...Research Process PSY/300 Understanding the Research Process 1. What hypothesis did Medvec & Colleagues set out to test in their first study of the “near miss” phenomenon? Describe the theory associated with this hypothesis. • In the summer of 1992, Medvec &Colleagues set out to test satisfaction after the Olympics competition. Based on “if only thinking”, they wanted to know if the person who won third place would be less upset than the person who won the second place. The Olympic competition was recorded, giving the opportunity to watch on slow motion. With the slow motion strategy, they were able to observe facial reaction of the gold, silver and bronze medalists. • The Phenomenon “near miss” or theory that Medvec and Colleagues were associated, tested how a person could react, or feel after a situation is altered or any other situation occurs. 2. Identify the variables in the study and describe how they were measured. How did the researchers operationalize affective response upon winning a bronze or silver medal? • The measure used on this study was recorded on a tape from the moment the participants were on the stand to receive the mdeal. It seems there were two kind of settings, such as unplanned emotions and counterfactual thinking. Measuring the two variables provided an insight on how the competitors felt and reacted. How different the silver medalist felt and reacted from the bronze competitor. 3. Who...
Words: 646 - Pages: 3
...University of Phoenix Material Understanding the Research Process Resources: Ch. 1, 2, and & 7 of Psychology This required Portfolio assignment will provide you with the opportunity to practice and hone your research skills. It has been designed to help you think scientifically about real world problems and issues and to apply your knowledge of the research process to various topics in Psychology. This assignment accomplishes that goal by challenging you to: • Differentiate between the common use of the word research and the use of the word research in the social and behavioral sciences • Identify the major steps in the research process using a classic study in Psychology as an example. Part I: Defining Research The word research is used in many different ways. Consider the following examples: • Your friend tells you that he intends to research different hair products before deciding on one to buy. • A real estate agent advises you to research home values in your neighborhood before putting your house on the market. • A police officer reports that she is doing ‘some research’ on possible motives for a crime that was committed. • A writer states that he does ‘extensive research’ before beginning his fictional works. Answer the questions below: 1. How is research defined in the social and behavioral sciences? Research within the social and behavioral sciences involve data being collected by empirical methods, and then statistically tested to prove or...
Words: 834 - Pages: 4
...response, be sure to address the characteristics of ‘good’ psychological research. Scientific research involves the use of the scientific method, wherein data is collected by empirical methods, and then statistically tested to prove or disprove the hypotheses. “The traditional concept of scientific method involves five steps, generally in the following order. 1. Theory construction 2. Derivation of theoretical hypotheses 3. Operationalization of concepts 4. Collection of empirical data 5. Empirical testing of hypotheses Part II: Understanding the research process Researchers in Psychology follow a systematic process of investigation. Carefully read Chapter 2 of your textbook, paying special attention to the section on Experimental Research. Then go to Chapter 7 in your textbook and read the following section: Research In-Depth: Counterfactuals and “If Only…” Thinking. Answer the questions below, using Medvec & colleagues’ first study as an example: 1. 1. What hypothesis did Medvec & colleagues set out to test in their first study of the ‘near miss’ phenomenon? Describe the theory associated with this hypothesis. • To test the thoughts and judgments of human mind and see...
Words: 618 - Pages: 3
...University of Phoenix Material Understanding the Research Process Resources: Ch. 1, 2, and & 7 of Psychology This required Portfolio assignment will provide you with the opportunity to practice and hone your research skills. It has been designed to help you think scientifically about real world problems and issues and to apply your knowledge of the research process to various topics in Psychology. This assignment accomplishes that goal by challenging you to: • Differentiate between the common use of the word research and the use of the word research in the social and behavioral sciences • Identify the major steps in the research process using a classic study in Psychology as an example. Part I: Defining Research The word research is used in many different ways. Consider the following examples: • Your friend tells you that he intends to research different hair products before deciding on one to buy. • A real estate agent advises you to research home values in your neighborhood before putting your house on the market. • A police officer reports that she is doing ‘some research’ on possible motives for a crime that was committed. • A writer states that he does ‘extensive research’ before beginning his fictional works. Answer the questions below: 1. How is research defined in the social and behavioral sciences? Behavior science is area of the science which concerns with the studying of human and animal behaviors...
