20 CHAPTER 1
- CONTROL: HOW CAN IT BE CHANGED? The focus of control, or the modifi-
cation of some behavior, is to change a behavior from an undesirable one (such as
women avoiding a certain academic major) to a desirable one (such as more equal-
ity in career choices). Professor Cheryan suggests that changing the image of com-
puter science may help increase the number of women choosing to go into this field.
Not all psychological investigations will try to meet all four of these goals. In some
cases, the main focus might be on description and prediction, as it would be for a person-
ality theorist who wants to know what people are like (description) and what they might
do in certain situations (prediction). Some psychologists are interested in both descrip-
tion and explanation, as is the case with experimental psychologists who design research
to find explanations for observed (described) behavior. Therapists may be more inter-
ested in controlling or influencing behavior and mental processes, although the other
three goals would be important in achieving this objective.
STEPS IN THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH The first step in any investigation is to have a
question to investigate, right? So the first step in the scientific approach is this:
- Perceiving the Question: You notice something interesting happening in your sur-
roundings for which you would like to have an explanation. An example might be that
you’ve noticed that your children seem to get a little more aggressive with each other
after watching a particularly violent children’s cartoon program on Saturday morning.
You wonder if the violence in the cartoon could be creating the aggressive behavior in
your children. This step is derived from the goal of description: What is happening here?
Once you have a question, you want an answer. The next logical step is to
form a tentative* answer or explanation for the behavior you have seen. This tenta-
tive explanation is known as a hypothesis. - Forming a Hypothesis: Based on your initial observations of what’s going on in
your surroundings, you form an educated guess about the explanation for your
observations, putting it into the form of a statement that can be tested in some way.
Testing hypotheses is the heart of any scientific investigation and is the primary way
in which support for theories is generated. In fact, a good theory should lead to the
formation of hypotheses (predictions based on the theory). It might be helpful to
think of an “if–then” statement: If the world is round, then a person should be able
to sail in a straight line around the world and come back to where he or she started.
“If the world is round” is the theory part of this statement, a theory based on many
observations and facts gathered by observers, like observing that when a ship sails
toward the horizon, it seems to “disappear” from the bottom up, indicating a curva-
ture of the surface of the water. The “then” part of the statement is the hypothesis,
a specific, testable prediction based on the theory. While it would be nice if all of our
assumptions about what we observe are always correct, that isn’t what happens and
isn’t necessarily what we want to happen—the scientific approach means you have
to seek out information even though it might not agree with what you believed you
would find. As odd as it might seem, hypotheses must be falsifiable: there must be
a way not just to prove a hypothesis is true but also to prove a hypothesis is false.
This is what being “testable” means: You have to be able to see if your hypothesis is
true or false. In the example, the “then” part of the statement is testable because, as
Christopher Columbus attempted to do, you actually can sail in a straight (more or
less) line and see if your prediction comes true. Going back to the previous example,
you might say, “If exposure to violence leads to increased aggression in children,
then children who watch violent cartoons will become more aggressive.” The last
part of that statement is the hypothesis to be tested. (Forming a hypothesis based on
observations is related to the goals of description and explanation.)
*tentative: something that is not fully worked out or completed as yet.hypothesis
tentative explanation of a phenome-
non based on observations.
The scientific approach can be used to
determine if children who watch violence on
television are more likely to be aggressive
than those who do not.