How Psychologist Observe and Describe Behavior
AP Psychology Outline
Pages 26-33
I. Description a. How do psychologist observe and describe behavior? i. The case study 1. Examines one individual in depth in hopes of revealing thing true of us all 2. Often suggest directions for further study, and they show us what can happen 3. To discern the general truth that cover individual cases, we must answer questions with other research methods ii. The survey 4. Looks at cases in less depth 5. Researchers do surveys when wanted to estimate, from a representative sample of people 6. We can describe human experience by drawing on memorable anecdotes and personal experience iii. Naturalistic Observation 7. Records behavior in natural environment 8. Does not explain behavior, it describes it 9. Observations made in natural habitat, helped to show that the societies and behavior of animals are far more complex than previously supposed iv. Correlation 10. A statistical measure helps us figure how closely tow things vary together, and thus how well either one predicts the other 11. A correlation is positive if two sets of scores, tend to rise or fall together 12. A correlation is negative if two sets of scores relate inversely, one set going up as the other goes down 13. Correlation indicates the possibility of a cause-effect relationship, but it does not prove causation v. Illusory Correlations 14. A perceived but nonexistent correlation is an illusory correlation 15. Illusory correlations help explain many superstitious beliefs 16. We can easily deceive ourselves by seeing what is not there vi. Perceiving order in random events 17. We look for order even in random data 18. In actual random sequence, patterns and
Pages 26-33
I. Description a. How do psychologist observe and describe behavior? i. The case study 1. Examines one individual in depth in hopes of revealing thing true of us all 2. Often suggest directions for further study, and they show us what can happen 3. To discern the general truth that cover individual cases, we must answer questions with other research methods ii. The survey 4. Looks at cases in less depth 5. Researchers do surveys when wanted to estimate, from a representative sample of people 6. We can describe human experience by drawing on memorable anecdotes and personal experience iii. Naturalistic Observation 7. Records behavior in natural environment 8. Does not explain behavior, it describes it 9. Observations made in natural habitat, helped to show that the societies and behavior of animals are far more complex than previously supposed iv. Correlation 10. A statistical measure helps us figure how closely tow things vary together, and thus how well either one predicts the other 11. A correlation is positive if two sets of scores, tend to rise or fall together 12. A correlation is negative if two sets of scores relate inversely, one set going up as the other goes down 13. Correlation indicates the possibility of a cause-effect relationship, but it does not prove causation v. Illusory Correlations 14. A perceived but nonexistent correlation is an illusory correlation 15. Illusory correlations help explain many superstitious beliefs 16. We can easily deceive ourselves by seeing what is not there vi. Perceiving order in random events 17. We look for order even in random data 18. In actual random sequence, patterns and