Words: 1934 - Pages: 8
...Chapter 5 – Social Cognition Debate: Faith and Social Cognition * Carolyn Briggs: involved in and then rejected. Christian fundamentalism. How can someone believe so intensely and then reject those same beliefs? How are our beleifs shaped by those around us? Consider some cognitive biases and errors you have made. **Social cognition: Study of how people think about people and social relationships. -What is unique about thinking about people as opposed to thinking about something else, like frogs or computers? Why is it important to study how people think about people? -How is argumentative thinking helpful? Why would arguing with others help with human survival? **Thinking Cognitive Miser: Exemplified by having errors in thinking. Reluctance to do much extra thinking. -During free time, why do most people choose to think about a subject such as baseball, but not about a subject such as calculus? **Automatic and deliberate thinking How does the Stroop Effect (colors and words) illustrate automatic versus deliberate thought? How do we know if a thought is automatic? -Requires no awareness -not guided by intention -not subject to deliberate control -effort is low Schemas: information about a concept. Ex/Schema for exams = involves multi paged paper and #2 pencil. Scripts: Schemas about certain events. How an experience and an event will play out. Ex/ For exam… come into class, cram before instructor says put materials away, administered exam...
Words: 950 - Pages: 4
...popular association of coolness and fun with these activities. That is, until you recall the image of your friend vomiting at a party or constantly reeking of smoke. The marketing of games of chance, such as lotteries and casino games, is very similar. It often focuses on psychological tendencies and weakness as well as misconceptions, such as the possibility of rising from one’s current socio-economic state, internal and external loci of control, and counterfactual thinking, to attract customers to their business. From an economists standpoint, the choice to gamble has historically been somewhat disconcerting. According to standard theory, people will almost always choose to pay a premium, like insurance, to eliminate uncertain future outcomes. Yet gamblers regularly seek out opportunities to participate in gambles where the odds are overwhelmingly against them. In his May 1981 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Bruck [1] evaluates a modified utility curve to explain the apparent inconsistency with economic theory. The figure below, copied from Brucks paper, illustrates graphically how a rational person can take such enormous gambles. Rather than following the traditional risk-averse model, where the utility curve has a log or square root-like shape, the cubic utility curve allows the individual to gain a higher utility, marked by Un, by taking a gamble with a large payout. This could be...
Words: 3286 - Pages: 14
...Assignment 1- Open Book Exam PHC100 – Professional Communications PHC100 Take Home Open Book Examination 1. You are a member of a decision making group at work where five people have a strong united vision, but three people including yourself, believe they are being dangerously optimistic, impulsive and misinformed. What social psychology theory of yourself and others would help you to maintain your own beliefs, and promote your minority position When working within a group in a professional context it is essential that we understand how the individuals interact with each other and the group as a whole. It is important to maintain a strong sense of integrity and professionalism especially as part of a minority where there is a desire to maintain one’s own beliefs and promote that minority position. Through the understanding and application of social psychology concepts such as a self serving bias and belief perseverance we gain an insight into an individual’s self perception and motivations. An appreciation for how these individuals interact within the group and how the group as a whole behaves can be gained via concepts of groupthink, group polarization and the power of minority influence. An understanding and the applications of these concepts will aid individuals and those within a minority to be both assertive and resilient in their own beliefs as well as promoting that minority position. A self serving bias has the effect of creating an inflated sense of...
Words: 1543 - Pages: 7
...Methodological Issues in Management Research Lee Sechrest, PhD Professor Department of Psychology University of Arizona Room 312 Tuscon, AZ 85721 White paper prepared for the Department of Veterans Affairs Management Research in VA Workshop, sponsored by the HSR&D Management Decision and Research Center November 19-20, 2001 Methodological Issues in Management Research Managers want to make good decisions. Any decisions will, by definition, be made on the basis of some presumed information. Even if a decision were to be made by throwing dice, that process would almost certain stem from “information” indicating that no better basis for the decision could be discerned, e.g., that a randomly determined choice would be likely to be better than a decision open to bias. At least to some extent, it is axiomatic that the better the information, the better the decisions. It is useful to distinguish between data, facts, and information. Data are simply observations, usually in the form of numbers thought to represent some systematic process underlying them, i.e., a process generating the numbers. Data do not mean anything or tell us anything until they are interpreted in some way. Merely to have an observation that on a particular day 43 patients were reported to have received a particular service is not in itself meaningful. Facts are merely data elevated in confidence to a point of suggested certainty. The observation that 43 patients received a service may be...
