Cause and effect Flashcards
What is causation?
what caused an effect
What is an experiment?
a scientific test of some hypothesis/principle carried out under carefully controlled conditions in order to determine/discover something unknown
What was the Lind’s scurvy experiment?
- naval ship where sailor would often die from scurvy and there was no understanding of what caused this.
- Didn’t know how to cure so they randomly chose sailors with developing symptoms and they started trying remedies out on them.
- Found that citrus reduced scurvy
What was the Tripplett’s experiment?
- study of the effects of competition on individuals speed of task completion
- single treatment (absent or present competition), single outcome (speed of tasks completion), alternate ordering of treatment.
- Found that presence of competition served to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available.
What was the Hawthorne experiment?
- studied effects of physical environment on productivity (light, length of breaks, snacks), - one room of workers in special room for treatment
- productivity increased regardless of change in conditions
- found that the researcher’s attention was a confounding factor
What are true experiments?
- random assignment to treatment and control groups
- Replicability that allows experiment to be reproduced
- control: demonstrate what happens when something is changed when everything stays the same
- precision: assures that thing changed caused the effect
What’s triangulation?
using more than one method to study the same phenomenon
What is replication?
- studying the same phenomenon with multiple methods
- builds confidence
What is the basic criteria for an experiment?
- cause must precede the effect
- cause must be related to effect
- are plausible alternative effects excluded?
What is variation in an experiment?
- achieved by manipulating the independent variable
- IV cause he effect in the dependent variable
- cause is rarely univariate
What are confounds?
additional, often unmeasured variables that are related to both the predictors and the outcomes
What is experimental control?
removing alternative explanations from experiments
What is statistical control?
measuring a covariate and controlling for it
What is a control group?
- a group that doesn’t receive any treatment
- considered neutral
- shows an effect of treatment/manipulation
-effect: difference btw what happened to treatment group and what would to control group - must get some kind of placebo treatment to give illusion
What is random assignment?
- everyone has an equal chance of being assigned to treatment group and control groups
- way of distributing individual differences