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chapter 1

Psychology as a Science

Chapter Contents

• Research Areas in Psychology • Scientific Thinking and Paths to Knowledge • Hypotheses and Theories • Searching the Literature • Ethics in Research

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CHAPTER 1Introduction

In an article in Wired magazine, journalist Amy Wallace described her visit to the annual conference sponsored by Autism One, a nonprofit group organized around the belief that autism is caused by mandatory childhood vaccines: I flashed more than once on Carl Sagan’s idea of the power of an “unsatisfied medical need.” Because a massive research effort has yet to reveal the precise causes of autism, pseudoscience has stepped in to the void. In the hallways of the Westin O’Hare hotel, helpful salespeople strove to catch my eye . . . pitching everything from vitamins and supplements to gluten-free cookies . . . hyperbaric chambers, and neuro-feedback machines.

(Wallace, 2009, p. 134)

The “pseudoscience” to which Wallace refers is the claim that vaccines generally do more harm than good and specifically cause children to develop autism. In fact, an extensive statis- tical review of epidemiological studies, including tens of thousands of vaccinated children, found no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism. But something about this phrasing doesn’t sit right with many people; “no evidence” rings of scientific mumbo jumbo, and a “statistical review” pales in comparison to tearful testimonials from parents that their child developed autistic symptoms shortly after being vaccinated. The reality is this: Research tells us that vaccines bear no relation to autism, but people still believe that they do. Because of these beliefs, increasing numbers of parents are foregoing vaccinations, and many com- munities are seeing a resurgence of rare diseases including measles and mumps.

So what does it mean to say that “research” has reached a conclusion? Why should we trust this conclusion over a parent’s personal experience? One of the biggest challenges

in starting a course on research methods is learn- ing how to think like a scientist—that is, to frame questions in testable ways and to make decisions by weighing the evidence. The more personal these questions become, and the bigger their con- sequences, the harder it is to put feelings aside. But, as we will see throughout this course, it is precisely in these cases that listening to the evi- dence becomes most important.

There are several reasons to understand the impor- tance of scientific thinking, even if you never take another psychology course. First, at a practical level, critical thinking is an invaluable skill to have in a wide variety of careers. Employers of all types appreciate the ability to reason through the decision-making process. Second, understanding the scientific approach tends to make you a more skeptical consumer of news reports. If you read in Newsweek that the planet is warming, or cooling, or staying the same, you will be able to decipher and evaluate how the author reached this conclu- sion and possibly reach a different one on your

Science Picture Co/Science Faction/Corbis

Specific research methods and ethical principles aid social scientists in understanding behavior and mental processes.

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CHAPTER 1Introduction

own. Third, understanding science makes you a more informed participant in debates about public policy. If we want to know whether the planet is truly getting warmer, this conclusion should come from carefully weighing the scientific evidence rather than trust- ing the loudest pundit on a cable news network.

Where does psychology fit into this picture? Objectivity can be a particular challenge in studying our own behavior and mental processes because we are intimately familiar with the processes we are trying to understand. The psychologist William C. Corning captured this sentiment over 40 years ago: “In the study of brain functions we rely upon a biased, poorly understood, and frequently unpredictable organ in order to study the properties of another such organ; we have to use a brain to study a brain” (Corning, 1968, p 6). (Or, in the words of comedian Emo Phillips, “I used to think that the brain was the most wonder- ful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”) The trick, then, is learning to take a step back and apply scientific thinking to issues you encounter and experience every day.

This textbook provides an introduction to the research methods used in the study of psy- chology. It will introduce you to the full spectrum of research designs, from observing behavior to manipulating conditions in a laboratory. We will cover the key issues and important steps for each type of design, as well as the analysis strategies most appropri- ate for each one. In this chapter, we begin with an overview of the different areas of psy- chological science. We then introduce the research process by discussing the key features of the scientific approach and then cover the process of forming testable research ques- tions. In the final section, we discuss the importance of adhering to ethical principles at all stages of the research.

Research: Making an Impact The Vaccines and Autism Controversy

In a 1998 paper published in the well-respected medical journal The Lancet, British physician Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues studied the link between autism symptoms and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in a sample of twelve children (Wakefield et al., 1998). Based on a review of these cases, the authors reported that all twelve experienced adverse effects of the vaccine, including both intestinal and behavioral problems. The finding that grabbed the headlines was the authors’ report that nine of the twelve children showed an onset of autism symptoms shortly after they received the MMR vaccine.

Immediately after the publication of this paper, the scientific community criticized the study for its small sample and its lack of a comparison group (i.e., children in the general population). Unfor- tunately, it turned out these issues were only the tip of the iceberg (Godlee, Smith, & Marcovitch, 2011). The British journalist Brian Deer conducted an in-depth investigation of Wakefield’s study and discovered some startling information (Deer, 2004). First, the study had been funded by a law firm that was in the process of suing the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine, resulting in a real threat to the researchers’ objectivity. Second, there was clear evidence of scientific misconduct; the data had been falsified and altered to fit Wakefield’s hypothesis—many of the children had shown autism symptoms before receiving the vaccine. In his report, Deer stated that every one of the twelve cases showed evidence of alteration and misrepresentation. (continued)

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.1 Research Areas in Psychology

1.1 Research Areas in Psychology

Psychology is a diverse discipline, encompassing a wide range of approaches to ask-ing questions about why people do the things that they do. The common thread among all of these approaches is the scientific study of human behavior. So, while psychology might not be the only field to speculate on the causes of human behavior— philosophers have been doing this for millennia—psychology is distinguished by its reli- ance on the scientific method to draw conclusions. We will examine the meaning and implications of this scientific perspective later in the chapter. In this section, we discuss the major content areas within the field of psychology, along with samples of the types of research questions asked by each one. For further reading about these areas, the American Psychological Association has an excellent collection of web resources: http://www.apa .org/topics/index.aspx.

Biopsychology

Biopsychology, as the name implies, combines research questions and techniques from both biology and psychology. It is typically defined as the study of connections between biological systems (including the brain, hormones, and neurotransmitters) and our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. As a result, the research conducted by biopsycholo- gists often overlaps research in other areas—but with a focus on biological processes. Biopsychologists are often interested in the way interactions between biological sys- tems and thoughts, feelings, and behaviors impact the ability to treat disease, as seen in the following questions: What brain systems are involved in the formation of memo- ries? Can Alzheimer ’s be cured or prevented through early intervention? How does

Ultimately, the Lancet withdrew the article in 2010, effectively removing it from the scientific record and declaring the findings no longer trustworthy. But in many respects, the damage was already done. Vaccination rates in Britain dropped to 80% following publication of Wakefield’s article, and these rates remain below the recommended 95% level recommended by the World Health Organi- zation (Godlee et al., 2011). That is, even though the article was a fraud, it made parents afraid to vaccinate their children. Vaccinations work optimally when most members of a community get the vaccines because this minimizes the opportunity for an outbreak. When even a small portion refuses to vaccinate their children, the entire community is at risk of infection (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, n.d.). Thus, it should be no surprise that many communities are seeing a resurgence of measles, mumps, and rubella: In 2008, England and Wales declared measles to be a prevalent problem for the first time in 14 years (Godlee et al., 2011).

This scenario highlights the importance of conducting science honestly. While disease outbreaks are the most obvious impact of Wakefield’s fraud, they are not the only one. In a 2011 editorial in the British Medical Journal condemning Wakefield’s actions, British doctor Fiona Godlee and colleagues captured this rather eloquently: “But perhaps as important as the scare’s effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion, and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it” (p. 7452).

Research: Making an Impact (continued)

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.1 Research Areas in Psychology

long-term exposure to toxins such as lead impact our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? How eas- ily can the brain recover after a stroke?

In one example of this approach, Kim and col- leagues (2010) investigated changes in brain anat- omy among new mothers for the first 3 months following delivery. These authors were intrigued by the numerous changes new mothers undergo in attention, memory, and motivation; they specu- lated that these changes might be associated with changes in brain structure. As expected, new mothers showed increases in grey matter (i.e., increased complexity) in several brain areas asso- ciated with maternal motivation and behavior. And, the more these brain areas developed, the more positively these women felt toward their newborn children. Thus, this study sheds light on the potential biological processes involved in the mother–infant bond.

Cognitive Psychology

Whereas biopsychology focuses on studying the brain, cognitive psychology studies the mind. It is typically defined as the study of internal mental processes, including the ways that people think, learn, remember, speak, perceive, and so on. Cognitive psychologists are primarily interested in the ways that people navigate and make sense of the world, including questions such as: How do our minds translate input from the five senses into a meaningful picture of the world? How do we form memories of emotional versus mun- dane experiences? What draws our attention in a complex environment? What is the best way to teach children to read?

In one example of this approach, Foulsham, Cheng, Tracy, Henrich, & Kingstone (2010) were interested in what kinds of things people pay attention to in a complex social scene. The world around us is chock-full of information, but we can only pay attention to a relatively thin slice of it. Foulsham and colleagues were particularly interested in where our attention is directed when we observe groups of people. They answered this ques- tion by asking people to watch videos of a group discussion and using tools to track eye movements. It turned out that people in this study spent most of their time looking at the most dominant member of the group, suggesting that we are wired to pay attention to those in positions of power. Thus, this study sheds light on one of the ways that we make sense out of the world.

Developmental Psychology

Developmental psychology is defined as the systematic study of physical, social, and cog- nitive changes over the human life span. Although this field initially focused on childhood

George Doyle/Stockbyte/Thinkstock

A study investigating changes in the brain anatomy of new mothers explores the connection between a biological system and the emotions, thoughts, and behaviors involved in caring for a newborn child.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.1 Research Areas in Psychology

development, many researchers now study changes and key stages over the entire life span. Developmental psychologists study a wide range of phenomena related to physi- cal, social, and cognitive change, including: How do children bond with their primary caregiver(s)? What are our primary needs and goals at each stage of life? Why do some cognitive skills decline in old age? At what ages do infants develop basic motor skills?

In one example of this approach, Hill and Tyson (2009) explored the connection between children’s school achievement and their parents’ involvement with the school. In other words: Do children perform better when their parents are actively involved in school activities? The authors addressed this question by combining results from several studies into one data set. Across 50 studies, the answer to this question was yes—children do bet- ter in school if their parents are involved. Thus, this study sheds light on a key predictor of academic achievement during an important developmental period.

Social Psychology

Social psychology attempts to study behavior in a broader social context. It is typically defined as the study of the ways our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are shaped by other

people. As you might imagine, this broad perspec- tive allows social psychologists to tackle a wide range of research questions, including the follow- ing: What kinds of things do we look for in select- ing romantic partners? Why do people stay in bad relationships? How do other people shape our sense of who we are? When and why do people help in emergencies?

Norman Triplett conducted the first published social psychology study at the end of the 19th century (Triplett, 1898). Triplett had noticed that professional cyclists tended to ride faster when racing against other cyclists than when compet- ing in solo time trials. He tested this observation in a controlled laboratory setting, asking people to do a number of tasks either alone or next to another person. His results (and countless other studies since) revealed that people worked faster in groups, suggesting that other people can have definite and concrete influences on our behavior.

Clinical Psychology

Finally, the area of clinical psychology is an applied field focused on understanding the best ways to treat psychological disorders. It is typically defined as the study of best practices for understanding, treating, and preventing distress and dysfunction. Clinical psychologists engage in both the assessment and the treatment of psychological disor- ders, as seen in the following research questions: What is the most effective treatment for depression? How can we help people overcome post-traumatic stress disorder following

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Social psychologist Norman Triplett's study of cyclists led to conclusions about how people influence one another.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.2 Scientific Thinking and Paths to Knowledge

a traumatic event? Should anxiety disorders be treated with drugs, therapy, or a combina- tion? What is the most reliable way to diagnose schizophrenia?

One example of this approach is found in a study by Kleim and Ehlers (2008), which attempted to understand the risk factors for post-traumatic stress disorder, a prolonged reaction to a severe traumatic experience. Kleim and Ehlers found that assault victims who tend to form less specific memories about life in general might be more likely to develop a disorder in response to trauma than victims who tend to form detailed memo- ries. People who tend to form vague memories may have fewer resources to draw on in trying to reconnect with their daily life after a traumatic event. Thus, this study sheds light on a possible pathway contributing to the development of a psychological disorder.

