aronson 7e ch02 research
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Social Psychology
Elliot AronsonUniversity of California, Santa
Cruz
Timothy D. WilsonUniversity of Virginia
Robin M. AkertWellesley College
slides prepared byTravis Langley
Henderson State University
7th edition
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Chapter 2
Methodology: How Social
Psychologists Do Research
“Theory is a good thing, but a good
experiment lasts forever.”
–Peter Leonidovich Kapista
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• How can we decide who is right about the
effects of something like pornography?
• Some say it increases the likelihood men
will commit sexual violence.
• Some conclude that it does not.
• Is there a more scientific way to
determine the answer?
• Social psychologists believe there is.
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Social Psychology: An Empirical Science
A fundamental principle of social psychology is
that social influence can be studied
scientifically.
The results of some of the experiments you
encounter may seem obvious, because social
psychology concerns topics with which we areall intimately familiar — social behavior and
social influence.
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Social Psychology: An Empirical Science
Scientific methods of answering questions are ofthree types:
• the observational method ,
• the correlational method ,
• the experimental method .
Each is a powerful tool in some ways and a weaktool in others.
Part of the creativity in conducting socialpsychological research involves choosing theright method, maximizing its strengths, andminimizing its weaknesses.
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Social Psychology: An Empirical Science
Once we know the winner of a political election, theoutcome seems inevitable and easily predictable, evenif we were quite unsure who would win before theelection.
The same is true of findings in psychology experiments; itseems like we could have easily predicted theoutcomes — once we know them.
The trick is to predict what will happen in an experimentbefore you know how it turned out.
Hindsight Bias
Tendency for people to exaggerate how much they could
have predicted an outcome after knowing that it occurred.
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Formulating Hypotheses
and Theories
Social psychological research begins with a
hypothesis about the effects of social influence.
There is a lore in science that brilliant insights come allof a sudden, as when Archimedes shouted “Eureka! I
have found it!” when the solution to a problem flashed
into his mind as he bathed.
Though such insights can occur suddenly, science is a
cumulative process, and people often generate
hypotheses from previous theories and research.
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Inspiration from Earlier
Theories and Research
• Many studies stem from a researcher’s
dissatisfaction with existing theories and
explanations.
• After reading other people’s work, a
researcher might believe that he or she
has a better way of explaining people’s
behavior (e.g., why they fail to help in anemergency).
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Inspiration from Earlier
Theories and Research
Social psychologists, like scientists in other
disciplines, engage in a continual process
of theory refinement:
• A theory is developed,
• specific hypotheses are derived from that
theory are tested,
• based on the results obtained, the theory is
revised and new hypotheses are formulated.
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Hypotheses Based on
Personal Observation
Many other hypotheses come fromobservations of everyday life, such asLatané and Darley’s hunches about why
people failed to help murder victim KittyGenovese.
Thirty-eight neighbors failed to call policeduring her prolonged and violent murder.
Genovese’s neighbors might have assumedthat someone else had called the police.
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Hypotheses Based on
Personal Observation
Latané and Darley (1968) called thisdiffusion of responsibility. Perhaps thebystanders would have been more
likely to help had each thought he orshe alone was witnessing the murder.
Once a researcher has a hypothesis,how can he or she tell if it is right? Inscience, idle speculation will not do;the researcher must collect data to testa hypothesis.
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The Observational Method:
Describing Social Behavior Observational Method
The technique whereby a researcher observespeople and systematically records
measurements or impressions of their behavior.
If the goal is to describe what a particular
group of people or type of behavior is like,the observational method is very helpful.
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Ethnography
The method by which researchers attempt to
understand a group or culture by observing
it from the inside, without imposing any
preconceived notions they might have.
• Ethnography is the chief method of cultural anthropology ,
the study of human cultures and societies.
• As social psychology broadens its focus by studyingsocial behavior in different cultures, ethnography is
increasingly being used to describe different cultures and
generate hypotheses about psychological principles.
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The Observational Method:
Describing Social Behavior
• In the early 1950s, a group predicted that the
world would come to an end in a violent
cataclysm on a specific date.
• Leon Festinger and colleagues wanted toobserve this group closely and chronicle howthey reacted when their beliefs and prophecywere disconfirmed.
