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Overview of Behavioral Research

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 Why won’t my dog mind me?  Why is my roommate always so mad at me?  Does adderall really people with ADD?  AND…..Would a little bit of that help me?  For the Philosophical…  Why are people prejudiced?  What causes people to walk by an accident and

not render aid?

 Was Hitler unusual?  What am I truly capable of?

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People have had questions about the behavior of others people, and animals in their environment for as long as we have recorded history.

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Fact or Fiction???

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 How do we apply Science to living creatures?  How can we scientifically answer a question

about behavior?

 Doesn’t behavior change in different

situations?

 Aren’t some of those experiments performed

by Evil Geniuses? And maybe they aren’t exactly legal?

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 Comparison of an experimental group and a Control group.  Randomly assign participants to groups

 Insure your two groups are equal

 Control everything but what you are interested in.

 I want to know if Adderall helps people not diagnosed with ADD to

concentrate.  Introduce the variable of interest

 Give half of the people who are not diagnosed with ADD some

Adderall and give the other people a placebo

 Independent variable: Adderall

 Have a consistent way to measure the effects of the variable.

 Give them all a math test  Dependent Variable: Math test

 Analyze results

 Statistically compare the results between the two groups

 Repeat……..

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 What if I want to look at whether or not

children raised in a household with same sex parents were more likely to be in a homosexual relationship?

 Or………Are political science majors smarter

than psychology majors?

 Can I do that?

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 The difference between a “relationship” and

a cause……

 Some research, which is just as valuable, can

tell us if some events (variables) are “related”, but they cannot say that one causes the other.

 Does beer drinking cause bad grades, or is there

a relationship between the amount of beer one drinks and one’s grade in a classroom.

 This is called correlational research: usually

conducted when participants cannot be randomly assigned…….

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 Correlation shows a relationship between

variables but not which came first.

 True Experiment shows a temporal

relationship between the IV and DV .

 In this class, we will learn about both, but

the writing assignment will involve a true experiment.

 So….ideas??????

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