psychology
Terms
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- psychology
- the scientific study of the mind, brain and behavior
- levels of explanation
- rungs on a ladder of explanation, with lower levels tied most closely to biological influences and higher levels tied closely to social influences
- multiply determined
- cause by many factors
- single-variable explanations
- explanations that try to account for complex behaviors in terms of only a single cause
- individual differences
- variations among people in their thinking, emotion and behavior
- naive realism
- belief that we see the world precisely as it is
- confirmation bias
- tendency to seek out evidence that supports out hypothese and neglect or distort evidence that conrtadicts them
- belief perseverance
- tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them
- scientific theory
- explanation for a large number of findings in the natural world
- hypothesis
- testable prediction derived from a scientific theory
- pseudoscience
- set of claims that seems scientific but isnt
- apophenia
- tendency to perceive meaningful connections among unrelated phenomena
- metaphysical claims
- assertions about the world that are not testable
- scientific skepticism
- approach of evaluating all claims with an open mind but insisting on persuasive evidence before accepting them
- critical thinking
- set of skills for evaluations all claims in an open-minded and careful fashion.
- correlation-causation fallacy
- error of assu,ing that because one thing is associated with another, it must cause the other.
- variable
- anything that can vary
- falsifiable
- capable of being disproved
- introspection
- method by which trianed observers carefully reflect and report on their mental experiences
- structuralism
- school of psychology that aimed to identify the basic elements of psychological experience
- functionalism
- school of pschology that aimed to understand the adaptive purposes of psychological characterisitics.
- behaviorism
- school of psychology that focuses on uncovering the general laws of learning by looking at observable behavior
- cognition
- mental processes involved in different aspects of thinking
- psychoanalysis
- school psychology, founded by sigmund freud, that focuses on internal psychological processes of which we're unaware
- evolutionary psychology
- discipline that applies darwins theory of natural selection to human and animal behavior
- basic research
- research examing how the mind works
- applied research
- research examining how we can use basic research to solve real world problems
- heuristic
- mental shortcut that helps us to streamline our thikning andmake sense of the world
- representativeness
- heuristic that involves judgin the robability of an even by its superficial similarity to a prototype
- base rate
- how common a characteristic or behavior is
- availability
- heuristic that involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our mind
- cognitive bias
- systematic error in thinking
- hindsight bias
- tendecny to overestimate how well we could have successfully forecasted known outcomes
- overconfidence
- tendency to overestimate our ability to make correct predictions
- naturalistic oberservation
- watching behavior in real world settings
- external validity
- extent to which we can generalize findings to real world settings
- internal validity
- extenet to which we can draw cause and effect inferences from a study
- case study
- research design that examines one person or a small number of people in depth, oftern over an extended time period
- existence proof
- demonstration that a given psychological phenomenon can occur
- correlation design
- research design that examines the extend to which two variables are associated
- scatterplot
- grouping on a two dimensional graph in which each dot represents a single persons data
- illusory correlation
- perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exsists
- experiment
- research design characterized by random assignment of participants to conditions and manipulation of an independent variable
- random assignment
- randomly sorting participants into two groups
- experimental group
- in an experiment, the group of participants that receives the manipulation
- control group
- in an experiment, the groupof participants that doesnt receive the manipulation
- independent variable
- treatment or intervention that the experimenter "manipulates" or vaires
- dependent variable
- variable that an experimenter measures to see whether the manipulation has an effect
- operationalization
- specification of how a variable is being measured for the purposes of a particular study
- reliability
- consistency of measurement
- validity
- extent to which a measure assesses what is claims to measure
- confounding variable or confound
- any difference between the experimental and control groups other than the independent variable
- placebo effect
- improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement
- blind
- unaware of whether one is in the experimental or control group
- experimenter bias effect
- phenomenon in which researchers' hypotheses lead them to unintentionally bias the outcome of a study
- double blind
- when neither researchers not participants are aware of whos in the experimental or control group
- demand characteristics
- cues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the researchers hypotheses
- random selection
- procedure that ensures every person in a population has an equal chance of being chosen to participate
- response sets
- tendencies of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items
- informed consent
- informing research participants of what is involved in a study before asking them to participate
- statistics
- applications of mathematics to describing and analyzing data
- descriptive statistics
- numerical characterizations that describe data
- inferential statistics
- mathematical methods that allow us to determine whether we can generalize findings from our sample to the full population
- central tendency
- measure of the "central" scores in a data set, or where the group tends to cluster
- mean
- average; a measure of central tendency
- median
- middle score in a data set; a measure of central tendency
- mode
- most frequent score in a data set; a meausere of central tendency
- dispersion
- measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are
- range
- difference between the highest and lowest scores; a measure of dispersion
- standard deviation
- measure of dispersion that takes into account how far each data point isfrom the mean
- peer review
- mechanism by which experts in a field carefully screen the work of their colleagues