11 Ch1 Overview Fall

AP Psych Chapter 1

1. When your best friend hears that you are taking a psychology course, she asserts that psychology is simply common sense. Explain why your awareness of both the limits of everyday reasoning and the methods of psychological research would lead you to disagree with your friend’s assertion. Most notions of common sense commonly create errors. Humans have the natural tendency to feel as if they had the “right idea” after an outcome of any event. One of our human errors is known as the hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is defined as ones tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one could have foreseen it (I – knew- itall-along phenomenon). For instance, after the World Trade Tower was hit on 9/11, people should have immediately evacuated but it was later revealed that this was not the case. In a study by psychologists Paul Slovic and Baruch Fischoff and Gordon Wood, they showed how unanticipated scientific results and historical happenings can seem like common sense. They created two groups of participants in their experiment and told one group that separation weakens romantic attraction (Out of sight, out of mind); then they told the second groups that separation tends to strengthen romantic attraction (Absence makes the heart grow fonder). Given this result, many participants could make sense out of the information given to them and perceive their overall attraction to the given aspect. Another error in humans is our tendency to be overconfident. Overconfidence is defined as the idea that we tend to think that we know more than we do. Humans tend to be more confident than correct. Take anagrams, once people know the target word, the answer seems obvious. People estimate that the answer will take them 10 seconds when it actually takes them 3 minutes. Psychology combines the scientific attitude and the scientific research method to prove that this study isn’t based on common sense. The scientific attitude that most psychologists abide by emphasizes on critical thinking: thinking that does not blindly accept arguments and conclusions. Rather, it examines assumptions, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, and assesses conclusions. Most psychologists, like scientists approach the world with something known as curious skepticism. Often this involves the two questions, “What do you mean?” and “How do you know?” The scientific research method involves a theory, hypothesis, operational definition, and replication. All of which ensure the validity and quality of research findings; the theory being an explanation using an integrated set of principles that organizes and predicts behavior and a hypothesis that is a testable prediction implied by a theory. Lather, psychologists provide operational definitions: a statement of procedures used to define research variables that allow for replication; repeating the essence of a research study with different participants and different situations.

2. Probably not getting this freak.

3. Speaking at a college graduation ceremony, Professor Robson compared college graduates with adults who are less educated. She correctly noted that college graduates pay more taxes, vote more frequently, and engage in more volunteer activities in their communities, and are less likely to go to jail than less educated adults. The professor concluded that colleges obviously do great things for society. How might you reasonably challenge the way the professor reached her conclusions.

First of all. Correlation does not prove causation. Correlation simply indicates the possibility of a cause-and-effect relationship but doesn’t prove the relationship. The fact that it makes logical sense for college graduates to pay fewer taxes and vote more simply points to a illusory correlation made by most people in society. An illusory correlation being the perception of a relationship where none exists. Illusory correlation explains why when we believe there is a relationship between college degrees and future earnings moves most people to perceive correlation if given the evidence. When making inferences one should keep these three principles in mind. Representative samples are better than biased samples. No research involves a representative sample of the whole human’s population, thus the population sampled in each comparison may be different. Robson can be over generalizing from only one such study to prove causation. Secondly less-variable observations are more reliable than those that are more variable. The average of any study is more reliable when it comes with low variability. Also more cases are better than fewer the cases that Robson mentions in her speech may be out of the ordinary when compared to other cases. So being impressed by her anecdotes would be generalizing based on a few unrepresentative cases.

4. Design an experiment to test whether alcohol consumption influences peoples’ tendency to become socially aggressive. Be sure to specify your experimental hypothesis and identify your dependent and independent variables, as well as your experimental and control conditions. Identify any experimental procedures that would ensure the validity of your research.

In order to evaluate whether alcohol consumption would influence people’s tendency to become socially aggressive, we must have a plausible experiment. An experiment is a research method in which an investigator manipulates one or more factors (independent variables) to observe the effect on some behavior or mental process (the dependent variable). These participants will be exposed to experimental conditions. The experimental condition is defined as the condition of an experiment that exposes participants to the treatment, that is, to one version of the independent variable .

First we much identify the variables of the experiment. Our independent variable would be alcohol consumption. An independent variable is the experimental factor that is manipulated; the variable whose effect is being studied. We will test the effect of alcohol consumption, therefore the levels of alcohol consumption must be changed. Our dependent

variable would be the social aggressiveness of people who have consumed alcohol. A dependent variable is the experimental factor-in psychology, the behavior or mental process that is being measured; the variable may change in response to the manipulations of the independent variable. However, there must be many control conditions in this experiment. This is because, without the control condition, the experiment will not know what factors are causing change in the dependent variable. The controlled variable or control condition is defined as the condition of an experiment that contrasts with the experimental condition and serves as a comparison for evaluating the effect of the treatment.

Some examples of controlled variables in this experiment would be the participants diets, the time of day the alcohol was consumed, what type of alcohol was consumed, the age of the participant, the criminal history of the participants actions, and the overall health of the participant. Some experimental procedures that could help to ensure the validity of the research would be the use of the placebo effect, double blind procedure, and random assignment. The use of a double blind procedure is defined as an experimental procedure in which both the research participants and the research staff are ignorant about whether the research participants have received the treatment of a placebo. In this experiment since different levels of alcohol need to be given to participants, the amount need not be disclosed to the researchers thus minimizing the personal bias or preexisting mindset of how a certain amount of alcohol will affect each participant. This procedure directly shows the basis of the placebo effect. The placebo effect is defined as experimental results based on expectations alone. Giving a group of participants’ mock alcohol could help identify the possibility of social aggressive behavior to be inert and not just persuaded by alcohol alone. Also, the random assignment will minimize preexisting differences between groups, random assignment is the assignments of participants to experimental and control conditions by chance.

5. Five students receive the following test scores: 7, 11, 5, 6, and 11. Calculate the mode, median, mean and range of this distribution of scores. Which measure of central tendency would change the most if an additional test score of 2 was included in the distribution?

Measures of central tendency are three measures used to summarize data. The simplest measure is called the mode. Mode is the most frequently occurring score in a distribution. However the most commonly reported measure of central tendency is the mean. The mean is the arithmetic average of a distribution, obtained by adding the scores and then dividing by the number of scores. The median is the middle score is a distribution, half the scores are above it and the other half below it. Measures of central tendency neatly summarize data but can change quickly. When data is skewed, the mean of a distribution also becomes lopsided. The mean can be biased by a few extreme scores. It is always important to note which measure of central tendency is being reported.

Measures of variation show the similarities in each set of data. Measures of variation can help with the validity of the measures of central tendency. The range of scores is the difference between the highest and lowest scores in a distribution. The lower range probably ensures a more accurate measure of central tendency. The more useful measure of how much scores deviate from each other is standard deviation. Standard deviation being a computed measure of how much scores vary around the mean score. Standard deviation better gauges whether scores are packed together or dispersed because it uses information from each score.