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PSYC211 > WEEK 2 > Flashcards

WEEK 2 Flashcards

1
Q

4 Types of personality psychology research?

A
  1. Correlational Research
  2. Experimental Research
  3. Natural or Quasi-Experiments
  4. Moderation by Individual Differences
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2
Q

What is Correlational Research?

A

• Examines the relation between two variables

  • Correlation does not equal causation
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3
Q

Pros/Cons of Correlational Research

A

Pros of Correlational Research
• Simple to collect data
• Test whether a relationship exists between two variables

Cons
• Cannot test causation

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4
Q

What is Experimental Research?

A
  • Tests Cause/Effect
  • Key: Random assignment to condition
  • Ideal: Samples identical except for manipulated condition
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5
Q

What is a Repeated Measures style experiment?

A

Within-subject design

  • A group of participants are recruited
  • All members of the group experience the same conditions of the independent variable (both do condition 1 & 2)
  • Compare the results for the two conditions

(but the difference in time could impact the study –> people could figure out the purpose of the study after the first condition)

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6
Q

What is a Independent Measures style experiment?

A

Between-subject design

  • Where a group of participants are recruited then split into 2 groups (randomly assigned)
  • Each group receives different independent variable conditions (e.g. placebo vs an actual drug)
  • The dependent variable is then measured for each group and compared
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7
Q

How do you combat the potential unreliability that between-subject designs may have due to the two groups being different?

A

Have large sample sizes for both groups so both groups on average end up being similar.

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8
Q

What are natural experiments?

A

Letting nature assign participants to conditions

  • e.g. we can’t assign someone a gender - nature does
    or we can’t make someone cut their hand off if we wanna study 1 handed people
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9
Q

Why are natural experiments not the gold standard but normal experiments are (when we assign the participants randomly to groups)

A

There’s always a 3rd kind of variable explanation for natural experiments (confound)

• Hence Experiments—Gold standard

• Natural Experiments, Correlations
- Possible alternative explanations

Because people who lets say have 1 hand due to some accident –> may have had that happen due to some confounding factor that could impact the study’s validity

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10
Q

What is the purpose of a pretest (occurs before group assignment)?

A

Helps us establish whether there is some underlying difference that may account for our results. If no such confound is found then we can confidently say that the results where due to our independent variables.

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11
Q

Why not run experiments on just individuals?

A

Can’t generalise to the population

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12
Q

What is a moderation analysis?

A

A moderator analysis is used to determine whether the relationship between two variables depends on (is moderated by) the value of a third variable

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13
Q

What are Projective Tests?

A

Perceptions of what we see in things such as ink blots are recorded and then analyzed to examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning.

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14
Q

What are Objective Tests?

A
  • Questionnaires using yes/no or scales
  • “Do you like cats?”
  • “I am a dog person” (Strongly disagree to Strongly agree)
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15
Q

What is the Rational Method?

A

Purposely designing a questionnaire to target a specific psychological construct.
• Choose face valid items - clearly aimed at measuring a particular thing

e.g. Intentional harm: Did you intentionally harm him?

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16
Q

What is the Rational Method?

A

Purposely designing a questionnaire to target a specific psychological construct.
• Choose face valid items - clearly aimed at measuring a particular thing

e.g. Intentional harm: Did you intentionally harm him?

e. g. • Need for cognition scale:
- I like to have the responsibility of handling a situation that requires a lot of thinking.
- Thinking is not my idea of fun.* (reverse coded) – to avoid response bias –> people who tend to agree to everything

17
Q

What must be done for the Rational Method to be valid?

A
  • Test to ensure otherwise valid, reliable, generalizable
  • Different samples (external validity)
  • Over time (reliable)
18
Q

What is the Factor Analytic Method?

A

No preset target of measurement (No a priori theoretical structure)

  • Big 5 personality was based of this method
  • Simply collects data from a bunch of questions (e.g. do you like pizza? do you like reading?)
  • Then sees what clusters together and what doesn’t
  • -> extract the meaning from the data
19
Q

What is Operationalization?

