Why Research is Crucial in Psychology: Understanding Scientific Inquiry

the topic of this lecture is why is research important so let's start by talking about some of

the basic background of the importance of research and psychology so at one time in history people believe the Earth

was flat as we all know and also what even more relevant to psychology is people used to believe that things like

mental illnesses and disorders were caused by demonic possession so for example you can see an image here on the

right side of the screen showing this process of trepidation where a large hole would be drilled in the skull in

order to allow evil spirits to leave this is obviously an outdated belief not something that modern psychology

advocates for but this was a very common belief through much of human history actually

and so what we're going to be interested in is the idea that people can be very wrong in their ideas about the world and

how things operate when they fail to rely on evidence to support their claims and what we're going to be focusing on

is the process of research and the important role that it plays in validating the claims and beliefs that

people have about how the world around them actually operates so scientific research is empirical in

nature it's grounded in objective tangible evidence the idea is that the same basic effects can be observed time

and time again regardless of who's actually doing the observing right it shouldn't matter if it's me or if it's

you running the experiment conducting the research if we're finding something that we believe has true empirical

support anyone should be able to find the same basic result results it shouldn't matter who the person actually

is if we don't rely on Research in the scientific process what we're basically

making decisions about are going to be based on things like intuition and oftentimes relatively groundless

assumptions about how the world operates it's only through research that we're able to prove that certain ideas

actually have support right we can provide some support for these sorts of ideas through repeated testing rigorous

empirical testing that other people can also replicate psychology is a science and therefore

what we're doing is conducting research that will not only further investigate the various sorts of phenomena that

we're interested in but it's going to provide verification and support of previous findings as well

so as far as how research information is used you see this in a variety of different places in popular culture so

for example it isn't uncommon for advertising campaigns to claim uh scientific evidence for things that may

not necessarily be the case like for example some new product X is the best product on the market when in fact it

actually may not be anywhere close to the best product on the market when you're subjected to these sorts of

claims of scientific evidence it's important to think critically about whatever these claims might be

so for example what is the expertise of the person who is actually making the claim

do they have a background that would make them an expert in this particular area that should lead you to consider

seriously their claims now that doesn't mean that every claim made on a topic has to be by an expert right sometimes

lay people can have really good ideas about things however it's often the case that people who don't have much of a

background in the topic may not fully understand the the topic that they're making claims about right so it's it's

important to be thoughtful right about the level of expertise of the person who's making the claim

it's also important to consider what the person who's making the claim might gain right if you believe that it's valid

right so for example if someone's trying to sell you a product it's really important to be thoughtful about whether

or not you can trust the claims that they're making right because in some cases your goals and desires uh may be

in conflict with the person making the claim right if your goal is to buy a good high quality product for a

reasonable price that may conflict with their goal of selling you a product that maybe isn't the best at an inflated

price right so you want to be thoughtful about what is their goal and and what might they gain from convincing you that

their claim is valid does the claim seem justified right given the evidence at hand and now in

many cases the evidence we have for various claims may not be the entire story right science is constantly

evolving and changing we're learning more and more about every topic that's still being studied by science so it

isn't like the things that we believe today are necessarily the final word that things will never ever change

but it's based on our best understanding of things today as they currently stand what do other researchers right think of

the claim that you're being subjected to right do other experts in this area think that there could be some validity

to the claim that's being made if the answer is yes and that's something that certainly warrants you you giving

careful consideration to if other experts in an area don't think that there's any possible way that this

claim could be true that's something that you should carefully consider again if people have

spent their lives or at least most of their careers right focused on becoming experts in an area it makes a lot of

sense for us to give them careful consideration if they're saying that what this person's saying or claiming

just doesn't make any sense right so we should be thoughtful about people who have considerable expertise in a given

area let's talk a bit about process of scientific research and how

this works so to begin let's talk a little about the idea of deductive versus inductive reasoning

so deductive reasoning involves results that are predicted based on some sort of General premise so for example all

living things require energy to survive right that's our premise ducks are living things therefore Ducks also

require energy to survive right that will be a conclusion based on deductive reasoning

now inductive reasoning and contrast has to do with conclusions that are drawn from observations so for example you may

see a lot of fruits growing on trees and therefore assume that all fruit grows on trees right that would be a form of

inductive reason now both deductive and inductive reasoning are important in the

scientific process so here's a diagram as you can see up here it's showing one way in which the scientific process kind

of unfolds so in essence what we have is that scientists tend to form ideas right their theories and hypotheses through

deductive reasoning right so we have these ideas that are starting to develop these hypotheses are then tested through

