a psychological state in which each person feels decreased personal responsibility for intervening. Darley and Latane reasoned that that the presence of multiple bystanders produced this in the Kitty Genovese murder.
Thinking scientifically
Curiosity
Skepticism
Open-mindedness
Steps in scientific process
Curiosity
forming a hypothesis
Conducting research
Analyze Data, Draw Conclusions and report findings
Build a body of knowledge
Hypotheses
A specific prediction about some phenomenon
Theory
A set of formal statements that explains how and why certain events are related to one another.
Hindsight
After the-Fact understanding
What are the advantages of and disadvantages of hindsight?
Disadvantage-past events usually can be explained in many ways, its hard to know which is correct.
Advantage-can provide insights
Variable
factor that can vary
Operational Definition
defines a variable in terms of the specific procedures used to produce or measure it.
Social desirability bias
the tendancy to respond in a socially acceptable manner rather than according to how one truly feels or behaves.
Unobtrusive measures
which record behavior in a way that keeps participants unaware that they are being observed.
Archival measures
records or documents that already exist.
APA Ethics Code
ethical guidelines for biomedical and behavioral research.
Descriptive research
seeks to identify how humans and other animals behave in natural settings.
case study
in-depth analysis of and individual, group, or event.
naturalistic observation
observing behavior as it occurs in a natural setting and attempts to avoid influencing that behavior.
Representative sample
one that reflects the important characteristics of the population.
Random sampling
every memeber of a population has an equal probablity of being chosen to participate in the survey.
Scatterplots
graphs that show the correlation between two variables
Independent variable
refers to the factor that is manipulated or controlled by the experimenter.
Dependent variable
factor that is measure by the experimenter and that may be influenced by the independent variable.
random assignment
a procedure in which each participand has an equal liklihood of being assigned to any on e group within a experiment.
counterbalancing
a procedure in which the order of conditions is varied so that no condition has an over all advantage relative to the others.
Internal validity
the degree to which an experiment supports clear causal conclusions
confounding of variables
two variables are intertwined in such a way that we cannot determine which one has influenced a dependent variable.
Placebo
substance that has no pharmacological effect
Placebo effect
People receiving a treatment show a change in behavior because of their expectations, not because the treatment itself had any specific benefit.
experimenter expectancy effects
the unintentional ways researchers influence their participants to respond in a manner that is consistent with the researcher's hypothesis.
double-blind procedure
both the participant and experimenter are kept blind as to which experimental condition the participant is in.
external validity
results of a study can be generalized to other populations, settings and conditions
Replication
process or repeating astudy to determine whether the original findings can be duplicated.
Descriptive statistics
allows us to summarize and describe the characteristics of a set of data.
Mode
most frequently occurring score in a distribution.
Median
middle score
Mean
average of scores
range
difference between highest and lowest scores in a distribution
Standard deviation
takes ininto account how much each score is a distribution differs from the mean.
Inferential statistics
tells us how confident we can be in making inferences about apopulation based on findings obtained from a sample.
Statistical significance
means that it is very unlikely that a particular finding occurred by chance alone.
meta-analysis
statistical procedure for combining the results of different studies that examine the same topic.