A

The way a study measures a psychological
process

  • E.g. Big 5 personality inventory as measure of traits
  • E.g. number of chili peppers given as measure of aggression
20
Q

What is a issue with Operationalization?

A

To ask why behaviour occurred requires Inference:

  • Psychology and personality cannot be directly observed
  • We must infer processes from other observations
  • and these inferences are always debatable
    e. g. Ice bucket measure of pain tolerance or self-control?
21
Q

What is the validity of a measure?

A

Does it measure what it claims to measure?

22
Q

What is the Reliability of a measure?

A

Does the measure consistently tap into what you want to measure?

23
Q

What is the Generalizability of a measure?

A

Do the results of your study generalize outside the study?

  • Generalizability to other populations
  • Generalizability to other procedures?
  • Generalizability to other situations?
24
Q

What was found in the Hallway study?

A

Northerners were much less likely to display reactive aggressive behaviour than Southerners when bumped into and called “asshole” by a research assistant.

25
Q

What is face validity?

A

On the surface, does it appear to measure what it is supposed to measure? (does it look like it measures what it’s supposed to measure?)

26
Q

When is Face validity bad?

A

When you want to detect deception or socially desirable responding

e.g. amber heard and her psychologist

27
Q

What is Predictive Validity?

A

Does your measure predict what it should
predict?

.e.g. Religiosity predictor for:
• Belief
• Frequency of prayer

28
Q

What is a potential issue with predictive validity?

A

Potential for bias in theory
• Preconceived ideas of what construct is
- e.g. we might think religiosity is associated with more donations to charity but it might not be

29
Q

What is Convergent Validity?

A

Does the measure correlate with other measures it should correlate with?

Converge= go together

e.g. Conspiracy belief should correlate with
anxiety, paranoia

30
Q

How do we test the reliability of a measure?

A

Replication with different populations to see if the results are consistent

31
Q

What is Internal consistency (falls under reliability)?

A

How closely correlated are the different items of a particular scale?

  • Ideally correlation between items should be high
  • High correlation between items means that they reliabily measure the same construct
  • e.g.
    • Belief
    • Frequency of prayer
    as predictors for Religiosity
  • Low Internal consistency = not a reliable measure in your scale
  • Cronbach’s α - is the measure of internal consistency
32
Q

What is unit used to measure Internal consistency?

A

Cronbach’s α (alpha)

33
Q

Factors that Reduce Reliability?

A

• Low precision of measurement
- Scale of 1-3 vs. 1-100 - not enough options (1-3)

• Low numbers of questions

  • Idiosyncrasies in responses to single questions
    (e. g. responds by saying doesn’t like salty food –> but some reason like pizza –> if asked about pizza too we have more information)

• The state of the participant
- E.g., distracted by love, stress

• The state of the experimenter
- Person, behavior, lack of consistent script, abnormal

• The environment
- Temp, weather, noise, etc.

34
Q

How to Boost Reliability?

A
  • Clean your data (remove errors in responses)
  • Use a standardized procedure or protocol (all participants treated the same)

• Measure something that is important and engages
participants

• Aggregation (have multiple measures combined into an aggregate measure)

• Attention checks
- If you’re reading this, answer “strongly agree”

35
Q

What is the WEIRD participant bias?

A 
Most studies done on
• Western
• Educated
• Industrialized Countries
• Rich Countries
• Democratic Countries

people

36
Q

What is Binomial Effect Size Display and is a larger effect size always better?

A

Indicates the practical importance of any particular effect size estimate

No, a bigger effect size is not always better

37
Q

Why are there Replication Issues in psychology?

A
  • Bad incentives: rewarded for publishing, not for correcting mistakes
  • Significant results more publishable than null results - (a lot of effort to just publish a paper finding no results –> leads to all the literature that is published only finding significant results –> misleading)
  • P hacking
  • Report study in a way that makes it look better than it really is
  • Small studies especially vulnerable
38
Q

How can we fix the replication issues?

A

• Preregistration
- Can’t p-hack if you say what you will do ahead of time

• Larger samples
- Tradeoff—most studies now online. Lab studies too much work

• Replication efforts
- Large, multi-lab replication studies on key phenomena

• Still have bad incentives

PSYC211 (12 decks)

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