Introduction to Experiment Design

This video outlines the purpose of conducting psychological experiments.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Understand the logic of building experiments
2. Understand what we can learn from the results of experiments

Video

Question 1

Part of scientists’ job is to find out when their explanations are wrong. How do you think experiments can help them achieve this aim?

You can find the answer after the video

Experiments make a frequent appearance in contemporary psychological science. In this video, we discuss why they are important and what we can learn from them. We will illustrate the answers to these questions with the Stroop task.

This video is presented by Aba Szollosi, who is a postdoctoral researcher in Psychology. Contact: aba.szollosi@ed.ac.uk

Download the slides for this presentation here.

Solution

Experiments can help us achieve this aim by providing tests for our explanations. If the results are not what we expected, we know that there is a problem with our explanation.