Unit 2 Psychological Research Essay

Unit two talks about the research methods that are used in psychological science. The first thing we talk about is common sense and intuition versus hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is known as the belief that after someone is told an outcome, they claim they knew the answer all along. This deals with us being overconfident in ourselves and because of this we tend to be bias with our thoughts. When we make conclusions with our common sense or intuition instead of embarking on a more scientific approach, we tend to make more mistakes and bias decisions. This is one way the science part of psychology is used. Another way is critical thinking which we learned about next.
Critical thinking is a way that we question conclusions and make progress

Mean is the average, median is the middle piece, mode is the piece seen the most, range is the difference between the largest and smallest pieces, and standard deviation scores depend on the answers above. Normal curve is bell-shaped and describes the distribution.
The next thing we learn about is the ways that someone’s culture and gender affects their behavior. Behaviors are very contrasting in different cultures. There are also gender differences but the similarities are much more common. We also learned about ethics and the guidelines and rules that have to be followed when experiments are done. There are many different views on experimenting on animals versus experimenting on humans.
When experimenting on animals, pain is very uncommon. People are much different and the restrictions are much higher. Sometimes human are put under stress or deceit so the researchers can find evidence. The principles of the international psychological organizations push researchers to obtain informed consent form the participants. This informed consent will do three things for the participants; protect them from harm, keep their personal information confidential, and to completely debrief