Doing Research in Psychology: Advanced

Every day we make decisions that guide our behaviour by relying on our tacit knowledge about the world. We form impressions and make predictions based on personal experience. But our cognitive architecture leaves us ill-equipped to deal with random and unusual events, and the probabilistic inferences we make about the world with imperfect data are often wrong. With mass media and vast datasets now at our fingertips online, sound scientific and statistical thinking has never been more important for evaluating claims made with data. The goal of this capstone course is to challenge you to think critically about research methods in psychology, bringing together and extending what you've learned about research design and statistics. We will apply scientific and statistical concepts like regression to the mean, the law of large and small numbers, correlation, causation, replication, generality, fidelity, and control, to a variety of real-world questions. We will discuss classic and contemporary meta-science problems, open science practices, and how the credibility revolution is changing the way we do and evaluate research in psychology. You will put all of this into practice by critically evaluating popular psychological claims, presenting your principled arguments to your peers, and critically reflecting on thorny methodological problems. The emphasis in this course is on when and why particular methods and statistical tools might be applied, and how to formulate a principled argument for what they can (and can't) tell us.