1.2 Scientific Thinking and Paths to Knowledge

One of the easiest ways to understand the scientific approach is to contrast it with other ways of understanding the world. While science offers us the most objective and rigorous approach to decision making, it is by no means the only approach. Some of the following paths to knowledge have been popular and acceptable during dif- ferent historical periods. Other approaches are currently in use by different academic dis- ciplines. To showcase the distinctions among them, the following examples illustrate how each perspective might approach the link between vaccines and autism.

Authority

In a number of contexts, people understand the world based on what authority figures tell them. Parents dic- tate curfews to children; cities assign speed limits within their borders; and churches interpret the meaning of holy texts. In each case, the rules and knowledge are accepted because there is trust in the source of the knowledge. In the debate over vaccines and autism, this perspective would be evident in those who trust their doctor’s advice to vac- cinate their children. It would also be evident in those who trust celebrity spokesperson Jenny McCarthy’s testimony that vaccines gave her son autism.

Phenomenology

Many academic disciplines take a phenomenological approach to studying the world around us. This approach focuses on each individual’s intuition and subjective expe- rience and treats truth as a subjective concept. In other words, if you believe that your alcoholism stems from a bad relationship with your father, there is some “truth” to this belief (regardless of the objective truth). In the debate over vaccines and autism, this perspective would be evident in

Dee Cercone/Everett Collection

Celebrity spokesperson Jenny McCarthy has authority among parents who continue to believe there is a link between vaccines and autism.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.2 Scientific Thinking and Paths to Knowledge

those who are swayed by a parent’s testimony, despite all evidence to the contrary. If Jenny McCarthy believes vaccines gave her child autism, then there is some “truth” to her belief.

Rationalism

For several centuries, scientific inquiry was guided by a rationalist approach, and this approach is still dominant in many of the humanities disciplines. Rationalism involves making decisions based on logical arguments; if something “makes sense,” it must be the right answer. In the debate over vaccines and autism, this perspective would be evident in the argument that because autism symptoms appear shortly after vaccination, vaccines must be the cause. (This reasoning ignores the rules about the kinds of evidence needed to make statements about causation, which we will cover in later chapters.)

Empiricism The scientific approach, which is our focus in this book, makes decisions based on evi- dence. This approach, also called empiricism, focuses on the role of observation and sen- sory experience over the role of reason and logic alone. It is all well and good to come up with a creative idea about how the world works, but this idea does not carry scientific weight until it has been supported through carefully collected observations of the world around us. These observations form the basis of science, which set it apart from the other

paths to knowledge. In the debate over vaccines and autism, scientific evidence leads to the unam- biguous conclusion: There is no link between vac- cines and autism. But if the opposite picture were true, scientists would gladly change their minds. One of the key advantages of science is that it is not bound to a particular ideology, other than a belief in the superiority of observable evidence.

In summary, science offers us one of many ways to understand the world. In theory, these perspec- tives are not incompatible, although in practice, differing perspectives can lead to drastically dif- ferent conclusions. (The writer Stephen Jay Gould famously made this argument about science and religion, arguing that they are essentially suited to answering different types of questions. You can

read an essay by Gould at the following website: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/ gould_noma.html.) And, on a particularly practical note, the scientific approach is the one that we will adopt throughout this class. So, when you are asked to evaluate research results on your exams, your interpretation will need to be based on weighing the evidence; it is not acceptable to claim that a finding “just makes sense.”

The Research Process

So, what does it mean to draw conclusions based on science? Scientists across all disci- plines use the same process of forming and testing their ideas. The overall goal of this

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Rather than relying on reason and logic, empiricism focuses on what one can learn through observations and sensory experiences.

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research process—also known as the scientific method—is to draw conclusions based on empirical observations. In this section, we cover the four steps of the research process— hypothesize, operationalize, measure, and explain, abbreviated with the acronym HOME.

Step 1—Hypothesize The first step in the research process is to develop a testable prediction, or hypothesis. A hypoth- esis is a specific and falsifiable statement about the relationship between two or more variables (more on that “falsifiable” bit in a minute. . .). For example, if we study the link between smoking and cancer, our hypothesis might be that smok- ing causes lung cancer. Or, if we are studying a new drug for treating depression, we might hypothesize that drug X will lead to a reduction in depression symptoms. We will cover hypoth- eses in more detail in the next section, but for now it is important to understand that the way we frame our hypothesis guides every other step of the research process.

Step 2—Operationalize Once we have developed a hypothesis, the next step is to decide how to test it. The process of operationalization involves choosing measurable variables to represent the compo- nents of our hypothesis. In the depression drug example above, we would need to decide how to measure both cause and effect; in this case we define the cause as the drug and the effect as reduced symptoms of depression That is, what doses of the drug should we investigate? How many different doses should we compare? And, how will we measure depression symptoms? Will it work to have people complete a questionnaire? Or do we want to have a clinician interview participants before and after they take the drug? An additional complication for psychology studies is that many of our research questions deal with abstract concepts. There is an art to turning these concepts into measurable variables. For example, the concept of “happiness” could be operationalized as a person’s score on a happiness scale, or as the number of times a person smiles in a 5-minute period, or perhaps even as a person’s subjective experience of happiness during an interview. We will cover this process in more detail in Chapter 2, where we discuss guidelines for mak- ing these important decisions about the study.

Step 3—Measure Now that we have developed both our research question and our operational definitions, it is time to collect some data. We will cover this process in great detail; Chapters 3 through 5 are dedicated to the three primary approaches to data collection. The goal of this stage is to gather empirical observations that will help address our hypothesis. As we discuss in Chapter 2, these observations can range from questionnaire responses to measures of brain activity, and they can be collected in ways ranging from online questionnaires to carefully controlled experiments.

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The Scientific Method enables researchers to draw conclusions based on empirical evidence.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.2 Scientific Thinking and Paths to Knowledge

Step 4—Explain After our data have been collected, the final step is to analyze and interpret the results. The goal of this step is to return full circle to our research question and determine whether the results support our hypothesis. Let’s go back to our hypothesis that drug X should reduce depression symptoms. If we find at the end of the study that people who took drug X showed a 70% decrease in symptoms, this would be consistent with the hypothesis. But the explanation stage also involves thinking about alternative explanations and planning for future studies. What if depression symptoms dropped simply due to the passage of time? How could we address this concern in a future study? As it turns out, there is a fairly easy way to fix this problem, which we’ll cover in Chapter 5.

In summary, the research process involves four stages: forming a hypothesis, deciding how to test it, collecting data, and interpreting the results. This process is used regardless of whether our research questions involve depression drugs, reading speed, or the speed of light in a vacuum.

Examples of the Research Process

To make these steps a bit more concrete, let’s walk through two examples of how they could be applied to specific research topics.

Example 1—Depression and Heart Disease Depression affects approximately 20 million Americans, and 16% of the population will expe- rience it at some time in their lives (NIMH, 2007). Depression is associated with a range of emo- tional and physical symptoms, including feelings of hopelessness and guilt, loss of appetite, sleep disturbance, and suicidal thoughts. This list has expanded even further to include an increased risk of heart disease. Individuals who are other- wise healthy but suffering from depression are more likely to develop and to die from cardio- vascular disease than those without depression. According to one study, patients who experi- ence depression following a heart attack experi- ence a fourfold increase in 5-year mortality rates (research reviewed in Glassman et al., 2011).

One intriguing idea that comes from these find- ings is that it might make sense to treat heart attack patients with antidepressant drugs. The goal of the HOME method is to take this idea, turn it into a testable question, and conduct a study that will test it.

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Deciding who would qualify as a heart attack patient is an example of operationalization.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.2 Scientific Thinking and Paths to Knowledge

Step 1 is to form a testable hypothesis from this research question. In this case, we might predict that people who have had heart attacks and take prescribed antidepressants are more likely to survive in the years following the heart attack than those who do not take antidepressants. What we’ve done here is to take a general idea about the benefits of a drug and state it in a way that can be directly tested in a research study.

Step 2 is to decide how we want to operationalize the concepts in our study. In this case, we would first decide who qualified as a heart attack patient: Would we include only those hospitalized with severe heart attacks or include anyone with abnormal cardiac symp- toms? As we will discuss in later chapters, this decision will have implications for how we interpret the results. We would also need to decide on the doses of antidepressant drugs to use and the time period to measure survival rates. How long would we follow patients?

Step 3 is to measure these key concepts based on the decisions we made in step 2. This step involves collecting data from participants and then conducting statistical analyses to test our hypothesis. We will cover the specifics of research designs beginning in Chapter 2, but essentially we would want to give antidepressants to half of our sample and compare their survival rates with the half not given these drugs.

Step 4 is to explain the results and tie the statistical analyses back into our hypothesis. In this case, we would want to know whether antidepressant drugs did indeed benefit heart attack patients and increase their odds of survival for 5 years. If so, our hypothesis is proved. If not, we would go back to the drawing board and try to determine whether something went wrong with the study or antidepressant drugs really don’t have any benefit for this popula- tion. As we’ll discuss, answering these kinds of questions usually involves conducting addi- tional studies. Either way, the goal of this final step is to return full circle to our research ques- tion and discuss the implications of antidepressant drug treatment for heart attack patients.

Example 2—Language and Deception In 1994, Susan Smith appeared on television claiming that her two young children had been kidnapped at gunpoint. Eventually, authorities discovered she had drowned her children in a lake and fabricated the kidnapping story to cover her actions. Before Smith was a suspect in the chil- dren’s deaths, she told reporters, “My children wanted me. They needed me. And now I can’t help them.” (The Washington Post, November 5, 1994, A15). Normally, relatives speak of a missing person in the present tense. The fact that Smith used the past tense in this context suggested to trained FBI agents that she already viewed them as dead (Adams, 1996).

One intriguing idea that comes from this story is that people may communicate in different ways

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The idea that people communicate differently when they are lying can be tested using a research study.

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when they are lying than when they are telling the truth. The goal of the HOME method is to take this idea, turn it into a testable question, and conduct a study that will test it.

Step 1 is to form a testable hypothesis from this research question. This example is some- what more challenging because “communicating differently” can be defined in many ways. Thus, we need a hypothesis that will narrow the focus of our study. One hypothesis, based on research literature, might be that liars show more negative emotion (e.g., anger, fear) in the way that they communicate than truth-tellers do (e.g., Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, & Richards, 2003). What we’ve done here is to take a general idea and state it in a way that can be directly tested in a research study.

Step 2 is to decide how we want to operationalize the concepts in our study. In this case, we would need to decide what counts as “showing negative emotion.” We might take the approach used in a previous study (Newman et al., 2003) and scan the words people use, looking for those reflecting emotions such as anger, anxiety, and fear. The logic here is that the words people use reflect something about their underlying thought processes and that people who are trying to lie will be more anxious and fearful as a result of the lie.

Step 3 is to measure these key concepts based on the decisions we made in step 2. This step involves collecting data from participants and then conducting statistical analyses to test our hypothesis. In this example, the challenge comes in determining whether and when people are lying. In Susan Smith’s case, the truth was ultimately discovered, so we can say with some certainty that her language was deceptive. One way to do this in a research study is to tell people to lie, tell others to be truthful, and compare differences in the way they use language.

Step 4 is to explain the results and tie the statistical analyses back into our hypothesis. In this case, we want to know whether people who were instructed to lie did indeed use more words suggestive of negative emotion. If so, this proves our hypothesis. If not, we would go back to the drawing board and try to determine whether something went wrong with the study or people really don’t use more negative emotion when they lie. Either way, the goal of this final step is to return full circle to our research question and discuss the implica- tions for understanding indicators of deception.

Goals of Science

In addition to sharing an overall approach, all forms of scientific inquiry tend to adopt one of four overall goals. This section provides an overview of these goals, with a focus on their application to psychological research. We will encounter the first three goals throughout the course and use them to organize our discussion of different research methods.