• To monitor conversations of this group, thesocial psychologists joined and pretended theytoo believed the world was about to end.
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The Observational Method:
Describing Social Behavior
Suppose a researcher wants to investigatehow much aggression children exhibit during
school recesses.
• The observer would systematically look for particularbehaviors that are concretely defined before the observationbegins.
• The observer might stand at the edge of the playground andsystematically record how often aggressive behaviors occur.
• How do we know how accurate the observer is?
Interjudge Reliability
The level of agreement between two or more people
who independently observe and code a set of data.
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Archival Analysis
Think back to the question of the relationship between pornographyand violence.
One problem with addressing this question is in defining what
pornography is.
Archival analysis enables researchers to describe the content of
documents present in the culture:• Nature of characters depicted,
• Differences in how men and women are depicted,
• Aggressive themes.
Archival Analysis
A form of the observational method in which the researcher
examines accumulated documents (archives).
e.g., diaries, magazines, newspapers
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The Correlational Method:Predicting Social Behavior
Researchers might be interested in questions like:
What is the relationship between pornography and
adult aggression?Or between the amount of violent television children
watch and how aggressive they are?
Correlational Method
The technique whereby two or more variables are
systematically measured and the relationship between them
(i.e., how much one can be predicted from the other) is
assessed.
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Positive correlation
Increases in the value of one variable are
associated with increases in the value ofthe other variable.
• Height and weight are positively correlated;the taller people are, the more they tend to
weigh.
The Correlational Method:Predicting Social Behavior
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Negative correlation
Increases in the value of one variable are
associated with decreases in the value of theother variable.
• Vaccination rate correlates negatively with
disease rate: The more often people get
vaccinated, the less often people get thedisease.
The Correlational Method:Predicting Social Behavior
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• Correlation coefficients are expressed as numbers thatcan range from – 1.00 to +1.00.
• 1.00 means that two variables are perfectly correlatedin a positive direction.
• 0 means that two variables are not correlated
• – 1.00 means that two variables are perfectly correlatedin a negative direction.
• In everyday life, of course, perfect correlations are rare.Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
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• Survey results are often correlated.
• To make sure that the results are generalizable,
researchers randomly select surveyrespondents from the population at large.
Surveys
Research in which a representative sample
of people are asked questions about their
attitudes or behavior.
The Correlational Method:Predicting Social Behavior
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Advantages of Surveys
• Researchers can judge the relationship betweenvariables that are difficult to observe, such as how oftenpeople engage in safer sex.
• Another advantage of surveys is the ability to samplerepresentative segments of the population.
• As long as the sample is selected randomly, we canassume that the responses are a reasonable match tothose of the population as a whole.
Random Selection
A way of ensuring that a sample of people is
representative of a population by giving everyone in
the population an equal chance of being selected
for the sample.
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Advantages of Surveys
Potential Problem of Surveys
• Accuracy of responses
Often people simply don’t know the answer— but they
think they do.
• Researchers can judge the relationship betweenvariables that are difficult to observe, such as how oftenpeople engage in safer sex.
• Another advantage of surveys is the ability to samplerepresentative segments of the population.
• As long as the sample is selected randomly, we canassume that the responses are a reasonable match tothose of the population as a whole.
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Limits of the Correlational Method:Correlation Does Not Equal Causation
• The major shortcoming of the
correlational method is that it tells us only
that two variables are related.
• But the goal of the social psychologist is
to identify the causes of social behavior.
• We want to be able to say that A causesB, not just that A is correlated with B.
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Limits of the Correlational Method:
Correlation Does Not Equal Causation
If two variables (e.g., TV violence &aggression) are correlated, there are three
possible causal relationships:
1. Maybe TV violent makes the viewer becomeviolent
2. Maybe kids who are already violent are morelikely to watch violent TV
3. Maybe both are caused by something elselike parental neglect
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The Experimental Method: Answering Causal Questions
The only way to determine causality is to
use the experimental method.
Experimental Method
Method in which the researcher randomly assigns
participants to different conditions and ensures these
conditions are identical except for the independentvariable (the one thought to have a causal effect on
people’s responses).
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The Experimental Method: Answering Causal Questions
Experimental method is the method of choice inmost social psychological research because itallows causal inferences.
Observational method helps describe socialbehavior.
Correlational method helps us understand whataspects of social behavior are related.
