Purpose Statement
To help students to both
appreciate and understand the limitations of the scientific method.
Description of Activity
Psychology makes much of
adopting a critical attitude toward commonsense observations of human behavior.
Introductory textbooks, in their initial chapter, all emphasize the scientific
method as the way to distinguish between fact and fuzzy thinking. The reader is
guided through the experimental method and it is asserted that all the
subsequent facts presented in the text have been established empirically and
impeccably.
So I, in the first or second class, do an in-class experiment. Everyone
participates, and we, using good experimental design, come to a conclusion
based on our data. At this point, the student has learned firsthand how to
arrive at a valid conclusion.
But is the conclusion valid as uncritically accepted science would and too
often does assert?As the next step in the exercise, we consider
"intervening (also called extraneous) variables," those unanticipated
and uncontrolled factors which may affect the experimental result. By careful
inspection, we realize that our methodology, at first sight so flawless, contains
a number of loopholes. We see that it is quite possible for our supposedly
foolproof experiment to yield a bogus result due to methodological inadequacies
which could not have been foreseen. I assert that it in fact may rarely if ever
be possible to design and carry out a methodologically perfect experiment in
psychology.
We conclude the exercise by considering the supposed sacrosanctity of
scientifically arrived-at conclusions, given what we have just experienced. We
discuss both the strengths and deficiencies of a reliance on science to yield
valid conclusions in psychology and more generally.
Materials Needed
Materials needed vary
depending on the experiment performed.
Application
This is a long exercise.
At least an hour should be allotted for it. It's worth the time invested.
this web page was created
on 11/3/99 at 10:23:40 PM
and modified on 11/3/99 at 10:23:40 PM