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Experimentology - 2 Theories

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When you do an experiment, sometimes you just want to see what happens, like a kid knocking down a tower made of blocks. And sometimes you want to know the answer to a specific applied question, like “will giving a midterm vs. weekly quizzes lead students in a class to perform better on the final?” But more often, our goal is to create theories that help us explain and predict new observations. What is a theory? We’ll argue here that we should think of psychological theories as sets of proposed relationships among constructs, which are variables that we think play causal roles in determining behavior. In this conception of theories, the role of causality is central: theories are guesses about the causal structure of the mind and about the causal relationships between the mind and the world. This definition doesn’t include everything that gets called a “theory” in psychology. We describe the continuum between theories and frameworks – broad sets of ideas that guide research but don’t ma

2 Theories – Experimentology Note learning goals Define theories and their components Contrast different philosophical views on scientific theories Analyze features of an experiment that can lead to strong tests of theory Discuss the role of formalization in theory development When you do an experiment, sometimes you just want to see what happens, like a kid knocking down a tower made of blocks. And sometimes you want to know the answer to a specific applied question, like “Will giving a midterm vs weekly quizzes lead students in a class to perform better on the final?” But more often, our goa

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