However, only a properly executed experimentallows us to draw conclusions about causeand effect.
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Independent and Dependent Variables
• The independent variable is the one
researchers vary to see if it has a causal
effect (e.g., how much TV children watch).
• The dependent variable is what
researchers measure to see if it is
affected (e.g., how aggressive children
are).
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Independent and Dependent Variables
Independent variable: Number of people supposedly present when aresearcher pretends to have a seizure.
Dependent variable: Number of people who try to help in theemergency.
Latané and Darley (1970)
Outcome:
• When participants believed four other people witnessed the seizure,
only 31% offered assistance.
• When participants believed only two others witnessed the seizure,helping behavior increased to 62%.
• When each participant believed that he or she was the only witness,
nearly everyone helped (85%).
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Internal Validity in Experiments
Experiments should be high in internal validity.
Internal Validity
Making sure that nothing besides the
independent variable can affect thedependent variable.
This is accomplished by controlling all
extraneous variables and by randomlyassigning people to different experimentalconditions.
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Random Assignment to Condition
A process ensuring that all participantshave an equal chance of taking part inany condition of an experiment.
Through random assignment, researchers
can be relatively certain that differencesin the participants’ personalities orbackgrounds are distributed evenlyacross conditions.
This powerful technique is the most
important part of the experimental
method.
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Probability Level (p -value)
A number calculated with statisticaltechniques that tells researchers how likelyit is that the results of their experimentoccurred by chance instead of the
independent variable(s).The convention in science is to consider
results significant (trustworthy) if probabilityis less than 5 in 100 that the results mightbe due to chance factors and not theindependent variables studied.
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External Validity in Experiments
• For all the advantages of the experimental method,
there are some drawbacks.
• By virtue of gaining enough control over the situation so
as to randomly assign people to conditions and rule out
the effects of extraneous variables, the situation canbecome somewhat artificial and distant from real life.
External Validity
The extent to which the results of astudy can be generalized to othersituations and to other people.
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External Validity in Experiments
External validity Note that two kinds of generalizability are at
issue:
1. Generalizability across situations: the extent to
which we can generalize from the situationconstructed by an experimenter to real-lifesituations and
2. Generalizability across people: the extent to
which we can generalize from the people whoparticipated in the experiment to people ingeneral.
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Generalizability Across Situations
There are different ways in which an experimentcan be realistic.
• Mundane Realism
The extent to which an experiment is similar toreal-life situations.
• Psychological Realism
The extent to which the psychological
processes triggered in an experiment aresimilar to psychological processes that occur ineveryday life.
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Generalizability Across Situations
Even though Latané and Darley staged anemergency that in significant ways was unlike onesencountered in everyday life . . .
• Was it psychologically similar to real-life
emergencies?• Were the same psychological processes triggered?
• Did the participants have the same types ofperceptions, thoughts, decisions, and behaviors
that they would in a real-life situation?• If so, then the study is high in psychological realism
and we can generalize the results to everyday life.
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Generalizability Across Situations
Psychological realism is heightened if
people feel involved in a real event.
Cover Story
A description of the purpose of a study, given
to participants, that is different from its truepurpose, used to maintain psychological
realism.
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Generalizability Across People
• The only way to be certain an experiment’sresults represent the behavior of a particularpopulation is to ensure that the participants arerandomly selected from that population.
• Unfortunately, it is impractical and expensive toselect random samples for most socialpsychology experiments.
• Many researchers address this by studyingbasic psychological processes so fundamental
that they are presumably universally shared.
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Generalizability Across People
• The question then is, how can researchers tellwhether the processes they are studying areuniversal?
• How can we trust that a study done with only
college sophomores captures everydayresponses?
• The ultimate test of an experiment’s externalvalidity is replication.
Replication
Repeating a study, often with different subject
populations or in different settings.
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Generalizability Across People
Several studies might find an effect of the
number of bystanders on helping
behavior, for example, while a few do not.
How can we make sense of this?
Meta Analysis
A statistical technique that averages theresults of two or more studies to see if the
effect of an independent variable is reliable.
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Cross-Cultural Research
Cross Cultural Research
Research conducted with members of
different cultures, to see whether thepsychological processes of interestare present in both cultures orwhether they are specific to the
culture in which people were raised.