empirical observations and scientists scientists inform conclusions through inductive reasoning these conclusions

then lead to new theories and hypotheses or at least more broad generalizations right so for example we may see

something in the environment around us then through this deductive process we form these sorts of hypotheses or

general premises and then we go back and and then we're making more observations as far as the scientific method goes a

couple of terms that we'll need to be familiar with are theories and hypotheses

so a theory is going to be a well-developed set of ideas that propose an explanation for certain phenomena

right and so the idea is we developed this theory about how the world operates we'll be talking a lot about theory in

the realm of psychology so most of what we'll be focusing on this semester will be theories about how people think about

the world around them why we engage in certain behaviors why we experience certain mental processes and so on

hypotheses are going to be tentative and testable statements right these are predictions about the relationships

between two or more variables so for example this might predict how the world will behave right if the theory is

correct usually hip hypotheses are going to take the form of kind of if then sorts of statements right if this occurs

then that will happen one of the really important things to keep in mind about hypotheses is that

they need to be falsifiable meaning that it has to be possible for us to show that something is incorrect

right it's possible for us to make statements these 10 these sorts of statements about how we think things are

going to work that are so vague right that we can't actually test them right in that case it wouldn't be falsifiable

right so a real hypothesis right has to be something that we can actually go out and test and we can possibly falsify

right we can say that we think this is what's going to happen we can then go out and test it and in some cases find

that okay that actually isn't what happened at all if you look up here in the top right of

your screen we'll see a diagram about how Theory and hypotheses tend to work in the research process so we'll kind of

jump into this cycle here at the at the role of theory so if we have a theory about how something is working the idea

is we then can develop hypotheses that build on or Draw from this Theory right so what if let's say for example

one of the things we'll talk about later in the semester is the role of depression and how people think about

depression and why depression exists right one explanation for depression is it has to be the biochemical imbalance

and so if we have this theory that depression is due to these biochemical imbalances we could then develop

hypotheses for example we could Target specific neurotransmitters maybe we're going to Target these neurotransmitters

with specific sorts of drugs that are going to increase or decrease the the levels of certain neurotransmitters that

that function in our brains and so we could then have this hypothesis right this tentative and testable statement

about what we think will happen right if we expose someone right to this drug that's going to alter the level of

certain neurotransmitters then we can actually design a study right to test this hypothesis right we

actually go out and we design the research so we develop this drug or we use this drug

that has been shown to alter levels of certain neurotransmitters for example for depression a neurotransmitter that's

often linked with depression of something called serotonin and so we could we could try to increase the level

of serotonin in certain synapses in the brain to hopefully alleviate depressive symptoms right so the idea is we could

design some research studies that would be targeted at testing this hypothesis about the role that serotonin plays in a

depression we could then perform the research and we could look to see do we actually find support right for our idea

we could actually go out and test some people who are depressed maybe some of them we give the real drug that's going

to increase levels of Serotonin maybe for other people we give them a placebo which is a which is a fake drug and so

it doesn't actually do anything doesn't have any active ingredients but the placebo is something that people will

sometimes use in research to essentially trick participants into thinking they're getting a real medication

the reason for that is that in some cases in many cases actually if someone takes a pill that they think is going to

make them feel better they'll actually feel a little bit better even if the pill doesn't really have any meaningful

impact on them right so if the drug isn't actually doing anything just thinking you're taking something that

can be helpful might actually make you feel a little bit better right so oftentimes we'll use Placebo controls to

make sure that the drugs that we're actually giving to patients really are effective and that it's not just due to

these Placebo effects so once we've made some sort of observation about the efficacy of the

drug that may then tie back into our Theory right so if the people who are receiving the real drug are feeling

better right less depressed than people receiving the placebo that might add more support to our Theory right we may

feel stronger about this biochemical imbalance playing a crucial role in depression now in contrast if we don't

find support for our idea right that may cause us to go back and rethink our Theory right it doesn't mean we'll have

to completely and utterly disregard our Theory but we might have to go back and tweak some things and so this is an

iterative process where what we'll see is researchers go around and around in this sort of cycle trying to fine-tune

and improve things as they move through different research studies foreign scholars in this area that we'll talk a

fair bit about over the course of the semester of Sigmund Freud right we've already mentioned them a couple of times

and we'll certainly mention them far more times as the semester unfolds many of the specifics of Freud's ideas like

for example he divided the Mind into the ID the ego in the superego falling out of favor because they're not

falsifiable right it's it's to say it's exceptionally difficult to say to find some way of testing whether or not the

