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Magnifying Glass Tilted Left

Unit 1 - Research Methodology

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Herb

Unit 2 - Biological Approach To Behaviour

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Brain

Unit 3 - Cognitive Approach To Behaviour

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Globe Showing Europe Africa

Unit 4 - Sociocultural Approach To Behaviour

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Performing Arts

Unit 6 - Health psychology

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Busts In Silhouette

Unit 7 - Pyschology Of Human Relationships

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Chart Increasing

Unit 8 - Developmental psychology

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Bar-Chart

Unit 9 - Internal Assessment

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Light Bulb

Unit 10 - The IB Curriculum - A Conceptual Model

Great music from Queen, mind-bending concept from Stranger Things, &amp; a whole lot of psychology.

Imagine throwing a frisbee and it veers off because of the wind, that&rsquo;s a confounding factor. In psychology, these are factors that mess with our cause-and-effect relationship between the independent variable (IV) and dependent variable (DV), reducing our experiment&rsquo;s internal validity. Think of it as an unexpected gust of wind in our frisbee experiment!

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Real World Example: When investigating whether caffeine increases alertness (IV is caffeine, DV is alertness), a confounding factor could be lack of sleep. If some participants pulled an all-nighter before the study, the results could be skewed.

If you&#39;re trying to do a perfect cartwheel but keep falling, you&#39;ve got high internal validity (it&rsquo;s all about you) but low ecological validity (not great at actual cartwheels). Similarly, to avoid bias in experiments, we standardize procedures, which can decrease ecological validity (how well the results apply to real-world situations).

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Real World Example: Research on memory recall might be conducted in a quiet lab with no distractions (high internal validity), but this isn&#39;t how we usually recall information in the noisy, distraction-filled real world (low ecological validity).

<ul>
	<li>Selection: Just like picking teams for a school football match, this happens when groups in an experiment are not equivalent at the start.
	<ul>
		<li>Real World Example: Let&#39;s say you&#39;re testing a new method of teaching maths. If one group is made up of math whizzes and the other of average students, any post-experiment differences could be due to this selection bias.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>History: Imagine you&rsquo;re trying to study but there&rsquo;s a rock concert outside your window. &lsquo;History&rsquo; is when events outside the experiment could affect the results.
	<ul>
		<li>Real World Example: In a study measuring stress levels during exams, a sudden news of a celebrity scandal might spike stress levels, leading to skewed results.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Maturation: We all grow and change over time. Just like kids growing taller, participants may change during the course of an experiment.
	<ul>
		<li>Real World Example: A study on student behavior over a school year might see changes due to maturation, like students becoming more disciplined simply because they&#39;re getting older.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Testing Effect: Remember the thrill of riding a bike for the first time? The next time wasn&#39;t so nerve-wracking, right? The testing effect refers to this phenomenon where repeated exposure to a test affects performance.
	<ul>
		<li>Real World Example: A study on driving test performance could be affected if participants become less nervous and perform better on their second or third attempts.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Instrumentation: This is when the tool used to measure your DV changes slightly. Imagine using a broken ruler to measure your height. You won&#39;t get accurate results!
	<ul>
		<li>Real World Example: If one observer in a bullying study is more empathetic, they might rate incidents more severely than a less empathetic observer.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Regression to the Mean: Like a boomerang, scores that are extremely high or low tend to move toward the average (or mean) over time.
	<ul>
		<li>Real World Example: If you select students with very high anxiety levels for a study on reducing anxiety, their scores are likely to naturally decrease over time, regardless of your intervention.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Experimental Mortality: This is like playing a board game where some players leave before it&rsquo;s over. This happens when participants drop out during an experiment, potentially skewing the results.
	<ul>
		<li>Real World Example: If more people drop out of an experiment on the effects of a high-intensity workout routine because it&#39;s too difficult, the final results may only represent those with higher fitness levels.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Demand Characteristics: This happens when participants suss out what the experiment is about and subconsciously change their behavior to fit that understanding. It&rsquo;s like guessing the end of a mystery novel and adjusting your expectations accordingly.
	<ul>
		<li>Real World Example: If participants in a diet study guess they are supposed to lose weight, they might start eating less or exercising more, skewing the results.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Experimenter Bias: This happens when the person conducting the experiment unintentionally influences the results, like a magic trick where the magician unknowingly reveals the secret.
	<ul>
		<li>Real World Example: In a study measuring student behavior, a teacher who prefers quiet students may subconsciously rate the quieter students more positively.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Double-Blind Design: A nifty way to deal with experimenter bias is to hide information from both the participants and the experimenters (everyone&#39;s blind!). This way, neither side&#39;s biases or expectations can affect the results.
	<ul>
		<li>Real World Example: In a drug trial, neither the doctors nor patients know who&#39;s getting the real drug and who&#39;s getting the placebo, preventing both sides&#39; expectations from affecting the results.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
</ul>

Remember:&nbsp;like with any great Queen song, each of these factors isn&#39;t just a single instrument but part of a larger orchestra that makes experimental research a nuanced symphony!

Explore Psychology’s Enigmatic Symphony: Harmony In Research

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Standard Level

Psychology SL

Unit 1 - Research Methodology

Explore Psychology’s Enigmatic Symphony: Harmony In Research

Table of content

Confounding factors

Unlock the Full Content!

Unit 1 - Research Methodology

Explore Psychology’s Enigmatic Symphony: Harmony In Research

Table of content

Confounding factors

Unlock the Full Content!