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Cross-Cultural Research
Much research on human emotions has shown
evidence for both:
• Universality: People in different cultures
express emotions on their faces in the sameway, even in remote cultures having no contact
with the rest of the world.
• Cultural influences: People are best at
recognizing emotions expressed by membersof their own cultural group.
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Cross-Cultural Research
Researchers always have to guard againstimposing their own viewpoints anddefinitions, learned from their culture,
onto another culture with which they areunfamiliar.
They must also be sure that theirindependent and dependent variables are
understood in the same way in differentcultures.
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The Basic Dilemma of
the Social Psychologist
One of the best ways to increase external validityis by conducting field experiments.
• In a field experiment, researchers study behavioroutside of the laboratory, in its natural setting.
• A field experiment has the same design as a laboratoryexperiment except that it is conducted in a real-lifesetting (sidewalk, store, street, campus grounds).
• Participants in a field experiment are unaware that the
events they experience are in fact an experiment.• External validity of such an experiment is high, since, itis taking place in the real world with real people.
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The Basic Dilemma of
the Social Psychologist
There is almost always a trade-off between internal andexternal validity in social psychological research.
• By increasing internal validity, some external validity(generalizability) is sacrificed.
• By increasing external validity (e.g., by conducting afield experiment), researchers often lose control overthe setting and sacrifice internal validity.
• Researchers often begin by maximizing internal validity,so that they know what is causing what, and then
establishing external validity with replications indifferent settings and with different populations.
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The Basic Dilemma of
the Social Psychologist
The way to resolve this dilemma is not to try to doit all in a single experiment.
• Most social psychologists opt first for internalvalidity, conducting laboratory experiments.
• Other social psychologists prefer to maximizeexternal validity by conducting field studies.
• Many social psychologists do both.
• Through replication, a given research questioncan thus be studied with maximum internal andexternal validity.
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Basic Versus Applied Research
Basic Research Experiments:
Designed to answer basic questions
about why people do what they do.
Applied Studies:
Research designed to find ways to solve
specific social problems.
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Basic versus Applied Research
In social psychology, the distinction between basic andapplied research is fuzzy.
Even though many researchers label themselves as eitherbasic or applied scientists, the endeavors of one group
are not independent of those of the other group.There are countless examples of basic science advances
that at the time had no known applied value but laterproved to be the key to solving a significant appliedproblem.
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Basic Versus Applied Research
In order to solve a specific social problem, weoften must understand the psychological
processes responsible for it.
Indeed, Kurt Lewin (1951), one of the founders of
social psychology, coined a motto: “There isnothing so practical as a good theory.”
He meant that to solve social
problems, one must firstunderstand underlying
psychological dynamics.
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Ethi l I i S i l
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Ethical Issues in Social
Psychology
• Social psychologists are concerned with
the welfare of their research participants.
• Researchers also make discoveries thatcan benefit society.
• To gain insight into such critical issues,
researchers must create vivid events thatare involving for the participants.
Ethi l I i S i l
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Ethical Issues in Social
Psychology
Informed Consent
Agreement to participate in an experiment,granted in full awareness of the nature of
the experiment, which has beenexplained in advance.
• In many experiments, this sort of description isfeasible — and where it is feasible, it is done.
• But sometimes it is impossible.
Ethi l I i S i l
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Ethical Issues in Social
Psychology
Deception
Misleading participants about the true
purpose of a study or the events that willactually transpire.
Note that not all research in socialpsychology involves deception.
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Guidelines for Ethical Research
Guidelines to ensure the welfare of their research
participants include:
• Having an Institutional Review Board approve
their studies in advance• Asking participants to sign informed consent
forms
• Debriefing participants afterwards about the
purpose of the study and what transpired,
especially if there was any deception involved
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Guidelines for Ethical Research
Investigators studying the impact on participants
in deception studies find:
• People do not object to the kinds of mild
discomfort and deceptions typically used insocial psychological research.
• Most who participated in deception experiments
said they had learned more and enjoyed the
experiments more than those who participatedin nondeception experiments did.
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Social Psychology
Elliot AronsonUniversity of California, Santa
Cruz
Timothy D. WilsonUniversity of Virginia
Robin M. AkertWellesley College
slides prepared byTravis Langley
Henderson State University
7th edition