In the 1890s, surgeons, led in theUnited States by William Halsted, believed that the cure for breast cancer was a radical mastectomy

A comparison group enables us to compare what would happenboth with and without the thing we are interested in

In 1993, researcherFrances Rauscher found that when students heard Mozart’s music played for 10 minutes, they performedbetter on a subsequent spatial intelligence test when compared with students who had listened to silenceor to a monotone speaking voice (Rauscher et al., 1993)

basic research, in contrast, is to enhance the general body of knowledge.

Applied research isdone with a practical problem in mind

over 80% of psychological research is still conducted by English-speaking and European researchers,and only a tiny fraction is published by scholars from Asia, the Middle East, or Latin America(Thalmayer, et al., 2021).

Historically, psychological scientists werepredominantly White men who mostly studied white rats and White American college students (Guthrie,2004).

TABLE 1.1 Merton’s Scientific Norms

self-correcting; that is, it discovers its ownmistaken theories and corrects them.

Sociologist Robert Merton (1942) identified four norms thatscientists attempt to follow,

The (satirical) “Birds Aren’t Real”

Some therapists practice facilitated communication (FC), believing they can helppeople with developmental disorders communicate by gently guiding their clients’ hands over a specialkeyboard.

A theory should lead to hypotheses that, when tested,could fail to support the theory—in other words, falsifiability is a characteristic of good theories

weight of the evidence—the collection ofstudies, including replications, of the same theory

A replication means the study is conducted again to test whether the result is consistent

after the study is designed but before collecting anydata, the researcher states publicly what the study’s outcome is expected to be (perhaps using a time-stamped Internet tool). It’s unconvincing if a researcher collects the data first and then claims, “I knewthat would happen all along.”

Data are a set of observations.

involves using evidence from the senses (sight, hearing, touch) or frominstruments that assist the senses (such as thermometers, timers, photographs, and questionnaires) as thebasis for conclusions.

A theory is a set of statements—as simple as possible—that describes general principles about howvariables relate to one another.

It’s the specific outcome the researcherwill observe in a study if the theory is accurate.

Has a warlock cursed my phone?