1.2 Research Methods in Psychology

There are various types of research methods in psychology with different purposes, strengths, and weaknesses.

Whenever researchers want to prove or find causation, they would run an experiment.

An experiment you'll learn about in Unit 9 that was run by Solomon Asch investigated the extent to which one would conform to a group's ideas.

Each person in the room would have to look at these lines above and state which one they thought was of similar length to the original line. The answer was, of course, obvious, but Asch wanted to see if the "real participant" would conform to the views of the rest of the group.

Asch gathered together what we could call "fake participants" and told them not to say line C. The "real participant" would then hear wrong answers, but they did not want to be the odd one out, so they conformed with the rest of the group and represented the majority view.

In this experiment, the "real participant" was the control group, and about 75% of them, over 12 trials, conformed at least once.

There could be a correlational study between anything. Say you wanted to see if there was an association between the number of hours a teenager sleeps and their grades in high school. If there was a correlation, we cannot say that sleeping a greater number of hours causes higher grades. However, we can determine that they are related to each other. 💤

Surveys are used all the time, especially in advertising and marketing. They are often distributed to a large number of people, and the results are returned back to researchers.

If a student wanted to observe how many people fully stop at a stop sign, they could watch the cars from a distance and record their data. This is a naturalistic observation since the student is in no way influencing the results.

A notable psychological case study is the study of Phineas Gage:

Phineas Gage was a railroad construction foreman who survived a severe brain injury in 1848. The accident occurred when an iron rod was accidentally driven through Gage's skull, damaging his frontal lobes. Despite the severity of the injury, Gage was able to walk and talk immediately after the accident and appeared to be relatively uninjured.

However, Gage's personality underwent a dramatic change following the injury. He became impulsive, irresponsible, and prone to outbursts of anger, which were completely out of character for him before the accident. Gage's case is famous in the history of psychology because it was one of the first to suggest that damage to the frontal lobes of the brain can have significant effects on personality and behavior.