or thinking critically when something matches pre-existing beliefs.
• Confirmation Bias: Paying more attention to information that supports your beliefs.
• Availability Heuristic: Thinking easier-to-remember things happen more frequently.
• Present/Absent Bias: Remembering things more when they occur than when they are absent.
• Bias Blind Spot: Awareness of biases doesn't make people immune to them.
• Method of Authority: Believing something because an authority figure or expert says it's true.
• Empirical Method: Believing something based on direct observation.

Characteristics of Science

• Empirical: Driven by evidence in the form of systematic observation.
• Public: Writing papers, attending conferences, distributing to policymakers and popular media.
• Objective: Recognizing and avoiding bias through statistics, replication, and collaboration.

Project ADAM (Legos) Lab

• Involved building a Lego set based on written instructions provided.
• Demonstrated the importance of a specific methods section in research.

Types of Designs

• Self-report
• Behavioral
• Physiological/neurological
• Questionnaire
• Proximity to partners
• Oxytocin
• Brain scans

Claims and Corresponding Designs

• Frequency: Describes behavior rates or amounts.
• Association: Indicates the relationship between two things.
• Causal: Establishes a cause-effect relationship between variables.

Using Existing Research

• Archival Research: Analyzing data from primary sources like public records, often allowing for larger sample sizes and national/international comparisons.
• Content Analysis: Converts text into quantifiable data, applicable to written records of speeches.
• Meta-Analysis: Analyzing results from multiple existing studies to calculate an overall or average effect size and determine publication bias.

Descriptive Research

• Case Studies/Ethnography: Provides a qualitative description of a person or group's experiences, useful for documenting rare circumstances.
• Observation: Recording the occurrence of pre-selected behaviors in contrived or naturalistic settings, measuring frequency or duration.
• Experience Sampling:, Participants report thoughts, feelings, or behaviors at the moment.
• Surveys: Studies that use surveys to describe groups and can be conducted as diagnostic interviews.
• Correlational Research: Designed to demonstrate a relationship between two variables.

Experimental Research

• Casual claims - Typically correlating one measured continuous variable and one manipulated categorical variable where levels of manipulation cause difference in measured variable, example: pet interaction reduces measured stress
• Anything that measures multiple variables without manipulation.

Requirements for Causal Claims

• Covariation: Changes in the IV and DV are related
• Temporal precedence: The IV occurs before the DV.
• Non-spurious: The relationship between IV and DV cannot be explained by another variable.

Variables

• Independent Variable: Manipulated variable, usually categorical, assumed to be the cause.
• Dependent Variable: Measured variable, usually continuous, assumed to be the effect.

Quasi-Experiments

• Designed like experiments but without random assignment or manipulation.
• Pre-existing groups are compared, statistical analyses can be used, but causal claims cannot be technically made.

Components of Experimental Design

• control/comparison - at least two different groups are compared
• manipulation - researcher creates difference between the groups
• Random assignment where an equal chase for any participant be in either group

Observational Research

• Watching behavior while collecting qualitative or quantitative data.

Types of Data Collection

• Quantitative, quantifiable objective data like amount
• Qualitative such as descriptive quality of the data

Methods of Measurement

• Frequency: Counting the number of times a behavior occurred.
• Duration: Measuring the amount of time spent engaging in a behavior.
• Interval: Noting if a behavior is observed during set time intervals.
• Event: Observing all instances of specific behaviors.
• Individual: Observing all behaviors of particular individuals.
• Time: Observing all behaviors within a specific time frame.

Types of Observations

• Naturalistic: Observing in a natural habitat without disturbing the subjects.
• Participant: Becoming one of the subjects.
• Intervention: Making a change in the world that might not naturally occur.

Potential Problems in Research

• Reactivity: People modify behavior when they know they are being watched.
• Demand Characteristics: Participants guess expectations based on accidental clues.

Precautions to Avoid these Problems

• Choose naturalistic designs
• Replicate study

Experimenter Expectancy Effect

• Researchers might influence results, as seen in Rosenhan's (1963) study where students were told rats were either "smart-bred" or "dumb-bred" and the "smart" rats learned quicker

Avoiding Experimenter Expectancy

• Single-blind study: experimenters are not aware of the condition
• Double-blind Study- neither the experiment or the participant are aware of the condition

APA Style Sections

• Title Page: Includes page number, paper title, author, affiliation, course, instructor, and due date.
• Abstract: A brief summary (typically 120 words) of the entire paper.
• Introduction: Hooks the reader, introduces constructs, sets the stage by reviewing literature, and states the specific hypothesis.
• Method: Provides sufficient information for replication, with subsections for participants, stimulus materials, design, and procedures.
• Results: Includes details, statistics, and references to tables and figures.
• Discussion/References: Explains the data, relates findings to literature, discusses implications and future directions.
• Figures/Tables: Essential for journal articles, each with a caption.

APA In-Text Citations and Reference List

• In-Text Citations: (author last name, year) as parenthetical or narrative.
• Reference List: Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (year). Title of article. Title of Journal, Vol. #(issue #), pp-pp.

Defining and Measuring Variables

• Theory: Leads to a hypothesis, a specific, testable idea about a construct.
• Constructs: Abstract concepts, such as "happiness", that need operational definitions.
• Operational Definitions: Specifies how each construct will be measured.

Self-Report and Survey Research

• Structure: Start with a non-threatening question as a warm-up, followed by general questions before specific ones, placing demographic questions at the end to reduce effort and stereotype threat.

Types of Questions

• Open-ended: Allowing freedom and flexibility but difficult & time-consuming to analyses
• Forced choice: Fast and efficient, but may not reflect the truthful opinion

Potential Problems in Surveys

• Leading Questions: Steer the respondent towards a particular answer.
• Double-Barreled Questions: Asking two things at once.
• Memory: Survey relies on memory which is error-prone

Sampling Research Participants

• Population vs. Sample: Population is the entire group of interest, while the sample is how you select people from this population.
• Sample size
• Bias - people respond when they have a high opinion

Sampling Plans

• Non-Probability Sampling
• SRS everyone in the population has an equal chance of being selected
• Quota, selectively take what is available

Probability Sampling

• Each member of the population has a known and non-zero chance of being selected
• Stratified Sampling: Break population into subgroups and sampling an equal number from each.
• Proportional Stratified: Sampling each stratum in proportion to its size.

Correlation

• Visualizing relation between variables
• Measures a persons r
• Each point = 1 observation

Strength (correlation)

• Further from zero equals stronger correlation

Temporal Precedence /Directionality

• The cause precedes effect
• We can design experiments to confirm this
• Surveys and other forms of correlation research do not accomplish this

Explore different sources of belief, including experience, intuition, and authority. Understand cognitive biases like confirmation bias and the availability heuristic. Learn about the characteristics of science, emphasizing empirical evidence and public verification.