Vocabulary


 * Empiricism**- empirical way of doing things. a method or practice.


 * Structuralism**- any theory that is made up of of structural principles.


 * Functionalism**- a psychologist who studies behavior.


 * Psychology**- the study of human behavior and why people do the things they do.


 * Nature-nurture issue**- a conflict concerning the importance of nature and nurture in a wide variety of individual development. ex: personality, intelligence, or mental illness.


 * Natural selection**- the process by which life forms have traits that better enable them to adapt to specific environmental pressures and they will pass these traits through the generations.


 * Basic research**-is research carried out to increase understanding of fundamental ideas.


 * Applied research**- using basic research to develop real life ideas and products.


 * Clinical psychology**- a career in psychology that deals with diagnosing personality and behavioral disorders.


 * Psychiatry**- a career in which you diagnose and treat mental disorders.


 * Hindsight bias**- the tendency to believe, after learning of an outcome, that one could have foreseen it.


 * Critical thinking**- using the mental process of analyzing and evaluating.


 * Theory**- using facts and thorough research to develop an explanation.


 * Hypothesis-** a scientific guess.


 * Operational definition**- statement that describes how a particular variable is to be measured or evaluated.


 * Case study**-a careful study of some social unit and what factors led to its success or failure.


 * Survey**-


 * False consensus effect**- the tendency for people to project their way of thinking onto other people.


 * Population**- the number of people or things in a given place.


 * Random sample**- a sample grabbed at random.


 * Naturalistic observation**- A research method in which the scientist observes people as they engage in common everyday activities in their natural habitats.


 * Correlation**- a reciprocal relation between two or more things.


 * Scatterplot**- The pattern of points due to plotting two variables on a graph.


 * Illusory correlation-** is the phenomenon of seeing the relationship one expects in a set of data even when no such relationship exists.


 * Experiment**- a very powerful type of study that psychologists conduct in order to determine whether one variable causes another variable.


 * Double-blind procedure-** an experimental procedure in which neither the subjects of the experiment nor the persons administering the experiment know the critical aspects.


 * Placebo effect-**


 * Experimental condition-** the procedure that is varied in order to estimate a variable's effect by comparison with a control condition.


 * Control condition-** a standard against which other conditions can be compared in a scientific experiment.


 * Random assignment-** the participants are assigned to either the experimental or control group by chance.


 * Independent variable-** the factor that the researcher manipulates, or the variable whose effect is being studied.


 * Dependent variable-** the outcome that is being measured, or the variable that might change depending on the independent variable.


 * Mode-** the number that occurs the most in a set of numbers.


 * Mean-** the average of a set of numbers.


 * Median-** the number that occurs the most in a set of numbers.


 * Range-** the smallest number subtracted from the largest number. (in a set of numbers).


 * Standard deviation-** A statistical measure of variability in a population of individuals or in a set of data.


 * Statistical significance-** A measure of how unlikely it is that a result has occurred by chance.


 * Culture-** a particular society at a particular time and place.


 * Bias-** influence in an unfair way.


 * Ethics-** study of moral values and rules.