This content is generated from chapter “Research Methods in Psychology”.
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The Breakdown
The goals of science include generating research questions that describe, predict, and explain phenomena.
Chapter 1, “The Science of Psychology,” introduces fundamental concepts for thinking like a psychology researcher.
It discusses several methods of knowing, including intuition, authority, rationalism, empiricism, and the scientific method.
The scientific method is a systematic process for collecting and evaluating evidence to test ideas and answer questions. It relies on systematic empiricism (careful observation under controlled conditions) and rationalism to draw conclusions. This method is most likely to produce valid knowledge but has drawbacks, such as requiring considerable time and resources and only being applicable to empirical questions.
Science is defined as a general approach to understanding the natural world through observation and experiment. Psychology is considered a science because it uses this approach to study human behaviour.
Three fundamental features of science are systematic empiricism, empirical questions (questions answerable by observation), and public knowledge (making research methods and results available).
Pseudoscience refers to activities and beliefs that are claimed to be scientific but lack one or more of these core scientific features. The theory of biorhythms is mentioned as an example of pseudoscience.