Hello again, Anderson Smith.

Today we're going to talk about those methods that allow us to discover

the facts about behavior.

Rather than understanding the behavior which is based on mythology and

our very limited experiences about how behavior operates.

We're going to talk about descriptive methods, and specifically

about naturalistic observation, looking at the research of Jane Goodall and

Dian Fossey, who studied great apes in the wild.

And we'll talk about case studies,

where we look at individuals that are very different from the rest of us.

And we'll talk about Luria's Shereshevsky, the Russian neuropsychologist

that studied memory in this one individual that he discovered in the Soviet Union.

And then Phineas Gage, probably the most famous

case study done with understanding the brain and behavior.

And then we'll look at surveys and correlational studies that allow us to

look at the relationship among different variables.

And then finally, we'll talk about the second major category of

methodologies, descriptive and experimental.

And experimental studies that allows us to actually look at the causes of behavior.

So naturalistic observation, I mentioned that the two we often think of is

Dian Fossey, who studied gorillas in their natural habitats.

And Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzees in the natural habitat.

There was a movie, Sigourney Weaver's played Dian Fossey,

called Gorillas in the Mist that you might have seen.

She was unfortunately murdered in her camp in Africa, but she did study gorillas.

And a lot about of what we know about gorillas as social organisms

was learned by simply watching them.

And then understanding and

then describing the behaviors that we saw in their natural habitat.

And Jane Goodall studied chimps in their natural habitat.

There's a Jane Goodall Foundation right now that's actually

represented here in Atlanta at Zoo Atlanta.

And she discovered things about their behavior.

They're very social organisms, the chimps used tools,

they have sort of a status in the hierarchy of the social organisms.

And really helped us understand the behavior of these human-like great apes.

Now, of the case studies you want to look at, the first is Luria's Shereshevsky.

And Luria, as I mentioned is a Russian neuropsychologist,

actually wrote a book called The Mind of a Mnemonist,

a mnemonist is just someone with an amazing memory.

And working in a factory in Russia, they discovered Solomon Shereshevsky.

And he had the uncanny ability to remember things

that most other people would not be able to remember.

For example, Shereshevsky tested him by presenting like this matrix of numbers.

And he would look at this set of numbers for a few minutes and

look away and then Luria would test Shereshevsky on the numbers.

And he would say okay, repeat the numbers and he would go 6,

I have to look at it, notice, he would go 6 6 8 0, 5 4 3 2.

And he'd say well, give me the third row backwards, and he would go, 1 2 6 1.

I promise you, you can't do that, well maybe you can if you're like Shereshevsky.

But the reason he was studied,

he was sort of unique in the ability to remember very complex things.

And he had other characteristics that are sort of interesting,

he had something called synesthesia.

Where he would see the number but he'd also hear, see a color

represented by the number, have a smell that was represented by the number.

All these unusual sensory kind of perceptions that would allow him

to remember it better.

So back Luria's discovery of him in writing the book,

Shereshevsky was no longer working on a factory floor.

He actually became mnemonist going around in a stage presentation and

getting paid for demonstrating his amazing memory.

The second case study is the classic one, and it's Phineas Gage,

who in 1948, 1848, I'm sorry, had a very serious accident.

He was working on a railroad, installing a railroad.

And what you would do to get rid of the rock is you'd put these tapping rods,

that you see here in his hand, into the rock, tap it down with a hammer, and

then take the rod out, put explosives in and

blow up the rock, helped him to build the railroad.

And he had an accident in 1848, where he was tapping the rod into the hole

not knowing that the hole already had explosives in it.

And the tapping rod came out, went through his cheek and

out of the frontal lobe of his brain.

The interesting thing about Phineas Gage is that he never became unconscious.

He was conscious the whole time, with the rod in his head.

And here's a picture from Harvard of the actual skull with the rod in the skull.

And you can see it forced him to lose his left eye by the accident.

And they studied after he recovered, really by the injury,

he was always conscious.

That he had some changes in his personality,

he became sort of more aggressive,

more belligerent in social situations, where before he was a very calm guy.

He actually went around like Shereshevsky, with one of PT Barnum's shows,

demonstrated himself in front of audiences and that's how he made his money.

And toward his death, by the way, in 1860,

he seemed to be recovering somewhat of these dramatic changes in his personality.

So case studies, are where we take an individual and very

carefully describe what their behaviors are like and what the changes are like.

Either in non-humans or in humans, but dealing with individual cases.

Now, there are also research methods, surveys that are descriptive,

you've all taken those.

We simply ask for your opinion about certain things.

So it's very descriptive, you've seen a lot about it recently in political polls.

Where we want to know what candidate one person prefers and

what that means in terms of other attitudes that people have.

So opinion polls, political polls, attitude surveys,

they're anonymous and they're voluntary.

And typically, we call them shopping mall techniques,

because often they handed out in places where you have lots of people to fill out.

More powerful are correlational studies,

where you measure several variables at the same time and

you see if they are related to each other, like intelligence and creativity.

Then we get a mathematical degree to which they are alike,

they are correlated, so when one goes up, the other will go up also.

And the correlation coefficient can go from a +1.0, meaning they're positively

correlated, to a -1.0, meaning that they're negatively correlated.

For example, here's a correlation between two variables, x and y, and

you can see there's a positive relationship between the two variables.

And actually, the correlation here is 0.81, very close to 1.0.

So it's descriptive,

in that we can't really tell whether x causes y or y causes x.

We only know that they are related to each other, they're correlated with each other.

And we have to always remember that correlations do not imply causation,

as this particular Associated Press technique shows.

People who live together before they tie the knot are more apt to

fail in their marriage than couples who do not.

And the idea here is that marital success is caused by not sleeping together

before they are married.

We only know that there's a correlation, what causes what,

we do not know, so correlation does not imply causation.

And the other technique, the other classes of techniques,

are much more powerful and they're the experimental techniques.

We control all the variables in an experiment, and

manipulate one variable at a time.

And we look to see whether that one variable causes the behavior that we're

looking at.

So we manipulate one variable, the independent variable, and

we measure the other variable, the dependent variable, when we know that

that independent variable is the only one varying in the experiment.

So when the independent variable one level produces a change in

the dependent variable,

we can imply that the dependent variable is a function of the independent variable.

There's a causal relationship between the two.

So the only way to determine causation

using psychological methods is with the experimental method.

And this is what the experimental method represents.

We look at the research literature, we have practical problems,

we make observations about behavior.

And then we develop a research question, an hypothesis about the relationship

between the independent variable one of dependent variable.

We do an empirical study, which is a manipulation

of the independent variable and a measurement of the dependent variable.

We do a data analysis to see whether or not that difference

in the dependent variable caused by the independent variable is significant or

just due to chance.

And then we reach conclusions about the relationship.

And then feed back into the research literature, answer the practical problem,

or change the way in which observations are made.

The experimental method.

So we looked at descriptive methods, naturalistic observations,

case studies, and correlation methods and surveys.

Then we looked at the experimental method,

the most powerful of the techniques to study behavior.

Thank you.

Lecture Video 1.3: Scientific Methods

Introduction to Psychology as a Science 1 – Methodological and Biological Foundations

Meet the Instructors