Description One of the most basic research goals is to describe a phenomenon, including descrip- tions of behavior, attitudes, and emotions. You are probably very familiar with this type of research because it tends to crop up in everything from the nightly news to your favorite magazine. For example, if CNN reports that 60% of Americans approve of the president, they are describing a trend in public opinion. Descriptive research should

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always be the starting point when studying a new phenomenon. That is, before we start try- ing to explain why college students binge drink, we need to know how common the phenomenon really is. So, we might start with a simple survey that asked college students about their drinking behavior, and we might find that 29% of them show signs of dangerous binge drinking. Now that we have described the phenomenon, we are in a better position to conduct more sophisti- cated research. (See Chapter 3 for more detail on descriptive research.)

Prediction A second goal of research is to attempt to predict a phenomenon. This goal takes us from describ- ing the occurrence of binge drinking among college students to attempting to understand when and why they do it. Do students give in to peer pressure? Is drinking a way to deal with the stress of school? These questions could be addressed through a more detailed survey that asked people to elaborate on the reasons that they drink. The goal of this approach is to under- stand the factors that make something more likely to occur. (See Chapter 4 for more detail on the process of designing surveys and conducting predictive research.)

Explanation A third, and much more powerful, goal of research is to attempt to explain a phenom- enon. This goal takes us from predicting relationships to testing possible causal links. Whereas predictive research attempts to find associations between two phenomena (e.g., college student drinking is more likely when students are stressed), explanatory research attempts to make causal statements about the phenomenon of interest (e.g., stress causes college students to drink more). This distinction may seem subtle at this point, but it is an important one and is closely related to the way that we design our studies. (See Chapter 5 for more detail on explanatory research.)

Change The fourth and final goal of research is generally limited to psychology and other social science fields: When we are dealing with questions about behaviors, attitudes, and emo- tions, we can conduct research to try to change the phenomenon of interest. Researchers who attempt to change behaviors, attitudes, or emotions are essentially applying research findings with the goal of solving real-world problems. In the 1970s, Elliot Aronson, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, was interested in ways to reduce

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Before a phenomenon can be explained it must first be described. For example, a survey might be used to collect information used to describe the phenomenon of binge drinking.

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prejudice in the classroom. Research conducted at the time was discovering that prejudice is often triggered by feelings of competition; in the classroom, students competed for the teacher’s attention. Aronson and his colleagues decided to change the classroom structure in a way that required students to cooperate in order to fin- ish an assignment. Essentially, students worked in small groups, and each person mastered a piece of the material. (You can read the details on this website: http://www.jigsaw.org/). Aron- son found that using this technique, known as the “jigsaw classroom,” both enhanced learning and decreased prejudice among the students (e.g., Aronson, 1978).

Aronson’s research also illustrates the distinction between two categories of research. The first three goals we have discussed fall mainly under the category of basic research, in which the primary goal is to acquire knowledge, with less focus on how to apply the knowledge. Scientists conducting basic research might spend their time trying to describe and understand the causes of binge drinking but stop short of designing interventions to stop binge drinking. This fourth goal of research is more often seen in applied research, in which the primary goal is to solve a problem, with less focus on why the solution works. Scientists conducting applied research might spend their time trying to stop binge drinking but not get caught up in the details of why these interventions are effective. But Aronson’s research is a great example of how these two categories should work together. The basic research on sources of prejudice informed his applied research on ways to reduce prejudice, which in turn informed further basic research on why this technique is so effective.

One final note on changing behavior: Anytime you set out with the goal of changing what people do, your values enter the picture. Inherent in Aronson’s research was the assumption that prejudice was a bad thing that needed to be changed. Although few peo- ple would disagree with him, the risk is that he might have trouble remaining objective throughout the research project. As we suggested earlier, the more emotionally involved you are in the research question, the more you have to be aware of the potential for bias, and the more you have to force yourself to pay attention to the data.

Quantitative versus Qualitative Research

Imagine for a moment that you are a city planner interested in studying traffic patterns at different times of the day. You might approach this research question in one of two ways. You could fly over the city in a helicopter, take snapshots of a random set of busy intersections, and conduct statistical analyses on cars moving in different directions at different times. This would give you a broad understanding of traffic patterns in the city. Alternatively, you could spend your resources studying the busiest intersection in the middle of downtown, trying to understand everything from driver behaviors to the effects of weather conditions. This would give you a very deep understanding of traffic in the middle of your city.

© Creasource/Corbis

The "jigsaw classroom" is a cooperative learning technique that reduces racial conflict among school children.

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These two approaches illustrate the differences between quantitative research and qualitative research, respectively. Quantitative research is a systematic and empirical approach that attempts to generalize results to other contexts. By taking “samples” of different intersections and by con- ducting inferential statistics, our hypothetical city planner could learn a little bit about traffic in gen- eral. Qualitative research, in contrast, is a more descriptive approach that attempts to gain a deep understanding of particular cases and contexts. By studying the busiest intersection in detail, our hypothetical city planner could learn a great deal about the traffic patterns at that intersection.

The two approaches have traditionally been pop- ular with different social science fields. For exam- ple, much of the current research in psychology is quantitative because the goal is to gain generaliz- able knowledge about behavior and mental pro- cesses. In contrast, much of the current research in sociology and political studies tends to be qualita- tive because the goal is to gain a rich understand- ing of a particular context. If you want to under- stand why college students around the country

suffer from increased depression, quantitative methods are the better choice. If you want to understand why the citizens of Egypt revolted against their government, then qualita- tive methods are more appropriate.

In an ideal world, a true understanding of any phenomenon requires the use of both methods. That is, we can best understand depression if we both study statistical trends and conduct in-depth interviews with depressed people. We can best understand binge drinking by conducting both surveys and focus groups. And we can best understand the experience of being bullied in school by both talking to the victims and collecting school- wide statistics. In this text, the focus is primarily on quantitative methods, reflecting cur- rent trends in the field of psychology. We will primarily cover qualitative methods in Chapter 3 (on descriptive research), and quantitative methods in Chapters 4 (predictive research) and 5 (experimental research).

1.3 Hypotheses and Theories

The use of hypotheses is one of the key distinguishing features of scientific inquiry. Rather than making things up as they go along, scientists develop a hypothesis ahead of time and design a study to test this hypothesis. In this section, we cover the process of turning rough ideas about the world into testable hypotheses. We cover the primary sources of hypotheses, as well as several criteria for evaluating hypotheses.

Andrea Morini/Digital Vision/Thinkstock

A researcher might use both quantitative data and qualitative data to understand depression.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.3 Hypotheses and Theories

Sources of Hypotheses

Bottom-Up—From Observation to Hypothesis Research hypotheses are based on observations about the world around us. For example, you may have noticed the following tendencies as you observe the people around you:

• Teenagers do a lot of reckless things when their friends do them. • Close friends and couples tend to dress alike. • Everyone faces the front of the elevator. • Church attendees sit and stand at the same time.

Based on these observations, you might develop a general hypothesis about human behavior—peo- ple will conform to, or go along with, what the group is doing. This process of developing a gen- eral statement out of a set of specific observations is called induction, and is perhaps best under- stood as a “bottom-up” approach. In this case, we have developed our hypothesis about conformity from the ground up, based on observing behav- ioral tendencies.

The process of induction is a very common and very useful way to generate hypotheses. Most notably, this process is a great source of ideas that are based in real-world phenomena. Induc- tion also helps us to think about the limits of an observed phenomenon. For example, we might observe the same set of conforming behaviors and speculate whether people will also conform in dangerous situations. What if smoke started pouring into a room and no one else reacted? Would people act on their survival instinct or conform to the group and stay put (Latane & Darley, 1969)? Your prediction about how this experiment might turn out forms your hypothesis for the experiment.

Top-Down—From Theory to Hypothesis The other approach to developing research hypotheses is to work down from a bigger idea. The term for these big ideas is a theory, which refers to a collection of ideas used to explain the connections among variables and phenomena. For example, the theory of evolution organizes our knowledge about how species have developed and changed over time. One piece of this theory is that life originated in Africa and then spread to other parts of the planet. However, this idea in and of itself is too big to test in a single study. Instead, we move from the “top down” and develop a specific hypothesis out of a more general theory; this process is known as deduction.

© Creasource/Corbis

The process of induction helps researchers form hypotheses about human behavior, such as why teens engage in reckless behavior.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.3 Hypotheses and Theories

When we develop hypotheses using a process of deduction, the biggest advantage is that it is easier to place the study—and our results—in the larger context of related research. Because our hypotheses represent a specific test of a general theory, our results can be combined with other research that tested the theory in different ways. For example, in the evolution example, you might hypothesize that older fossils would be found in Africa than would be found in other parts of the world. If this hypothesis were supported, it would be consistent with the overall theory about life originating in Africa. And as more and more researchers develop and test their own hypotheses about the origins of life, our cumulative knowledge about evolution continues to grow.

Table 1.1 presents a comparison of these two sources of research hypotheses, showcasing their relative advantages and disadvantages.

Table 1.1: Comparing Sources of Hypotheses

Deduction Induction

“Top-down,” from theory to hypothesis “Bottom-up,” from observation to hypothesis

Easy to interpret our findings Can be hard to interpret without prior research

Helps science build and grow Helps our understanding of the real world

Might miss out on new perspectives Great way to get new ideas

Evaluating Theories

While experiments are designed to test one hypothesis at a time, the overall progress in a field is measured by the strength and success of its theories. If we think of hypotheses as being like individual combat missions on the battlefield, then our theories are the overall battle plan. So, how do we know whether our theories are any good? In this section, we cover four criteria that are useful in evaluating theories.

Explains the Past; Predicts the Future One of the most important requirements for a theory is that it has to be consistent with existing knowledge. If a physicist theorized that everything on earth should float off into space, this would conflict with millennia worth of evidence showing that gravity exists. And, if a psychologist argued that people learn better through punishment than through rewards, this would conflict with several decades of research on learning and reinforce- ment. A theory should offer a new perspective, and a new way of thinking about familiar concepts, but cannot be so creative that it clashes with what we already know. Related to this, a theory also has to lead to accurate predictions about the future, meaning that it has to stand up to empirical tests. There are usually multiple ways to explain existing knowledge, but not all of them will be supported as we test their assumptions in new cir- cumstances. At the end of the day, the best theory is the one that best explains both past and future data.

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Research: Thinking Critically Controversy Grows over Study Claiming Liberals and Atheists Are Smarter

By Daniela Perdomo

There’s a lot of buzz over a controversial study released in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly, titled “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent,” that compares IQ levels among liberals and conservatives, atheists and religious believers.

The widely circulated study claims that “more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism. . .) than less intelligent individuals.”

The study was written by Satoshi Kanazawa, a social scientist at the London School of Economics, who employs evolutionary psychology to analyze the social sciences, such as economics and politics, and who has a history of attracting ire over his studies and opinions.

But before drawing any conclusions about Kanazawa’s latest study, it’s worth expanding on the data he bases his claims on. First of all, quantifying intelligence on a societal level—and even from person to person—is incredibly tricky, if not impossible. As an evolutionary psychologist, Kanazawa likely recognizes this and that may be why he decided to limit his intelligence measures to IQ points, a convenient and notoriously narrow way of assessing cognitive abilities.

The first problem in the study comes with Kanazawa’s use of IQ as an accurate measure of intelli- gence. P. Z. Myers, a leader in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (and an avowed athe- ist and progressive), is not surprised. He calls Kanazawa the “great idiot of social science” and points to a 2006 paper in which Kanazawa took the mean IQ of various countries and used those to draw conclusions on their dedication to health care.

For example: Ethiopia has a mean IQ of 63. This low IQ explains why Ethiopia’s health care system is awful, according to Kanazawa.

Talk about simplistic. Not only does this ignore the fact that IQ might better measure cognitive capa- bilities in the developed world, where it was designed, but it completely tunes out the fact that Ethiopia has been embroiled in wars for many years, which would appear to be a better explanation for why the health care system there hasn’t developed to western levels yet.

“Intelligence is such a complex phenomenon—there are multiple parameters,” Myers says. “And IQ is extremely sensitive to social conditions. Kanazawa wants to reverse it and say that IQ is causing problematic social conditions.”