Words: 6205 - Pages: 25
...GE1132 Mind, brain and language 09.03.2015 Semester B 2014/2015 Rianne Okkema, 40070660 Mind, Brain and Language Thinking through language (Bloom and Keil 2001) My little nephew of two years old has begun talking in Frisian, the native language of people from the northern part of The Netherlands. For many people from this part of the country, Frisian and Dutch are their mother tongue because Dutch is the official language of The Netherlands. A lot of children, like my nephew, begin learning and speaking Dutch only when they enter school. In a couple of years my nephew will start his school life; will the change of knowing not one, but two languages in this young age change his way of thinking? According to Paul Bloom and Frank Keil it might. In their paper Thinking through language (2001) they look at several views and discuss the relation between language and thought, in particular, whether language influences thought. Some say language does not affect your thoughts while others do say that the language you learn has a profound influence on how you think. Theories At first Paul Bloom and Frank Keil make a distinction between theories of the claim language-affects-thought. The first distinction is about three positions. One can believe in language-general effects, in language-general and language-specific effect and one can believe in that neither of these effects exists. The second distinction is about the aspect of language that are said to matter, especially...
Words: 1088 - Pages: 5
...AFRICAN POVERTY Duncan Kennedy* Abstract: African extreme poverty is probably a function (although not solely) of the balkanized post-colonial geopolitics of Africa. It is also probably a function (although not solely) of the income distribution generated by a typically perverse African political economy, through its effect on the allocation of resources to development. As between these two causes, the second is probably much the more important. This reinterpretation puts considerably more of the blame for African poverty on the Western great powers than does the “poverty trap” analytic that is a common contemporary way of thinking about the African economic situation. INTRODUCTION This essay, which really is an essay rather than a sustained scholarly encounter with the problem, proposes an alternative to the “poverty trap” analytic for understanding extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. The poverty-trap idea is well instantiated by the following quotation from Jeffrey and Lisa Sachs, and it is common among liberal Western commentators on African economy. For the world’s poorest people, daily life is a struggle for survival, with millions of impoverished people each year losing that struggle to famine, disease, environmental catastrophes, and violent conflicts that arise in conditions of extreme deprivation. . . . One basic point, not always remembered, is that impoverished countries lack their own budgetary resources needed to supply vital—indeed life-saving—services such...
Words: 12690 - Pages: 51
...Relationship Between Unplanned Buying And Post Purchase Regret Introduction: The theory of cognitive dissonance was developed in 1957 by Leon Festiner. Festinger describes cognitive dissonance as a psychological state which results when a person perceives that two cognitions both of which he believes to be true, do not “fit” together; that is, they seem inconsistent. The resulting dissonance produces tension, which serves to motivate the individual to bring harmony to inconsistent elements and thereby reduce psychological tension (Loudon, Bitta 2006) Regret arises from individuals expending cognitive efforts to consider the chosen option against the rejected options (Inman, Dyer, and Jia 1997). Individuals must think in order to feel regret. For individuals to experience regret, they have to cognitively process and cross-compare one option (chosen) to another option (foregone). If the result of the comparison is perceived to be unfavourable (i.e. the foregone option is perceived to be better than the present option), then individuals are prone to feeling regret over their actions. According to Sugden (1985) regret has been known to be a painful sensation that arises as a result of comparing ‘what is’ with ‘what might have been. Regrets about what one has failed to do or what one has done are common. It has been defined as the negative cognitively-based emotion that we experience when realizing or imagining that our present situation would have...
