An introduction to the application of scientific method to human behavior

Beatty’s unscientific sources of knowledge
• Intuition
• Tenacity
• Common sense
• Personal experience
• Authority
• Rationalism

So what are we to do?
• Develop ways to reduce the bias and improve our ability to observe
• ‘Science’ as a means to systematically study the world
– First developed in ‘hard’ or ‘natural’ sciences
• Human beings were not the object of study
• Study moves from description to classification to correlation to ‘causality’

Science
• Draws upon the other sources of knowledge
• Systematically tests ideas in the empirical world
– Precise
– Objective
– Cumulative

Appropriate for some but not all questions
• Are Muslims violent?
• Would young children learn more from watching educational videos or from unstructured play?
• Do people use the Internet more for entertainment or for social contact?
• What is the meaning of life?
• Should the government license websites?
• Does advertising make us feel ugly?
• What colors should I wear together?

Empiricism
• The kind of evidence that we gather in science is ‘empirical’ evidence
– Drawn from our interaction with the physical world
• Science structures experience in ways that help us to improve on the lessons we learn from the ‘real world’

Social science
• Scientific study applied to human behavior did not really get going till the 1800s
– Excitement over the successes of natural sciences
• Industrial machinery
• Vaccines against disease
• Optics
• Astronomical discoveries
• Navigation

Development of social science
• There was a heated controversy over the appropriateness of the scientific study of people
– Religious/ethical concerns over the ethics of trying to study people
– Scientific debate over whether humans act according to ‘laws’ of behavior the way inanimate objects do
• This debate continues

Positivism
• From the beginning of the 20 th century until the latter half of the century, social sciences favored an approach that said that the proper approach to the study of human behavior was to adopt the methods and philosophy dominant in natural sciences.
– Empirical
– Hypothetico-deductive
– “Nomothetic”

Covering laws
• Scholars during the first half of the 20 th century were concerned with attempting to identify the limited number of laws that explained all human behavior.

• Over time, their frustration, coupled with an increasing understanding of the uncertainty even of natural sciences led to an abandonment of the attempt by most social scientists.

More recent developments
• An approach that accepts some level of uncertainty in the prediction and understanding of human behavior was adopted (“Post-positivism”)
– Note: a ‘probabilistic’ model was adopted
(Trochim)

The new view of social science
• Social scientists recognize that absolute
‘covering laws’ of human beliefs, attitudes and behaviors are probably not there to be found
– Instead, relationships among variables are seen as partial and contingent upon circumstances, personalities, etc.

How we study human action with social science methods
• Social scientists attempt to develop theory by generalizing from a number of individual cases or examples
– Induction
• They then make predictions from the general rules to a new set of events or cases
– Deduction
• They test their predictions
• With the knowledge gained from the tests, they reconsider the generalizations they made
• The process begins again (continuous)

Social science community
• The development of knowledge in a discipline is a community undertaking
– The best approximation to truth is attained through multiple researchers applying different theories and methods to the same questions
• Scientists act as a profession, policing each other and critiquing each other’s theories and research
– Conferences, etc. bring researchers looking at similar problems together

Goals of social science
• In modern study of social science topics, the goal, generally speaking, is to develop probabilistic theories by identifying relationships among concepts
• Concepts are generalized ideas that refer to a number of individual cases

Relationships
The two most common types of relationships in research are a) Correlational —two concepts are related so that variance in one coincides with variance in another b) Causal —two concepts are related so that variance in one leads to variance in the other

Examples: Correlation
If you find that people who use illegal drugs at an early age watch druggie movies, it could be either that a) kids exposed to druggie movies are more likely to use drugs at an early age or b) kids who use drugs at an early age are attracted to druggie movies

Examples: Causality
If you find that exposure to pro-abstinence messages leads to later onset of sexual behavior but not vice versa, and there is no other plausible explanation for the relationship, then you conclude that you have a causal relationship

Representing relationships
+
Drug movies Drug use
Exposure to pro-abstinence messages
__
Onset of sexual activity

Basic theoretical statement
Gender self-definition
Determines
Violent video game play

Concepts and variables
• Variables are concepts that take more than one value
– Otherwise, they are a ‘constant’
• E.g., the star that the Earth revolves around

Basic research statement
Independent Variable
Relationship :
Determines
Gender identity
Dependent Variable
Violent video game play

Antecedent variable
Antecedent Variable
Social construction of gender
Independent Variable
Gender identity
Dependent Variable
Violent video game play

Mediating variable
Mediating Variable
Parents’ political liberalism
Independent Variable
Gender identity
Dependent Variable
Violent video game play

Intervening Variable
Independent Variable
Gender identity
Intervening Variable
Personal aggressiveness
Dependent Variable
Violent video game play

Confound —“third variable” explanation
Antecedent Variable
Hormonal balance
Independent Variable
Gender identity
Dependent Variable
X X X
Violent video game play

It can get quite complicated
Papies, Dominik, and Michel Clement. "Adoption of New Movie Distribution
Services on the Internet." Journal of Media Economics 21.3 (2008): 131-57.

It can get quite complicated
Papies, Dominik, and Michel Clement. "Adoption of New Movie Distribution
Services on the Internet." Journal of Media Economics 21.3 (2008): 131-57.

Paek, Hye-Jin. "Mechanisms through Which Adolescents Attend and Respond to
Antismoking Media Campaigns." Journal of Communication 58.1 (2008): 84-105.

Some variables to play around with
Sex Age Gender
Education Interest in technology
Game genre preference Game playing skill
Video Game Play
Enjoyment of fantasy Social conservatism
Sociability (Tendency toward interaction with others, friendships)
Psychological compulsion
Film genre preference Sports experience Income

The trouble with people

People are hard to study because:
• (and we don’t have direct access to their minds)

People are hard to study because:
• They don’t simply react to your stimulus
– They try to guess what you’re doing and anticipate what your goal is
• They may intentionally help or hinder your goal (as they see it)
• They are affected by a wide range of things in their environment
– You can’t control all the things that might affect your subjects

People are hard to study because:
• They are complicated
• They are emotional
• They forget
• They change over time
• Individuals are very different
• They can be uncooperative

People are hard to study because:
• Ethics limit what you can do to study them