In this more recent study, not only does Kanazawa wax over structural inequalities that may lead to varying IQ levels in American society, even the disparities he finds in this imperfect measure of intel- ligence are relatively miniscule. For the most part, he is not speaking of a difference of more than six IQ points between liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers—a negligible difference one would never notice in real person-to-person interactions.

Kanazawa isn’t the first to study the intelligence–religiosity nexus. Other studies have also found a three- to six-point IQ difference between atheists and religious believers, in the atheists’ favor. But those studies didn’t claim that atheists were more evolved, as Kanazawa presumes, and merely con- clude that they are more skeptical due to a certain kind of schooling and cultural exposure (which might also account for why some people perform well on IQ tests), leaving room to account for why so many people—say, like William F. Buckley, Jr., the late conservative public intellectual—can be so religious and conservative and yet quite intelligent.

Then there’s the issue of Kanazawa’s definition of liberalism, which he writes is the “contemporary American” denotation: “the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated (continued)

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.3 Hypotheses and Theories

others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others.” Practically speaking, this means Kanazawa’s “liberalism” is defined as a willingness to pay a higher tax rate and donate money to charity.

This definition of liberalism, says Ilya Somin, a legal scholar whose expertise includes popular political participation, does not actually distinguish it from, say, conservatism or libertarianism.

Somin writes, “a libertarian who believes that free market policies best promote the welfare of ‘genetically unrelated others’ and contributes a great deal of his money to charities promoting liber- tarian causes counts as a liberal under this definition. The same goes for a Religious Right conserva- tive who believes that everyone will be better off under socially conservative policies and contributes lots of money to church charities.”

On this last point, it should be noted that recent research shows American political conservatives actually give more money to charity (and donate more blood) than their political liberal counterparts.

The problem inherent in Kanazawa’s vague definition of liberalism is further compounded by the fact that he gleans his data on intelligence and attitudes toward topics of religion, politics and charity from two massive national surveys—the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the General Social Survey.

These huge studies are greatly compromised by self-reporting. Most Americans don’t even really know where they fall on the left–right political continuum. Polling shows, for example, that more African Americans self-identify as conservative than liberal, but when it comes to actual votes, data indicate that blacks overwhelmingly vote for traditionally defined liberal causes and candidates.

And libertarians—estimated to be about 15 percent of the U.S. population—don’t neatly identify as liberals or conservatives, or even centrists, depending on whether they more closely identify as economic conservatives or social liberals. Even progressives shy away from identifying as liberals, a term that carries a negative connotation for many of them.

A particularly problematic idea presented by the study is how Kanazawa defines certain values and preferences as “evolutionarily novel.” While he does not come out and say being atheist is a sign of having evolved more than those who are religious, he does infer this, not only by referring to the slightly higher mean IQ levels of American atheists, but also by pointing out that atheism goes against the grain of general human history. (Kanazawa doesn’t even touch upon the idea that beliefs are more likely colored by one’s cultural background than one’s genetics.)

In the end, Kanazawa’s study reinforces long-standing prejudices against conservatives and religious believers. To think that conservatives or religious people “are dumber than you and me,” says Myers, “fosters this tribalism that we’re out to replace people rather than to educate and inform them.” And that’s not very smart.

Think about it:

1. What general theory is Kanazawa trying to test? How does the theory differ from his specific hypothesis?

2. How did Kanazawa operationalize liberalism and intelligence in his research? Are there prob- lems with the way these constructs were operationalized? Explain.

3. What were Kanazawa’s main findings? Evaluate the strength of the evidence for and against his hypothesis. How is the strength of this evidence influenced by his research methods?

4. Why do you think this research is controversial? If Kanazawa’s methodology were more rigor- ous, would it still be controversial?

Research: Thinking Critically (continued)

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.3 Hypotheses and Theories

Testable and Falsifiable Second, a theory needs to be stated in such a way that it leads to testable predictions. More specifi- cally, a theory should be subject to a standard of falsifiability, meaning that the right set of condi- tions could prove it wrong (Popper, 1959). Calling something “falsifiable” does not mean it is false, only that it would be possible to demonstrate its falsehood if it were false. The Darwinian theory of evolution offers a great example of this criterion. One of the primary components of evolutionary theory is the idea that species change and evolve from common ancestors over time in response to changing conditions. So far, all evidence from the fossil record has supported this theory—older variants of species always appear farther down in a fossil layer. However, if conflicting evidence ever did appear, it would deal a serious blow to the theory. The biologist J. B. S. Haldane was once asked what kind of evidence could possibly dis- prove the theory of natural selection, to which he replied, “fossil rabbits in the Pre-Cambrian era”— that is, a modern version of a mammal in a much older fossil layer (Ridley, 2003).

Parsimonious Third, a theory should strive to be parsimonious, or as simple and concise as possible without sacrificing completeness. (Or, as Einstein famously quipped during a lecture at Oxford: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” [Einstein, 1934, p. 165]). One helpful way to think about this criterion is in terms of efficiency. Our theories need to spell out the components in a way that represents everything important but doesn’t add so much detail that it becomes hard to understand. This means that our theories can lack parsimony either because they are too complicated, or because they are too simple. At one end of this spectrum, Figure 1.1 presents a theoretical model of the causes of malnutrition (Cheah et al., n.d.). This theory does a superb job of summarizing all of the predictors of child malnutrition across multiple levels of analysis. However, the potential problem is that it becomes too complicated to test. At the other end of the spectrum, Figure 1.2 presents the overall theoretical perspective behind behaviorism. In the early part of the 20th century, the behaviorist school of psychology argued that every- thing organisms do could be represented in behavioral terms, without any need to invoke the concept of a “mind.” The overarching theory looked something like Figure 1.2, with the “black box” in the middle representing mental processes. However, the cognitive rev- olution of the 1960s eventually displaced this theory, as it became clear that behaviorism was too simple. The ideal balance, then, is to lay out your theory in a way that includes the necessary pieces and nothing unnecessary.

iStockphoto/Thinkstock

The theory of evolution is falsifiable, meaning that it could be disproved under the right conditions. For example, if fossil evidence that contradicted the theory was discovered.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.3 Hypotheses and Theories

Promotes Research Finally, science is a cumulative field, which means that a theory is really only as good as the research it generates. Or to state it more bluntly: The theory that you are so attached to is useless if no one follows up on it. Thus, one of the best bases for evaluating a theory is whether it encourages new hypotheses. Consider the following example, drawn from real research in social psychology. Since the early 1980s, Bill Swann and his colleagues have

Siblings shared

Arm circumference Weight for age Height for age

Malnutrition Indicator

Gender

Age

Birth weight

Biological Aspect

Sanitation

Location

Infrastructure Health

services

Social and economic

factors

Environmental Aspect

Breastfeeding

Birth interval

Maternal factors

Health practice

Childcare practice

Shared preference for food

Feeding practice

Diet

Weaning

Behavioral Aspect

Unobserved/latent, endogenous variables

Observed, endogenous variables

Observed, exogenous variables

Unobserved/latent, theoretical exogen variables

Stimulus Response (Behavior)

Figure 1.1: Predictors of Malnutrition

Figure 1.2: The Behaviorist Model

Figure 1.1 presents a theoretical model of the causes of malnutrition.

Figure 1.2 presents the overall theoretical perspective behind behaviorism. The“black box” in the middle represents mental processes.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.3 Hypotheses and Theories

argued that we prefer consistent feedback to positive feedback, meaning that we would rather hear things that confirm what we think of ourselves. One provocative hypothesis that comes out of this theory is that people with low self-esteem are more comfortable with a romantic partner who thinks less of them than anyone who might think well of them. This hypothesis has been tested and supported many times in a variety of contexts and continues to draw people in because it is exciting. (For a review of this research, see Swann, Rentfrow, & Guinn, 2005.)

The Cycle of Science

Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture. We have now covered the processes of developing theories, developing hypotheses, and evaluating all of them. But of course none of these pieces occurs in isolation; science is an ongoing process of updating and revising our views based on what the data show. This overall process works something like the cycle depicted in Figure 1.3. We start with an overall theory about how concepts relate to one another and use this to generate specific, testable, and falsifiable hypothe- ses. These hypotheses then form the basis for research studies, which generate empirical data. Based on these data, we may have reason to suspect the overall theory needs to be refined or revised. And, so, we develop a new hypothesis, collect some new data, and either confirm or don’t confirm our suspicion. But it doesn’t end there: other researchers may see a new perspective on our theory and develop their own hypotheses, which lead to their own data and possibly to a revision of the theory. If this is making your head spin, you’re not alone. The scientific approach is a slow and strange approach to problem solving, but it is the most objective one available.

In the 1960s, social psychologists were begin- ning to study the ways that people explain the behavior of others (e.g., when someone cuts you off in traffic, you tend to assume he is a jerk.) One early theory, called “correspondent infer- ence theory,” argued that people would come up with these explanations in a rational way. For example, if we read a persuasive essay but then learn that the author was assigned her position on the topic, we should refrain from drawing any conclusions about her actual position. How- ever, research findings demonstrated just the

opposite. In a landmark 1967 study, participants actually ignored information about whether authors had chosen their own position on the issue, assuming instead that whatever they wrote reflected their true opinions (Jones & Harris, 1967). In response to this data (and similar findings from other studies), the theory was gradually revised to account for what was termed the “fundamental attribution error”—people tend to ignore situational influence and assume that all behavior simply reflects the person’s own disposition. These authors developed a theory, came up with a specific hypothesis, and collected some empirical data to test it. But because the data ran counter to the theory, the theory was ultimately revised to account for the empirical evidence.

Theory

Hypothesis

Empirical Data

Revised Theory

Figure 1.3: The Cycle of Science

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.3 Hypotheses and Theories

Proof and Disproof

While we are on the subject of adjusting our theories, let’s take a look at the notions of “proof” and “disproof.” Because science is a cumulative field, decisions about the validity of a theory are ultimately made based on results of several studies from several research laboratories. This means that a single research study has rather limited implications for an overall theory. This also means that you, as a researcher, have to use the concepts of proof and disproof in the correct way. We will elaborate on this as we move through the course, but for now we can rely on two very simple rules:

1. If the data from one study are consistent with our hypothesis, we support the hypothesis rather than “proving” it. In fact, we almost never prove a theory, but our statistical tests can at least tell us how confident to be in our support.

2. If the data from one study are not consistent with our hypothesis, we fail to support the hypothesis. As we will discuss throughout the course, lots of things can cause a study to fail; these are often a result of flaws in the design rather than flaws in the overall theory.

Sources of Ideas

Where do all of these great ideas come from in the first place? Students are often nervous about starting a career in research because they might not be able to come up with great ideas to test. In reality, though, ideas are easy to come by, once you know where to look. In this section, we cover a few tips and suggest handy sources for developing research ideas.

Real-World Problems A great deal of research in psychology and other social sciences is motivated by a desire to under- stand—or even solve—a problem in the world. This process involves asking a big question about some phenomenon and then trying to think of answers based on psychological mechanisms. For example, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, approximately 42 mil- lion Americans are unable to read, and 20% of high school seniors are unable to read when they graduate. These statistics might lead you to think about ways to improve reading instruction in the school system. And that might lead you to the hypothesis that individual tutoring will cause sig- nificant improvement in children’s reading skills.

In 1961, Adolf Eichmann was on trial in Jerusa- lem for his role in orchestrating the Holocaust. Eichmann’s repeated statements that he was only “following orders” caught the attention of Stanley Milgram, a young social psychologist who had just

Universal Images Group/Photolibrary

Adolf Eichmann claimed he was just "following orders" in his role as a Nazi Lieutenant Colonel of Holocaust logistics during World War II.

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earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University and who began to wonder about the limits of this phenomenon. To understand the power of obedience, Milgram designed a well-known series of experiments that asked participants to help with a study of “punishment and learning.” The protocol required them to deliver shocks to another participant—actually an accomplice of the experimenter—every time he got an answer wrong. Milgram discovered that two thirds of participants would obey the experimenter’s commands to deliver danger- ous levels of shocks, even after the victim of these shocks appeared to lose consciousness. These results revealed that all people have a frightening tendency to obey authority. We will return to this experiment below in our discussion of ethics; you can read more about Milgram and his work on this website: http://www.stanleymilgram.com/.