Words: 1438 - Pages: 6
...Arlington, VA 22203 USA Selmer Bringsjord SELMER @ RPI . EDU Depts. of Cognitive Science, Computer Science & the Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180 USA Abstract Herein we make a plea to machine ethicists for the inclusion of constraints on their theories consistent with empirical data on human moral cognition. As philosophers, we clearly lack widely accepted solutions to issues regarding the existence of free will, the nature of persons and firm conditions on moral agency/patienthood; all of which are indispensable concepts to be deployed by any machine able to make moral judgments. No agreement seems forthcoming on these matters, and we don’t hold out hope for machines that can both always do the right thing (on some general ethic) and produce explanations for its behavior that would be understandable to a human confederate. Our tentative solution involves understanding the folk concepts associated with our moral intuitions regarding these matters, and how they might be dependent upon the nature of human cognitive architecture. It is in this spirit that we begin to explore the complexities inherent in human moral judgment via computational theories of the human cognitive architecture, rather than under the extreme constraints imposed by rational-actor models assumed throughout much of the literature on philosophical ethics. After discussing the various advantages and challenges of taking this particular perspective on the development...
Words: 13485 - Pages: 54
...Running Head: LITERATURE REVIEW: HALO EFFECT 1 Literature Review: HALO EFFECT NO NAME GIVEN HERE Liberty University BUSI 600-B04 21 January 2013 LITERATURE REVIEW: HALO EFFECT Abstract 2 The term “Halo Effect” has several definitions. In conducting business research, it is important to understand which definition is to be used and apply that definition to the problem at hand. In this paper, we will attempt to define the correct version of the halo effect as it applies to this literature review. This paper will then look at the history of the halo effect in business and define how it is being used today. During the writing, examples and studies regarding the halo effect that have already been completed will also be reviewed to see if the halo effect can genuinely and repeatedly be used in business to increase profits or generate revenues. LITERATURE REVIEW: HALO EFFECT Literature Review: Halo Effect Introduction Definition When discussing and researching the term “Halo Effect” the various definitions of the 3 phrase must be reviewed. Once reviewed, the researcher then has the responsibility to determine which definition best fits their research question at hand in order to best formulate the research design and subsequent answer. One of the definitions of halo effect is from the textbook Business research methods by Donald Cooper. It is defined as “error caused when prior observations influence perceptions of current observations” (Cooper & Schindler...
Words: 7558 - Pages: 31
...be found in a special mental substance. Behaviorism identified mental states with behavioral dispositions; physicalism in its most influential version identifies mental states with brain states. Functionalism says that mental states are constituted by their causal relations to one another and to sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. Functionalism is one of the major theoretical developments of Twentieth Century analytic philosophy, and provides the conceptual underpinnings of much work in cognitive science. Functionalism has three distinct sources. First, Putnam and Fodor saw mental states in terms of an empirical computational theory of the mind. Second, Smart’s "topic neutral" analyses led Armstrong and Lewis to a functionalist analysis of mental concepts. Third, Wittgenstein’s idea of meaning as use led to a version of functionalism as a theory of meaning, further developed by Sellars and later Harman. One motivation behind functionalism can be appreciated by attention to artifact concepts like carburetor and biological concepts like kidney. What it is for something to be a carburetor is for it to mix fuel and air in an internal combustion engine--carburetor is a functional concept. In the case of the kidney, the scientific concept is functional--defined in terms of a role in filtering the blood and maintaining certain chemical...
Words: 4824 - Pages: 20
...when the mother lays own at night, fatal activity will be affected by now the mother is feeling. | Infancy(0-3) | Reflex develop for survival, for example babies automatically sauce when presented with a nipple. When a mother speaks the child’s heal will automatically turn towards their parent voice. Skills like: blinking, grasping, stepping, sucking and more develop. Rapid growth and with increase in the first months double and triples in one year. New-borns are born with not vision but this develops quickly and respond visually to their surroundings from birth. Brain developments are rapid, the lower areas of the brain, responsible for basic life, like breathing, are the first to develop, followed by the higher areas, responsible for thinking and planning. After birth...
Words: 2055 - Pages: 9
