psychology as science

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Psychology as a Science

Despite the differences in their interests, areas of study, and approaches, all psychologists have one thing in common: They rely on the scientific method. Research psychologists use scientific methods to create new knowledge about the causes of behavior. Practitioners, such as clinical, counseling, industrial-organizational, and school psychologists, primarily use existing research to help solve problems. In a sense all humans are scientists. We all have an interest in asking and answering questions about our world. We want to know why things happen, when and if they are likely to happen again, and how to reproduce or change them. Such knowledge enables us to predict our own behavior and that of others. We may even collect data, or any information collected through formal observation or measurement, to aid us in this undertaking. It has been argued that people are “everyday scientists” who conduct research projects to answer questions about behavior (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). When we perform poorly on an important test, we try to understand what caused our failure to remember or understand the material and what might help us do better the next time. When our good friends Monisha and Charlie break up, we try to determine what happened. When we think about the rise of terrorism around the world, we try to investigate the causes of this problem by looking at the terrorists themselves, the situation, and others’ responses.

 The Problem of Intuition 

The results of these “everyday” research projects can teach us many principles of human behavior. We learn through experience that if we give someone bad news, he or she may blame us even though the news was not our fault. We learn that people may become depressed after they fail at an important task. We see that aggressive behavior occurs frequently in our society, and we develop theories to explain why this is so. These insights are part of everyday social life. In fact, much research in psychology involves the scientific study of everyday behavior (Heider, 1958; Kelley, 1967). Unfortunately, the way people collect and interpret data in their everyday lives is not always scientific. Often, when one explanation for an event seems “right,” we adopt that explanation as the truth. However, this reasoning is more intuitive than scientific. Intuition is thinking that is more experiential, emotional, automatic, and unconscious, and does not lead to careful analysis of all the variables in a situation (Kahneman, 2011). Other explanations might be possible and and even more accurate. For example, eyewitnesses to violent crimes are often extremely confident in their identifications of criminals. But research finds that eyewitnesses are just as Learning Objective 1. Describe the differences among opinions, values and facts, and explain how the scientific method is used to provide evidence for facts. 9 confident when they are wrong as when they are right (Cutler & Wells, 2009; Wells & Hasel, 2008). People may also believe in extrasensory perception (ESP), or the predictions of astrology, when there is no evidence for either (Gilovich, 1993). Furthermore, psychologists have also found that there are a variety of biases that can influence our perceptions. These biases lead us to draw faulty conclusions (Fiske & Taylor, 2007; Hsee & Hastie, 2006). In addition, most individuals listen to people they know and trust to give them accurate information rather than doing research to determine what scientific studies show.



Let’s start with thinking…critically…about anything. You have most certainly heard about critical thinking, as it is often stated as a learning objective in college-level courses. You may even think that the critical thinking you do in your Physics class is not the same critical thinking that you do in your Psychology class. And in a way, you are right. However, I challenge you to broaden your idea of critical thinking, beyond specific courses, even beyond areas of study, to include everything you think about—from the most mundane decisions you make to the weightiest ones. The critical thinking model that we will use in this course is one that allows you to do just that. Developed by Richard Paul and Linda Elder (2006), the model has eight elements of reasoning that, together, capture the essence of the thinking critically—the process of analyzing and assessing thinking with a view to improving it.

ELEMENT OF THOUGHT QUESTION POSED BY ELEMENT OF THOUGHT
 Purpose
 Assumptions
 Implications and Consequences
Information
Concepts
 Interpretation,
Conclusions





Psychology’s Central Questions Psychology has changed dramatically over its history, but the most important questions that psychologists address have remained constant. Some of these questions follow, and we will discuss them both in this chapter and in the chapters to come:

 • Nature versus nurture:
 Are genes or environment most influential in determining the behavior of individuals and in accounting for differences among people? Most scientists now agree that both genes and environment play crucial roles in most human behaviors. Yet we still have much to learn about how nature, our biological makeup, and nurture, the environment and experiences that we have during our lives, work together (Harris, 1998; Pinker, 2002). The proportion of differences that is due to genetics is known as the heritability of the characteristic. We will see, for example, that the heritability of intelligence is very high (about .85 out of 1.0), but we will also see that nature and nurture interact in complex ways. Given this complex interaction, psychologists now consider the question of how they interact to produce behavior as more relevant than whether nature or nurture is more important.

 • Free will versus determinism:
 This question concerns the extent to which people have control over their own actions. Are we the products of our environment, guided by forces out of our control, or are we able to choose the behaviors we engage in? Most of us like to believe that we are able to do what we want. Our legal system is based on the concept of free will. We punish criminals because we believe that they have choice over their behaviors and freely choose to disobey the law. But as we will discuss later in the research focus in this section, recent research has suggested that we may have less control over our own behavior than we think we do (Wegner, 2002)

. • Conscious versus unconscious processing:  
 To what extent are we conscious of our own actions and the causes of them? Many of the major theories of psychology, ranging from the Freudian psychodynamic theories to cognitive psychology, argue that much of our behavior is determined by variables of which we are not aware.

 • Differences versus similarities:
 To what extent are we all similar, and to what extent are we different? For instance, are there basic psychological and personality differences between men and women, or are men and women by-and-large similar? What about people from different ethnicities and cultures? Are people around the world generally the same, or are they influenced by their backgrounds and environments in different ways? Personality, social, and cross-cultural psychologists attempt to answer these classic questions. • Accuracy versus inaccuracy: To what extent are humans good information processors? It appears that people are “good enough” to make sense of the world around them and to make decent decisions (Fiske, 2003). But human judgment is sometimes compromised by inaccuracies in our thinking styles and by our motivations and emotions. For instance, our judgment may be affected by emotional responses to events in our environment



How Do Psychologists Study Behavior?

 —well, that depends on whether their purpose is to describe, explain, predict, or change it 

This introduction to research methods in Psychology is intended to do just that—introduce you to the ways psychologists study behavior. Although more than half of psychologists are engaged in applied practice (i.e., changing behavior), the evidence that guides their interventions is the result of behavioral research. Psychologists are scientists searching for answers to questions and solutions to problems. Research methods are the indispensable tools of their investigations. Like any skilled worker who uses tools in his/her profession, psychologists know which tool to use for the job at hand. If you can organize the psychologist’s toolbox in three tiers (paradigms, methods, statistics), you will be more likely to know which methods answer which questions.


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