To take one more example, you might notice that criminal-trial juries often seem to make really poor decisions. This might lead you to wonder about the process of making decisions in a group. And that might lead you to the hypothesis that juries are more interested in get- ting along with the group than in finding the truth. The possibilities here are endless; but, as we discussed earlier, you must always be cautious when you design research to solve a prob- lem. Sometimes, your desire to make a difference can bias your interpretation of the data.

Reconciliation and Synthesis Ideas can also spring from resolving conflicts between existing ideas. The process of resolving an apparent conflict involves both reconciliation, or finding common ground among the ideas, and synthesis, or merging all the pieces into a new explanation. In the late 1980s, psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major noticed an apparent conflict in the prejudice literature. Based on everything then known about the development of self-esteem, members of racial and ethnic minority groups would be expected to have lower than average self-esteem because of the prejudice they faced. However, study after study demonstrated that, in particular, African-American college students had equiva- lent or higher self-esteem than European-American students. Crocker and Major offered a new theory to resolve this conflict, suggesting that the existence of prejudice actually grants access to a number of “self-protective strategies.” For example, minority group members can blame prejudice when they receive negative feedback, making the feedback much less personal and therefore less damaging to self-esteem. The results of this synthe- sis were published in a 1989 review paper, which many people credit with launching an entire research area on the targets of prejudice (Crocker & Major, 1989).

Learning from Failure Kevin Dunbar, a professor at Dartmouth University, has spent much of his career study- ing the research process. That is, he interviews scientists and sits in on lab meetings in order to document how people actually do research in the trenches. In a 2010 interview with Jonah Lehrer, Dunbar reported the shocking statistic that approximately 50 to 75% of research results are unexpected. Even though scientists plan their experiments carefully and use established techniques, the data are surprising more often than not. But even more surprising was the tendency of most researchers to discard the data if it did not fit their hypothesis. “These weren’t sloppy people,” Dunbar says. “They were working in some of the finest labs in the world. But experiments rarely tell us what we think they’re going to tell us. That’s the dirty secret of science.” The trick, then, is knowing what to do with data that make a particular study seem like a failure (Lehrer, 2010).

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The secret to turning failure into opportunity is twofold: First, question your assumptions about why the study feels like a failure in the first place. Perhaps the data contradict your hypothesis but can be explained by a new one. Or perhaps the data suggest a dramatic shift in perspective. Sec- ond, seek new and diverse perspectives to help in interpreting your results. Perhaps a cognitive psychologist can shed light on reactions to preju- dice. Or perhaps an anthropologist knows what to make of the surprising results of your aggression study. Some of the best and most fruitful research ideas have sprung from combining perspectives from different disciplines. Sometimes, all that your strange dataset needs is a fresh set of eyes.

Research: Thinking Critically Does 9 Just Sound Cheap?

By William Poundstone

We have all heard of calculating prodigies, those rare souls able to perform astounding feats with numbers. For many of these individuals, numbers have colors, flavors, sounds, or other qualities alien to the rest of us. Mental calculator Salo Finkelstein detested the number zero and adored 226. The Russian mnemonist S. V. Shereshevskii associated the number 87 with a visual image of a fat woman and a man twirling his mustache. This is known as synesthesia, the association of sensory qualities with seemingly inappropriate objects. A recent study suggests that most people may have a bit of number synesthesia. It might help explain the mysterious appeal of “charm” prices ending in the digit 9—beloved by discounters everywhere.

At least since the 19th century, retailers have been using prices like 99 cents (rather than an even $1.00) or $295 (rather than $300). There’s evidence that these prices induce shoppers to buy more than the corresponding round prices do. There’s been a lot of debate among marketers, psycholo- gists, and even cognitive scientists about why these prices trick people into buying something they wouldn’t have bought at a round price that is hardly much higher. In fact, in some experiments, more bought at a 9-ending price than at a price that was lower.

New research by Keith Coulter and Robin Coulter, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, implies that certain numbers just sound bigger than others. This in turn can affect the perception of discounts.

Coulter and Coulter begin by citing decades of research claiming that sounds pronounced with the front of the mouth (long a, e, and i; fricatives like f, s, and z) trigger associations with smallness. (Think of words like tiny and wee.) The vowels pronounced at the back of the mouth, like the “oo” in foot or goose, are linked to largeness. (Think huge or crowds oohing and ahhing something really big.) Crazy? Well consider how it applied to discounts in the study. Subjects were given “regular” and “sale” prices and asked to estimate the percentage discount. The guesstimated discounts were skewed by the sound effect. For instance, people estimated that a $3 product marked down to $2.33 was about a 28% discount. But when the product was marked down to $2.22, the estimated saving was only 24%. It was a bigger discount, really, but it didn’t seem that way. (continued)

Paul Harris/John Warburton-Lee Photography/Corbis

Scientists often turn failure into an opportunity for further study.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.4 Searching the Literature

1.4 Searching the Literature

Regardless of how you develop your hypothesis, an important step in the process is to connect it with what has been done before. Scientific knowledge accumulates one study at a time, so the best studies will build on earlier studies—by extending, cor- recting, or contradicting them. And, on a practical note, it would be a waste of your time to struggle over the best way to measure something when another researcher figured it out 20 years ago. So, rather than reinvent the proverbial wheel, one of the first steps in a research project is to consult published relevant articles. In this section, we will cover the process of finding these articles, followed by an overview of how to read these articles effectively.

One explanation: Three, with a long e, sounds small, and two, with a back-of-the-mouth vowel, sounds large.

That doesn’t prove the sounds were responsible. In one of the crucial experiments, Coulter and Coul- ter tested perceptions of the prices $7.01 and $7.88 with English and Chinese speakers. In English one is pronounced with the back of the mouth, and eight with the front. In Chinese, this is reversed. So were the perceptions of how big or small discounts were. The researchers use this to argue that it is indeed “phonetic symbolism” at work.

“Nine” has a long i, so it’s one of the small-sounding digits. Assuming the hypothesis is right, prices ending in 9 would seem a little smaller than they would otherwise, enhancing the quick, largely unconscious perception of a good deal. But 9 isn’t unique: it would seem that all the digits from 3 on up have a vowel or consonant sound supposedly associated with smallness. (Ironically, the truly bigger digits sound small. Zero is a problematic case: The fricative z might put it in the small category, but most people say “o” when reciting a phone number, and zeros at the end of a price aren’t pro- nounced at all: $70 is “seventy dollars,” not “seven-zero dollars.”)

Obviously, retailers would want to charge the largest “small-sounding” price (the sound they care about is ka-ching.) From that perspective, the use of 9 makes sense.

This study adds more fuel to the debate about how 9-ending prices “work.” Coulter and Coulter believe that shoppers must “rehearse” prices—say them to themselves, at least silently—for the sounds to affect them. In the experiments, participants were told to repeat the sale prices to them- selves. It’s not clear whether this would apply to silent reading of a fast-food menu. Still, the experi- ment hints at what unexpected layers of meaning we may attach to simple numbers—including the ones with dollar signs.

Think about it:

1. What hypothesis are Coulter and Coulter trying to test? Try to state this as succinctly as possible.

2. How was “perception of discounts” operationalized in their studies?

3. How were the key variables measured?

4. How do Coulter and Coulter explain their findings? Are there other possible alternative explanations?

5. Are these studies primarily aimed at description, explanation, prediction, or change? Explain.

Research: Thinking Critically (continued)

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.4 Searching the Literature

Searching for Articles

Beginning a search for relevant research articles can seem like a daunting task, largely due to the sheer number of available sources. Should you ask a librarian? Search Wiki- pedia? Browse the web? Fortunately, you can use a few tricks to make sure that your reference sources are both objective and scholarly. First, it is important to understand the difference between primary and secondary sources. Primary sources contain full reports of a research study, including information on the participants, the data collected, and the statistical analyses of these data. These types of sources appear in professional academic journals and are evaluated by a set of experts in the field before they are published—a pro- cess known as peer review. Thus, primary sources are a reliable way to determine what has been done in a particular field.

Secondary sources, in contrast, consist only of summaries of primary sources. These types of sources include textbooks, some academic books, and review articles in journals such as Psycho- logical Bulletin. As an analogy, think of the dif- ference between telling your friends about your adventurous weekend (primary source) and one of your friends repeating the story to her room- mate (secondary source). While some secondary sources undergo a process of review and evalu- ation (academic books), others do not (e.g., web- sites, friends re-telling stories).

In this day and age, people are becoming more and more comfortable searching for information via the Internet. Thus, it is particularly important to point out that websites are often not objective in their summaries of research. The vac- cine/autism scare discussed at the beginning of the chapter is a great example of this point. If you search in Google for the terms “vaccine” and “autism,” you will get more than 4 million hits, sorted in order of popularity. As of this writing (summer 2011), the top hit is a summary by the Centers for Disease Control, arguing in favor of vaccines. At another time, the top hit might be Jenny McCarthy’s website arguing that vaccines gave her child autism. Search results in Google are not peer reviewed, are not listed in order of reliability, and are customized to your browsing history, confirming your biases. As a result, Google is a poor choice when it comes to finding trustworthy information about academic research.

Another popular, but untrustworthy, source of information is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a tempting resource, given its marketing as a “free online encyclopedia.” But unlike other encyclopedias, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. On the upside, this means that errors can be identified and corrected at any time. On the down- side, this means that errors can be made—either accidentally or deliberately—at any time. The upshot is that there is no way to be sure that you are drawing information from a page at a time when it sticks to the facts.

So what’s a researcher to do? Fortunately, there are two reliable ways to access primary sources (research articles), which allow you to draw your own conclusions based on the

Steve McDonough/Photolibrary

College libraries provide students access to hard copies and digital copies of relevant research articles.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.4 Searching the Literature

patterns of data. First, Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) is a free resource that is managed by Google and that works exactly like Google but is limited to peer-reviewed academic articles. Thus, Google Scholar provides one pipeline to access primary sources. Second, many university libraries have access to centralized databases of peer-reviewed articles. The best-known database for psychology articles is PsycINFO; this database contains abstracts and citations for articles in psychology and related fields, maintained by the American Psychological Association. PsycINFO is updated monthly and covers approximately 2,500 different primary source academic journals.

Searching in PsycINFO (or Google Scholar) is as easy as typing key terms into a text box— sometimes labeled “Find,” or “Keywords.” But, that said, the process of choosing the best key words for your particular search can be a complex process. If your search terms are too general, the search might yield too many hits to be useful. If your search terms are too specific, the search might yield only one or two articles and fail to fully represent prior studies. As an example, the following list of numbers represents different combinations of search terms related to the topic of self-esteem.

“self-esteem” (in all fields) 35,847 hits

“self-esteem” (title only; peer reviewed) 4,977 hits

It’s clear we need to narrow the field a bit—you have better things to do than review almost 5,000 abstracts! What aspect of self-esteem do we find most interesting? Perhaps we want to learn more about self-esteem and sexual behavior?

“self-esteem” and “condom use” 2 hits

It seems we may have overdone the limits—two articles may not be very helpful in giving you a sense of previous research. So, let’s try one more combination, using a more general search term:

“self-esteem” and “sexual behavior” 133 hits

This number is a bit more manageable; we could tinker a bit more, but it no longer seems overwhelming to skim through the search results and find the most useful articles. No two searches will be the same, so the real take-home point is to try several combinations of search terms in order to strike a balance in your number of results.

Reading Research Articles

Now that you have assembled a collection of research articles relevant to your hypothesis, the next step is to read them. This may sound painfully obvious, but psychological journal articles are written in a very formulaic way, which can be confusing at first glance. However, once you know what to look for, the format ultimately makes these articles easy to read (and easy to write). As a matter of fact, the format of a journal article is designed to follow the steps of the scientific method, with a section devoted to each of the four steps! In this sec- tion, we examine each of the parts of a journal article to give you a sense of what to expect of each one. This overview is based on a fantastic article by Jordan and Zanna (1999); the goal of both is to let you appreciate the stories without getting bogged down in the details.