id ego and superego exist it would be an understatement right there just isn't a good way to test these sorts of things

and so uh here again this picture of Freud this is what's referred to as this

Iceberg model and the reason it's called an iceberg model is uh much like an iceberg Freud thought that part of the

mind that we are consciously aware of is really just the tip of the mind right in the same way that all you can see about

the surface of the water is just the tip of the iceberg right with the most of the bulk of the iceberg being below the

surface Freud thought the same basic thing was true of the mind that what we're con

what you and I are consciously aware of is just a small percentage of what's actually happening that most of what's

going on in our minds actually operates below our level of conscious awareness now these are really interesting ideas

and they set the stage for a lot of what psychologists think today but it's important to know that uh Freud's ideas

are are not really very scientific since they since they aren't falsifiable right again we'll return to these sorts of

approaches later in the semester one of the things I want to leave you with in this lecture would be some basic

organizing themes to be thinking about as we move through the rest of the semester and these are going to be

related to the role of research and Understanding Psychology so the first is that psychology is an

empirical discipline right when we're talking about empiricism again we're talking about the idea that knowledge

should be acquired through observation right it isn't just the case that we are kind of armchair theorists who sit back

in our chairs and think and guess about how the world operates rather we're going out and we're collecting data

right to actually test our ideas right this is going to be one of the things that will differentiate Psychology from

some other disciplines that aren't empirical in nature right some other disciplines also were interested in

understanding human behavior but they don't actually go out and test their ideas in any anything resembling or

breaker with fashion second is that psychology is a theoretically diverse area so one of the

things we'll see is we'll talk a lot about different theories and this is going to be important for thinking about

what research is doing in Psychology we develop these sorts of theories some theories are very Broad and

all-encompassing others are very fairly specific and narrow but the ideas are all of these different

theories and over time they are if they're trying to explain the same basic sort of phenomena over time data starts

to be acquired that then can start lending more or less support to different theoretical orientations and

this is important because having a diverse array of theories is really great right in the early and middle

stages of a scientific discipline right over time hopefully things will coalesce and we'll start figuring out which

theories really deserve a great deal of our attention psychology is going to evolve in a

socio-historical context right so for example we were just talking a moment ago about Sigmund Freud right his ideas

are partially due to the context in which uh Freud lived right he lived in the Victorian age right we've mentioned

previously that may have played an important role in why he was so focused on the role that issues concerning

sexuality right and repression involving sexuality may have been may have played such a big role in his theories because

of the his sociohistorical context in which he lived right we'll see for some of the other theories we'll talk about

we'll see how the context in which they were developed may have played at least some role in influencing the theorists

who developed these various ideas our behavior is going to be determined by multiple causes in many cases so for

example people often want relatively simplistic explanations for Behavior unfortunately what we'll talk about in

numerous situations over the course of the semester is that often behavior isn't explained in really really simple

terms in many cases there are multiple causes for why you and I do the things that we do and we'll we'll address this

as we go through the entire semester our behavior is shaped in part by our cultural heritage right we learn from

our family from our societies from our teachers from our friends how to behave right our culture is going

to shape a lot of what we do so for example if you think about things like the grieving process right we learn how

to grieve in part by watching our families right so for example when you're a child and an elderly relative

dies one of the things that happens is you may see your adult relatives your parents for example right grieving the

passing of this adult relative and what happens is we start internalizing and learning how to grieve from watching our

adult relatives so for example if if you are raised in a culture where your family when someone dies for example may

be part of uh part of the the passing of this person is your family and friends gather together

maybe you tell store maybe you gather at a funeral home for example you tell stories about the person right you

reminisce about your experiences and your memories of the person right this sort of grieving process is fairly

common but it isn't Universal right different cultures will have different ideas for how the grieving process

should kind of unfold right now there will be certain commonalities across many cultures but not all cultures do

everything in exactly the same way and this is important because our behavior is going to be shaped in part right by

our cultural heritage heredity and environment are going to jointly influence our Behavior so in

some places over the course of the semester we'll talk about the idea of nature versus nurture but just know that

that's really going to be a false argument or dichotomy because in many cases our behavior is really determined

by The Joint influence of these things it isn't nature or nurture in most cases it's nature and nurture acting in

concert and again we'll address that issue in multiple places over the course of the semester

our experience of the world tends to be highly subjective and this is going to be another issue that we'll we'll see

time and again so for example um the the sort of approach that people

take to the world right depends on part on how they're viewing things and our perceptions tend to change right not

only are they different between individuals but they can even change over time

and again we'll address this as we talk about things like developmental psychology