AP Psychology: Research Methods, Buzz Online Textbook.

The human mind is capable of amazing feats of intellegence and deduction, but it can also succumb to the the distortions of hindsight bias, overconfidence and misperception. To combat these distortions, rely on descriptive, correlational, and experimental methods to answer psychological questions.

• Hindsight Bias: the tendency to believe that you would have forseen an outcome.
• Hawthorne Effect: when a participant in a study acts differently because they know that they are being watched or observed.

To research, scientists use the Scientific method. The heart of this method is a reliance an operational definitions. 

• Operational Definition: a statement of the procedures or ways in which a researcher is going to measure behaviours or qualities.
•  The Descriptive method:  When using this, psychologists observe and then describe behaviors they see. Since this method can't prove that one event caused another, and it can't isolate one factor, this method makes drawing firm conclusions hard. It can still be a start though.
• Naturalistic Observation: process of observing a subject in its natural environment w/ o any manipulation; main advantage of this is overcoming experimental contamination. We are just observing though, and any type of relationship between variables can not be inferred w/ this technique.
•  Case Studies: individual is studied in high depth to identify behavioral, emotional, and cognitive qualities, that are universally true, on average of others( ex: interviews on tests) Only provide info. about an indivibual cases, this can't be generalized to other people. It provides inspires new theories though
•  Surveys: a techenique for ascertaining the self- reported attitudes and behaviors of people, usually by questioning a sample. We can generalize the results of a servey to a larger population. We need to randomly select a representative sample of the pop. where everyone in the pop. has the same chance to be selected.
• Representative Sample: a sample is chosen from a given pop. in hope that all majorities and minorities will be appropriately represented in a study or experiment.
• The problem w/ surveys is that people may not be honest and are at the risk of a countesy bias.
• Courtesy Bias: tendency of individuals to report what they think the researchers want to hear rather than their true opinion. 
• Correlation Method: a stastical measure that reflects the relationship between 2 Variables. Psychologists use corr to predict how variables influence each other. 
• Positive correlation: related variables either increase or decrease in the same direction.( ex: less I study, the lower my grade)
• Negative Correlation: when one variable increases while the other decreases ( ex: More l work, less l excercise) 
• How to determine if a correlation is positive or negative? IL- positive- I- negative C )-  positive 
• Scatterplots: graphic representatien of correlations where data from 2 Variables are plotted. The resulting graph will describe the type and strength of the correlation.
• Correlation Coeffecient: measure of the direction+ extent between 2 sets of scores

0= NO CORRELATION

CORRELATION VS CAUSATION 

• factors that are corelated do NOT cause each other

Positive means direct correlation

Negative means inverse correlation

Correlations go from negative one to positive one 

**correlation does not prove causation 

• Test Method: same as survey method, but instead of questions a test to come to know about ones knowledge on a particular topic or subject is given.
• There are positives and negatives to every research method.
• Experiments are the only type of research method that can prove causation.
• Quasi type experiments are experiments that do not prove causation as the control and experiment groups are chosen on purpose.