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The Title and the Abstract At the top of every journal article—as well as in the search results in PsycINFO—you will see both the title and an abstract, or a short summary of the article. While neither of these is a section per se, both provide you with a valuable first impression of the contents of

the article. If your search query results in a large number of hits, you can usually scan the titles to determine which ones are most likely to be use- ful. For example, if your research question con- cerns the links between depression and alcohol consumption among college students, you might search a database for the terms “alcohol” and “depression.” Most of the results are likely to be relevant and useful, but you could mostly likely skip one with a title like “Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Postpartum Depression,” since it is likely to be focused on a different population.

Once you narrow the list to the most useful titles, the abstract provides additional information about the content of the article. A journal article abstract follows a standard formula of stating the objec- tives of the study, followed by information on the methodology, results, and conclusions. Gener- ally, an abstract has to fit all of this information in about 150 words; as a result, it provides a nice concise summary that is worth reading carefully.

The Introduction The first main section of a journal article is the introduction, corresponding to the first step (i.e., hypothesize) of our four-step research process. As the name implies, the goal of this section is to introduce the research question, review background research, and state the hypothesis that was investigated. When you are diving into a new research area for the first time, it is a good idea to read the entire introduction carefully. This section provides the context for the rest of the paper, as well as a valuable introduction to previous work in the area.

The Method Section The second main section of a journal article is the method section, corresponding to the second step (i.e., operationalize) of our four-step research process. The goal of this section is to explain how the hypothesis was translated into a set of specific measurable variables and how the researchers gathered data to test their hypothesis. An additional—perhaps even more important—goal of this section is to provide enough detail about the study that someone could read the article and repeat the study.

The method section is typically divided into three parts: The participants section describes the people who provided data for the study, including information about their age, gender,

Shaffer-Smith/Photolibrary

A study's abstract summarizes the theories and hypotheses analyzed, methods used, and overall results and conclusions.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.4 Searching the Literature

and other relevant information. For example, in a study on treatment of depression, the authors would specify whether the participants were “normal” college students or patients who have been hospitalized for treatment of severe, clinical levels of depression. The materials section describes any questionnaires or equipment that were used in the study, including both standardized measures and ones that the researchers created. The third and related section, procedure, provides all of the details regarding the execution of the experi- ment. What did participants experience, and in what order? If specific instructions were given before a task, what were they?

The materials and procedure sections are crucial for two reasons. First, they provide the necessary detail for someone else to recreate the study. In reading these sections, you should focus on understanding the key variables and how they were defined. Second, they allow readers to envision the study from the perspective of the participants and to decide whether the authors’ interpretation of the results is the only one. For example, the authors might claim that participants were placed under stress and that the results showed a drop in concentration because of the stress. But, in reading over the procedure section, the “stress” part of the study might seem more likely to invoke boredom. This would give you an idea for a follow-up study: Perhaps people actually lose concentration when they are bored. . .

The Results Section The third main section of a journal article is the results section, corresponding to the third step (i.e., measure) of our four-step research process. The goal of this section is to describe how the data were analyzed and to report the results of these analyses. The results section consists primarily of statistical analyses and, as Jordan and Zanna put it, “statistics can be intimidating” (p. 356). When you first start to read journal articles, the statistics can indeed seem overwhelming, but there are two reasons not to get discour- aged. First, statistical results are always followed by a translation into plain English and almost always by tables and graphs of the data. As we move through this course, you will have the opportunity to practice interpreting results in both statistical and graphi- cal form. And this brings us to the second reason: You will be surprised to learn how quickly the statistics stop being intimidating. The more you read journal articles and place them in the context of your own ideas, the more you become comfortable with interpreting statistical analyses. In fact, as you become savvier with interpreting statis- tics, you may be surprised by how often authors make mistakes in either their analyses or their interpretations of them!

The Discussion Section The fourth and final section of a journal article is the discussion section, corresponding to the fourth (i.e., explain) step of our four-step research process. The goal of this section is to summarize the main findings and provide an evaluation of the hypothesis. Thus, the first few paragraphs of the discussion are often a great summary of the entire article. Authors state whether their predictions were confirmed and speculate on the meaning of the find- ings. If some of the predictions were not confirmed, authors suggest explanations for this and either acknowledge or defend potential flaws in the study. In addition, to encourage others to follow up on the study, authors tie their findings to previous literature and make suggestions for future research.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.4 Searching the Literature

Evaluating Articles So, in sum, a journal article will follow a predictable structure: authors first describe the problem and state their hypothesis (introduction), then explain their approach to testing the hypothesis (method), then report the findings of this test (results), and finally discuss the meaning of these findings relative to the hypothesis (discussion). These four sections are often described as following an hourglass structure—that is, the paper starts broadly in the introduction, narrows to the specific details of the study, and ends broadly in the discussion by tying everything back into the overall problem (e.g., Bem, 1987). This struc- ture is shown in Figure 1.4.

Before we move on, let’s review some general guidelines for evaluating journal articles. After reading the paper in its entirety, the following five questions can be helpful in form- ing an overall evaluation of what you’ve read.

1. What am I being asked to believe? What is the author’s main argument? Before critiquing in detail, make sure you have the argument down and can summarize it in a few sentences.

2. What evidence supports this claim? How does the author support the main argument? If it is an empirical paper, look to the data; if it is a theoretical paper, look at the literature the author summarizes.

3. Are there alternative explanations? Be creative here. Based on your reading of the article, what else seems plausible? But, to make your critique a good one, you should be able to test it.

4. What additional evidence would help us test alternatives? This question is one of the keys to doing good science. Once you identify something wrong with the original study, how can you test your alternative?

5. What conclusions are reasonable? Return to step 1 with your critiques in mind. What should the author reasonably conclude, given the problems with the study?

Results

Discussion

Introduction

Method

Figure 1.4: Structure of Journal Articles

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.5 Ethics in Research

1.5 Ethics in Research

In the summer of 1971, psychologist Phillip Zimbardo conducted an experiment at Stan-ford University to test the power of social roles. Zimbardo hypothesized that people would take on the characteristics and behaviors of whatever role was assigned to them, and he tested this by creating a simulated prison in the basement of the psychology build- ing. A group of 24 psychologically healthy young men were selected from the San Francisco Bay area and randomly assigned to play the role of either “prisoner” or “guard.” Zimbardo appointed himself the role of “warden.” The researchers gave each participant pieces of a uniform meant to reinforce their role—smocks for the prisoners, khakis and mirrored sun- glasses for the guards. Almost immediately, and without instructions from the researchers, partici- pants began to act out their roles. The guards took it upon themselves to establish control and dominate the prisoners by withholding privileges and devis- ing clever ways to humiliate them. The prisoners, in turn, accepted all of this without much protest since it was part of their prisoner role. The experi- ment was scheduled to run for 14 days but was stopped after only 6 because things had gotten out of hand—prisoners were going on hunger strikes and being locked in solitary confinement, and one even suffered a serious mental breakdown. This study is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment; you can learn more about it and view video clips on a website designed by Zimbardo and his col- leagues: http://www.prisonexp.org/.

If this experiment reminds you of the real-life prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, you’re not alone. Zimbardo was even called to testify about the power of social roles during the trial of one of the Abu Ghraib guards! If this experiment strikes you as ethically dubious, you are not alone. When the research was published, it raised serious questions about the amount of distress that can be inflicted in the name of research. Although the proposal for this study was approved under ethics standards of the time, it could not be run under today’s more stringent standards. But how do we balance the distress of the “prisoners” with the valuable knowledge gained from the study? Should the Stanford Prison Experi- ment ever have been run? Does the knowledge outweigh the distress? Before we move on to the nuts and bolts of research designs in the next four chapters, it is important to spend some time on the ethics of conducting research.

At the most basic level, all deliberations about the ethics of a particular study come down to the balance between a) avoiding all unnecessary discomfort for participants; and b) creating a realistic situation that will provide a valid test of the hypothesis. But in practice, achieving this balance can be complicated. In this section, we first examine an overview of some of the potential threats to participants’ well-being, and then discuss how avoidance of these threats has been formalized into rules for researchers to follow. Finally, we evaluate a set of ethical dilemmas that represent the types of issues likely to arise in psychological studies.

Comstock/Thinkstock

The Stanford Prison Experiment raised ethical concerns in the scientific community about how research is conducted.

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Threats to Participants

To help you appreciate the need for ethical guidelines, this section introduces some of the possible threats to participants’ welfare in the context of research studies.

Physical Harm Let’s start with the most extreme threat: Sometimes a research paradigm, or worldview, can place participants at risk for physical harm. For the most part, these types of stud- ies are limited to the medical field. For example, if you are testing a new medication for heart attack survivors, there is a risk that an unexpected side effect could hasten the death of participants. Or, perhaps the participants could have benefitted more from another,

more established medication, but they were not taking it because they were participating in your study. Because of these risks, medical research- ers are required to perform preliminary testing— often using cell cultures and then nonhuman ani- mals—before administering drugs to a clinical population. Occasionally, psychological research can pose a physical threat to participants, albeit a more minor one. For the past 25 years, Sheldon Cohen has been conducting studies in which he exposes participants to the common cold virus and measures their cold symptoms for several days. This work is designed to explore the link between individuals’ social environment and their susceptibility to illness; you can read more about it on Cohen’s website: http://www.psy .cmu.edu/~scohen/.

Extreme Stress More common among psychological studies are those that introduce high levels of men- tal or emotional stress for participants. As we will discuss later, the key in evaluating whether a stressful research paradigm is ethical is to think about whether—and to what extent—it exceeds the stress that participants encounter in everyday life. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, it is easy to see how this stress experienced by the “prisoners” would exceed normal levels. In 1924, Carney Landis conducted the first studies of facial expres- sion and emotion. His goal was to map specific emotional states onto specific expres- sions—work that is now associated with Paul Ekman (and popularized by the television show “Lie to Me.”). Landis photographed his participants as they reacted to a variety of stimuli such as smelling ammonia and viewing pornography. But the most shocking and controversial task was the final one. To measure responses to “disgust,” Landis asked his participants to either decapitate a live rat (a task they lacked the training to perform humanely), or watch Landis behead the rat. In this case, the discomfort could not even be balanced by the knowledge gained from it; Landis found no support for his hypotheses regarding common facial expressions. Of course, this study is beyond anything deemed ethically acceptable by today’s standards.

Cultura/Photolibrary

Ethically dubious experiments can cause physical and emotional harm to participants.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.5 Ethics in Research

In reality, most research, and particularly psychological research, presents a much more minor degree of stress to participants. For example, in some of my own research, I observe college students’ reactions as they are asked to prepare and give a speech. Most people become anxious at the thought of public speaking, but this anxiety is mild and very much temporary. In fact, among studies that receive approval from ethics boards, the effects of the research on overall well-being are always mild and temporary.

Deception Finally, at the low end of the threat spectrum, many psychological studies involve deceiv- ing participants about the purpose of the research—at least until the study is finished. This deception is a way to ensure people’s honest reactions to the experimental setting. That is, if Milgram’s participants had known he was studying obedience, they would have reacted very differently and there would have been no point to doing the study. As we will discuss in later chapters, people tend to change their behavior when they figure out your research question (as well as when they think they figure it out).

Deception is described here as a threat because of the potential for abuse. The history of sci- ence is rife with examples of medical research conducted on unsuspecting (and unwilling) participants. In one of the most infamous, researchers in Tuskegee, Alabama, conducted a study of the natural progression of syphilis among poor African-American farmers. The study began in 1932 under the supervision of the Public Health Service and continued until 1972. Where’s the deception? Well, it turns out that penicillin was discovered to be a reliable cure for syphilis—in 1947. The researchers not only lied about the purposes of the study (participants were never told they had syphilis), but they deliberately withheld treatment in order to continue the study. (You can read more about the study on this web- site: http://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm.)

On the one hand, these types of studies are vastly different from research that could be approved today, much less the type of research conducted in psychology. On the other hand, every researcher must be mindful at all times that he or she does not abuse the trust of participants. We return to the issue of deception in the discussion of evaluating a set of research scenarios.

