Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review
In this video I'd like to talk about some of the difficulties of conducting psychological research.
and the first problem that we have is that human behavior is incredibly complex.
So psychologists want to know about things that are complicated they want to know about things like
depression or levels of aggression or anxiety
and these are things that are pretty much impossible to narrow down to a single measurement
The second problem that we have
is that of variation
so the things that we want to measure are changing all the time. If I wanted to measure the length of this coffee table but it kept
changing in size it would be a pretty difficult task. That's exactly what happens with psychological variables so I can measure your
level of happiness now and 10 minutes later it might be completely different
that this problem variation
within individuals
the same person gets two very different measurements from one time when of
We also have a problem of variation between individuals. So the way that you respond to a particular stimulus
might be completely different from the way that I respond to the exact same stimulus
and this can make it really difficult for us to generalize our results from one person
to another
The third problem that we have is that measuring actually changes people
so
when I measure my coffee table it doesn't shrink in fear or expand with pride
people can change when we measure them
you might decide to exaggerate your level of happiness
to put me at ease
or in another situation you might decide to downplay your level of happiness because you want to avoid making me jealous
This brings us to a problem known as demand characteristics
and demand characteristics refer to aspects of the situation that influence how people respond
so the situation
influences the responses that we get
So for example if I were to do a study on illegal drug use and to collect some data I decide to
bring each of my students into my office and along with a police officer
I ask them if they've ever used illegal drugs
Now of course you can see that if my results said "oh my students have never used illegal drugs" you can see
the problem here, the problem is I've created a situation that demands a particular response
and so I'm only going to get that response and that means my data isn't going to be accurate
Now that's an extreme example and kind of an obvious one
but this effect can be more subtle and one way that it happens is known as social desirability
this refers to the idea that people give responses that they think are socially acceptable in other words they want to give
the "right" or "correct" response even if that's not the accurate response. So people want to be "good"
or "correct"
in terms of what society or what they think the researchers expect from them
and you could see this if you went out and asked people, they'd probably tell you that they exercise a lot more often than they actually do
We also see how measuring can change people in what's known as the Hawthorne Effect
This comes from a place known as the Hawthorne Works and this was a Western Electric factory outside of Chicago
and in the 1920s and 1930s some researchers did some studies on worker productivity
and what they found was that
if they increased the lighting
that productivity went up
but then it gradually went back to its baseline
and then they tried dimming the lighting and they found that productivity went up
and then gradually returned back to the baseline
then they tried rearranging some things in the workplace and they found that productivity went up again then gradually went back to normal
so they put things back how they were and productivity went up again
and then gradually went back to baseline. So what was going on? Well what the Hawthorne Effect refers to is the idea that
any changes can have an influence
In this case anything they changed influenced the workers but the workers were really just responding to the fact that something changed
They weren't responding to the specific change, it wasn't actually lighting that influenced
productivity. It was the fact that something in the workplace had changed
and so we can't say for sure that
a particular variable is responsible for a change when maybe it was the case that just having a change had an influence
These three problems we have of complexity variation and responsiveness to situations
are problems that we can't really eliminate from psychological research. They're always going to be there but we can do our best to be
aware of them and then try to reduce their influence in order to get more accurate data on human behavior
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