APA Ethical Guidelines

In response to public outcry over the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the United States Congress formed a panel to develop guidelines that would ensure that all human subjects were treated ethically. This committee published the Belmont Report in 1979, laying out a set of basic ethical principles for the use of human subjects. (The full report is available at http:// ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/belmont.html.) Essentially, the Belmont Report guidelines argue for treating participants with respect, minimizing harm, and avoiding exploitation. These principles were formalized into a set of federal laws referred to as the common rule, a baseline standard of ethics for all federally funded research.

One critical part of the common rule was the creation of review boards to evaluate the ethics of every proposed research study. The common rule mandated that any institution receiving federal money must have an institutional review board (IRB), which reviews

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.5 Ethics in Research

and monitors all research involving humans in order to protect the welfare of research participants. The IRB is tasked with determining whether a study is consistent with ethi- cal principles, and it has the authority to approve, reject, or require modification of any research proposal. To put it another way, the IRB serves a gatekeeper role for research, ensuring that something like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, or Landis’s “facial expression” studies could not be run today.

An important piece of IRB review is to assess the degree of risk that a study poses for participants. Based on these assessments, each proposed study undergoes one of three categories of review. The lowest risk studies are subject to exempt review, in which an IRB representative simply verifies the low risk and approves the study. In order to qualify for exempt review, a study has to fit into one of six predefined categories, including research done in educational settings (e.g., testing a new way to teach reading skills), and reanaly- sis of existing data (e.g., looking for patterns in poll data). The full set of guidelines is available online at http://mayoresearch.mayo.edu/irb/policy_manual_3c.cfm.

Studies classified as medium risk—including the majority of psychological studies—are subject to expedited review, in which an IRB representative conducts a full review of the proposed study’s procedures, ensuring that participants’ welfare and identity is pro- tected. Expedited review also requires that a study fit into one of seven predefined cate- gories (http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/policy/expedited98.html). These categories encompass most of the research that psychologists conduct, even when these studies include col- lection of personal information and biological specimens. The key to meeting expedited review criteria is that the risk of harm and distress and the release of information are kept to a minimum.

Finally, studies classified as high risk are subject to full-board review, in which all mem- bers of the IRB review the proposed study’s procedures and then meet as a group to discuss the degree of risk and protection. This category includes studies involving medical pro- cedures, children, prisoners, or pregnant women. Any time there is potential for physical harm, release of confidential information, or undue pressure on people to participate (e.g., prisoners), the IRB pays careful attention to the procedures for minimizing these risks.

The American Psychological Association (APA) has its own version of an ethical code, written specifically for the kinds of dilemmas faced by psychologists in both research and therapeutic settings. The APA ethics code lays out five specific rules for research that involves human participants. These rules take their inspiration from the Belmont guide- lines—treat people with respect, minimize harm, and avoid exploitation. (You can view the full APA ethics code here: http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx.)

1. Informed Consent First and foremost, research participants must be “informed of all features of the study that would reasonably affect their decision to participate.” Before people agree to take part in your study, they need to know whether it involves anything painful or uncom- fortable or might reveal sensitive or embarrassing information. Participants need to be informed of the risks and benefits of participating. And they need to know how you will protect the information that they provide. What if your study involves deception? This is where the “reasonably affect their decision” phrase comes in. If you are pretending to

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.5 Ethics in Research

study perception but are actually studying conformity, you are under no obligation to reveal this. However, if your study involves, say, running on a treadmill or taking drugs, people need to know in order to make informed decisions about their overall health.

2. Free Consent Researchers are forbidden from placing “undue pressure” on people to either participate in or remain in a study. One lesson from the Milgram studies is that people are willing to obey seemingly strange commands from an experimenter wearing a lab coat. As research- ers, we therefore have an obligation not to abuse this tendency to obey. You probably don’t need me to tell you that it’s wrong to recruit participants at gunpoint, but there are quite a few grey areas when it comes to free consent. For example, many psychology departments require students to participate in research studies or offer extra credit for doing so. (There are always alternative ways to earn the credit.) Could students who are failing the class feel more compelled to agree to a research study? What about students who wait until the last minute and have fewer options? Free consent also becomes an issue when prisoners or soldiers serve as research subjects. Do these populations really feel free to say “no” to a request to participate? The answer to all of these questions depends on the context.

3. Protection from Harm Participants cannot be exposed to physical or emotional risk “beyond what they would encoun- ter in real life.” So, unfortunately, you won’t be able to run that study involving random limb amputations. . . But where should we draw the line regarding “real life” harm? Is it acceptable to make people feel stupid or embarrassed? Is it ok to reject people from a group in order to observe their reactions? The answer, once again, depends on the context, more specifically on the balance of costs and benefits. If participants experience mild rejection for the sake of understanding how to cope with it, that’s probably fine. But if partici- pants experience severe verbal abuse for the sake of learning whether people like abuse, then that’s less acceptable. (If that one sounds made-up, check out this study of stuttering from the 1930s: http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/06/monster-study.php)

4. Confidentiality It is critical that all personal information collected during the research study be protected and prevented from being released to anyone not authorized to view it. If you were to ask people about their history of drug use, this information could compromise their political prospects. If you ask employees to report attitudes toward their employers, the employ- ers who saw that information could retaliate against unfavorable ratings. There are two related options for protecting personal information. Whenever possible, responses should be anonymous, meaning that you do not collect identifying information from participants.

Mauricio Jordan de Souza Coelho/Photolibrary

Individuals who agree to participate in a research study are protected from unnecessary emotional and physical harm.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.5 Ethics in Research

There is no risk of retaliation or other backlash if your participants cannot be individu- ally identified. But, in some cases, anonymity is not possible, such as when you need to track people for a period of time and then link their data. In these situations, identifying information should be kept confidential, meaning that the information is collected but kept secret. One common way to do this is for researchers to maintain and closely guard a master list of participants matched to code numbers and identifiers, which are used dur- ing the study instead of names.

5. Debriefing Finally, as mentioned, many experiments cannot avoid using some degree of deception. In its list of ethical rules, the APA suggests a compromise regarding deception. First, it should be done only when necessary, meaning that you should never create an elaborate cover story just for its own sake. Second, participants should always be debriefed, or informed of the true purpose once the study is concluded. In Milgram’s obedience stud- ies, participants went through a long debriefing that involved meeting the “victim” and understanding that they had not done any actual harm to another human being. If par- ticipants were under the illusion that your conformity study was focused on “perceptual processing,” then tell them the truth at the end. If your study involved having participants be rejected from the group at random, then tell them this decision was random. The goal of this disclosure is to remove possible negative effects of the study procedure and to explain why the deception was necessary.

Ethical Dilemmas

To give you a feel for what these guidelines look like in everyday research studies, let’s walk through a pair of experimental scenarios and evaluate whether they meet the APA guidelines.

Scenario 1 A cognitive psychologist tells students she is interested in their reading comprehension when in reality she is recording the speed of their responses rather than their comprehension.

Evaluation: There is no risk of physical harm or extreme stress, but participants have been deceived about the purpose of the study. Rule 5 is most relevant, but any IRB is likely to approve the study, provided that participants are given a full debriefing at the end of it.

Scenario 2 In a field experiment designed to test whether people would help more when they are alone or with others, male subjects walking alone or in a group were exposed to a simulated rape (Harari, Harari, & White, 1995). As subjects walked along, a male and female confederate acted out the rape. The man grabbed the woman around the waist, put his hand over her mouth, and dragged her into the bushes as she screamed for help. Observers stationed at various points recorded the number of subjects who offered help. Before they could actu- ally intervene, a researcher stopped them and told them the “rape” was part of a study.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.5 Ethics in Research

Evaluation: This study is likely to have induced extreme stress in participants and quite likely presented emotional risks beyond what participants normally encounter (Rule 3). In addition, participants did not give their consent to be in the study (Rule 1) until after their data were collected. However, this study was approved by a modern-day IRB, which means that at least one group of reviewers felt that these threats were outweighed by the benefits of the study.

Ethics in Animal Research

Our discussion so far has focused on ethical issues in dealing with human participants. However, a significant portion of psychological research involves nonhuman animals. Studying the behavior of nonhuman animals provides an additional important avenue for understanding basic principles of behavior and ultimately for improving the welfare of both human and nonhuman animals.

Many people object to the use of animals in scientific research, arguing that animals should have the same rights and protections as human subjects—including the right to free and informed consent. However, the majority of scientists reject this view, arguing that the benefits of animal research outweigh the costs. One of the most salient examples

involves testing the effectiveness of drugs to cure cancer, depression, and so on. The first stage in testing these drugs is to examine chemical reac- tions in isolation, using test tubes and petri dishes. Before moving on to research involving humans, researchers are required to conduct safety testing of these drugs on nonhuman animals. Thus, any discomfort experienced by the animals is justified by the fact that these drugs can save human lives. Most scientists are in favor of the continued use of this practice, provided that the nonhuman ani- mals are treated humanely (Plous, 1996).

To this end, the APA has also developed a set of guidelines to govern research with nonhuman animals, overseen by the Committee for Animal Research and Ethics (CARE). The CARE guide-

lines are available at http://www.apa.org/science/leadership/care/guidelines.aspx). The upshot of these guidelines is to ensure that animals are treated humanely at all stages of the study by well-trained personnel, and that there is a strong justification for their use. And, just as research with human subjects is reviewed by an IRB, all research with nonhuman animals is reviewed by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) to ensure that the benefits of the research outweigh any discomfort experienced by the animals.

Scientific Misconduct

Before we leave the subject of ethical conduct, there is one more important topic to cover that has less to do with protecting participants’ welfare and more to do with the over- all ethics of research. Because science is a cumulative discipline, every research study

Wolfgang Flamisch/Photolibrary

In certain fields of research, studying animal behaviors helps researchers learn more about human behaviors.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.5 Ethics in Research

contributes to the body of knowledge in that discipline. Our understanding of the devel- opment of aggression, the process of forming memories, and the mechanisms for cop- ing with trauma all come from knowledge gained one study at a time. And so, when researchers do not accurately represent their data and publish dishonest results, this is a serious threat to the cumulative body of knowledge. These types of violations are cap- tured under the umbrella of scientific misconduct, defined as intentional or negligent distortion of the research process. To give you a better sense of how this happens, this section describes two real cases of scientific misconduct, one probably “negligent,” and the other very much intentional.

Negligent Misconduct—Race Differences in Skull Size In the 19th century, physician Samuel Morton argued that he could measure the intel- ligence of a racial group by measuring its average skull size—bigger skulls would mean bigger brains and, therefore, more intelligence. (We now know that intelligence is much more complicated than this, but the science was young in the 1830s.) Morton’s work is often credited with kick-starting more than a century’s worth of racially tinged science by a subgroup of researchers who attempted to show that some races were superior to others. In his 1996 book, The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould dissects and discred- its this entire line of work, and it is now taken for granted that this work was terribly biased and fundamentally flawed. (For a short audio pro- gram that explains the context of this work, see http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi429.htm)

Gould was able to obtain access to all of Samuel Morton’s laboratory notes, and the latter turns out to be a fascinating example of negligent mis- conduct. Morton’s method of quantifying skull sizes was to pour lead shot into the hole in the bottom and then measure the volume of lead shot that each skull held. But he was hardly consis- tent in his pouring: As he held a known European skull in his hand, he might pack it full of lead shot to make sure it was full. And as he held a known African skull, he might declare it full when there was still space at the top. Morton also discarded data from skulls that didn’t seem to fit the pat- terns and occasionally guessed at the race of a skull based on its size! The incredible thing is that he did not try to hide any of this. Gould’s interpretation is that Morton believed so strongly in his hypothesis that his data collection was biased every step of the way. While Morton’s intentions were good, the danger of this type of misconduct is that it can happen without our knowledge.

Intentional Misconduct—Reactions to Discrimination In the late 1990s, social psychologist Karen Ruggiero was interested in the way people responded to instances of discrimination and prejudice. Other researchers had documented a strange discrepancy among targets of prejudice: people perceive more discrimination

Bettmann/Corbis

Scientific misconduct can be either intentional or negligent, as was the case with psychologist Samuel Morton's studies on human skull size.

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CHAPTER 1Section 1.5 Ethics in Research

directed at their group as a whole than at them as individuals (Taylor, Wright, Moghad- dam, & LaLonde, 1990). Ruggiero argued that this indicated a reluctance to admit to per- sonal discrimination because it would mean acknowledging a lack of control over one’s own outcomes. That is: I haven’t personally seen any sexism because I’m in charge of my own destiny, but it’s a big problem for other women.

In a compelling 1999 paper, Ruggiero showed that members of high-status groups were more likely to blame discrimination in a single situation because there were fewer impli- cations for one’s degree of long-term control. Fascinating, right? But there’s just one prob- lem: These data were completely fabricated. Not one of the 240 supposed participants actually existed; Ruggiero had written a piece of fiction and passed it off as a scientific journal article. This was her most egregious offense, but others surfaced as well. She fabricated partial data for another paper; she discarded participants that did not fit her hypothesis; she used federal grant money to pretend to collect these data; and she used these fake data to apply for future funding. Ruggiero was eventually caught and forced to submit retractions to several scientific journals to correct the fabricated publication. She was also forced to resign from her faculty position and barred from working on federally funded research for 5 years. (You can read the official report of the investigation here: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-02-020.html.)

Dr. Ruggiero completed her Ph.D. at McGill University and began a prestigious faculty position at Harvard University before being wooed away to the University of Texas with a $100,000 start-up package for setting up her laboratory. In short, she gave every sign of being a rising star in the field. So why would she take such a big risk? One of her fel- low graduate students, interviewed for a 2002 article in The Chicago Tribune, suggested that she was motivated by a sincere belief in the work she was doing: “She was invested in proving people were denying discrimination. . . She knew what the answer ought to be.” Another possible motivation has to do with the way incentives work for academic research. Science works one slow step at a time, but people are often rewarded for making a big, counterintuitive splash. Ruggiero was certainly rewarded for her efforts, at least in the short term. But it couldn’t last.

This case is fascinating because it sheds real light on the scientific process. The reason her deception was ultimately uncovered was that other people tried to recreate her experi- ments. Again, this is how science works—one finding doesn’t really mean much until other people can repeat it in their own laboratories. However, because these data were fictional, there was no way to replicate them. So, people started talking at conferences, which eventually led to official questions, and the rest is history. The silver lining to this story is that it illustrates the strength of the scientific approach. Ultimately, this approach is self-correcting, and people who attempt to cheat the system always get caught. An interesting website that tracks retractions of journal articles is http://retractionwatch .wordpress.com/. This blog highlights problematic research, including faked experiments and plagiarized articles.

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CHAPTER 1Summary

Summary

This chapter has provided an introduction to the scientific approach to problem solv-ing. We first discussed what it means to think “scientifically” and contrasted this approach to other ways of making decisions, such as reliance on authority or indi- vidual experiences. We then covered the four steps of the research process: forming a research question, deciding how to test it, collecting data, and interpreting the results. The key distinguishing feature of scientific thinking is that our decision-making process is based on empirical evidence. If our data run counter to our initial predictions—especially if this happens over and over again—then we have to conclude that our prediction was wrong. Science means that we draw conclusions about even the most important questions based on facts. Do vaccines cause autism? Is the planet getting warmer? What is the best way to improve children’s reading skills? In every case, we would collect the appropri- ate set of data and then decide, regardless of whether the answer fits our preconceived notions or what we want to be true.

The first and most important step of the research process is to form a testable and falsifi- able research hypothesis. We covered the process of developing hypotheses and of plac- ing them in the broader context of research in the field. Broadly speaking, hypotheses can be developed in one of two ways. Induction is a bottom-up process that involves trying to generalize from our observations about the world. Deduction is a top-down process that involves trying to generate a specific prediction from a broader theoretical perspective. One of the key points from this section is that science is a cumulative dis- cipline, meaning that our knowledge in a particular field grows and accumulates with each study. The theory of evolution sprang not from a single fossil discovery but from the combined evidence of thousands of fossils and ethological studies. Thus, it is particu- larly important that each study be placed in the proper context of prior studies, and this requires the ability to find and digest peer-reviewed journal articles that are relevant to your research question.

The final section of this chapter emphasized the importance of ethics in conducting research. Anytime research involves human or nonhuman animals, we have to protect the rights of these participants. The history books are full of abuses of human participants such as deceiving people about the diseases they had, subjecting them to extreme stress, and the horrors inflicted by Japanese and Nazi doctors on prisoners during World War II. In response to these, and countless other more minor abuses, the federal government has mandated that all research treat participants with respect, minimize harm, and avoid exploitation. The American Psychological Association has its own guidelines governing psychological research studies: participants must give both informed and free consent; they must be protected from undue harm; their personal information must be protected; and they must be told the full purpose of the study at its conclusion. Finally, we covered the subject of scientific misconduct, which includes all distortions of the research process. As discussed in the chapter, these distortions can be either negligent or intentional. But the beauty of the scientific process is that those who attempt to commit fraud don’t get away with it forever.

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CHAPTER 1Summary

abstract a summary of a journal article, appearing both at the top of the article and in search results

anonymous data data collected without identifying information from participants

applied research research in which the primary goal is to solve a problem, with less focus on why the solution works

basic research research in which the pri- mary goal is to acquire knowledge, with less focus on how to apply the knowledge

biopsychology the study of connections between biological systems (including the brain, hormones, and neurotransmitters) and our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

clinical psychology an applied field focused on understanding the best ways to treat psychological disorders; the study of best practices for understanding, treating, and preventing distress and dysfunction.

cognitive psychology the study of inter- nal mental processes, including the ways that people think, learn, remember, speak, perceive, and so on.

Committee for Animal Research and Ethics (CARE) APA committee respon- sible for guidelines governing animal research; the upshot of these guidelines is to ensure that animals are treated humanely at all stages of the study by well-trained personnel and that there is a strong justification for their use

common rule a set of federal laws that established the baseline standard of ethics for all federally funded research

confidential data data collected in such a way that identifying information is pro- tected and kept secret

debriefing ethical principle stating that participants should be informed of the study’s true purpose when it is concluded

deduction the process of developing a specific hypothesis out of a more general theory; best understood as a “top-down” approach

developmental psychology the system- atic study of physical, social, and cognitive changes over the human life span; initially focused on childhood development, though many researchers now study changes and key stages over the entire life span.

empiricism a scientific approach to deci- sion making that focuses solely on the role of observation and sensory experience over the role of reason and logic

exempt review category of IRB review reserved for low-risk studies falling into a set of predefined categories; involves hav- ing an IRB representative simply verify the low risk and approve the study

expedited review category of IRB review used for medium-risk studies falling into a set of predefined categories; involves hav- ing an IRB representative conduct a full review of the study procedures and ensure that participants’ welfare and identity is protected

falsifiability a concept applied to theories and hypotheses meaning that the right set of conditions could prove it wrong; call- ing something falsifiable does not mean it is false, only that it would be possible to demonstrate its falsehood if it were false

free consent ethical principle stating those involved in studies must freely agree to do so; thus, researchers are forbidden from placing undue pressure on people to par- ticipate in or remain in a study

Key Terms

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CHAPTER 1Summary

full-board review category of IRB review used for high-risk studies, which contain an inflated risk to participants’ welfare or the potential for release of confidential information; involves having all members of the IRB review the study procedures and then meet as a group to discuss the degree of risk and protection

hypothesis a specific and falsifiable state- ment about the relationship between two or more variables

induction the process of developing a general hypothesis out of a set of specific observations; best understood as a “bot- tom-up” approach

informed consent ethical principle stat- ing that research participants must be informed of all features of the study that would reasonably affect their decision to participate

Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) review panel that reviews and monitors all research involv- ing nonhuman animals in order to protect the welfare of research subjects; tasked with ensuring that the benefits of the research outweigh any discomfort experi- enced by the animals

institutional review board (IRB) review panel that reviews and monitors all research involving humans in order to protect the welfare of research participants; tasked with determining whether a study is consistent with ethical principles and has the authority to approve, reject, or require modification from each research proposal

operationalization the process of choos- ing measurable variables to represent the components of a hypothesis

parsimonious term applied to theories meaning that our concepts are as simple as possible without sacrificing completeness

peer review a process that involves having experts in the field evaluate the merits of research articles before they are published

primary source sources that contain full reports of a research study, including information on the participants, the data collected, and the statistical analyses of these data; these appear in professional academic journals

qualitative research a descriptive approach that attempts to gain a deep understanding of particular cases and contexts

quantitative research a systematic and empirical approach that attempts to gener- alize results to other contexts

rationalism an approach to decision mak- ing that involves use of and reliance on logical arguments

reconciliation and synthesis the process of resolving an apparent conflict by find- ing common ground among the ideas and then merging all the pieces into one new explanation

scientific method a method of approach- ing problems and drawing conclusions based on empirical observations; consists of four steps: hypothesize, operationalize, measure, and explain, abbreviated HOME.

scientific misconduct intentional or negli- gent distortion of the research process

secondary source sources that contain summaries of primary source articles; these include textbooks and academic books, as well as less-than-trustworthy websites

social psychology the study of the ways our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are shaped by other people.

theory a collection of ideas used to explain the connections between variables and phenomena

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CHAPTER 1Summary

Apply Your Knowledge

1. For each of the following broad theoretical statements, think of a specific research hypothesis that would test the theory. There are many possibilities for each one, but remember that your hypothesis needs to be both testable and falsifiable. The first one is provided as an example.

Theory: Infants look cute and helpless so that adults will take care of them Hypothesis: Parents will be more attentive to cute infants than to less cute infants

Theory: People are inherently social and value the approval of others. Hypothesis:

Theory: People prefer to feel good about themselves. Hypothesis:

2 a. Read the following abstract of a published research study (Langer & Rodin, 1976), and identify the four components of the research process:

A field experiment was conducted to assess the effects of enhanced personal responsibility and choice on a group of nursing home residents. It was expected that the debilitated condition of many of the aged residing in institutional set- tings is, at least in part, a result of living in a virtually decision-free environment and consequently is potentially reversible. Residents who were in the experi- mental group were given a communication emphasizing their responsibility for themselves, whereas the communication given to a second group stressed the staff’s responsibility for them. In addition, to bolster the communication, the former group was given the freedom to make choices and the responsibility of caring for a plant rather than having decisions made and the plant taken care of for them by the staff, as was the case for the latter group. Questionnaire ratings and behavioral measures showed a significant improvement for the experimen- tal group over the comparison group on alertness, active participation, and a general sense of well-being.

Hypothesis: Operationalization (how did they define variables): Measure (how did they conduct the study): Explain:

b. Read the following abstract of a published research study (Swim & Hyers, 1999), and identify the four components of the research process

Two studies illustrate women’s struggle between their desire to challenge sex- ism and the social pressures and costs that lead to not publicly responding. In Study 1, 45% of the women confronted a man who made a sexist remark and only 15% did so directly. Confronting was most likely to be chosen by women actively committed to fighting sexism in their daily lives. Private responses illustrate that a lack of responding was not necessarily indicative of compla- cency about the remarks or a lack of thoughts about confronting. The results from Studies 1 and 2 reveal that diffusion of responsibility, normative pressures to not respond, social pressures to be polite, and concern about retaliation likely suppressed responding.

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CHAPTER 1Summary

Hypothesis: Operationalization (how did they define variables): Measure (how did they conduct the study): Explain:

3. Read the following description of a research study, and then evaluate whether it meets the five APA ethical guidelines:

A researcher told students that their responses to an online survey on cheating were anonymous. One question asked students for their email address to use in a raffle drawing. Instead, the researcher used this to locate GPAs in school files so he could correlate frequency of cheating and GPA.

Informed consent? Free consent? Protection from harm? Confidentiality? Debriefing?

Based on this evaluation, is the study likely to be approved by an Institutional Review Board? Why or why not?

Critical Thinking Questions

1. You have been asked to help determine whether watching violent television leads people to become more violent. Explain how you would approach this task using the four steps of the research process (Hint: HOME).

2. Take a second to review the guidelines for evaluating theories. Using these five criteria, evaluate and compare Freud’s theory of unconscious drives. The key to this theory is that much of our behavior is driven by internal conflicts that exist outside our awareness.

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