In this video I discuss three difficulties of conducting psychology research: complexity, variability, and reactivity. I also explain demand characteristics, social desirability, and the Hawthorne Effect.
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Video transcript:
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review.
In this video I’d like to talk about some of the difficulties of conducting psychological research and the first problem that we have is that human behavior is incredibly complex.
So psychologists want to know about things that are complicated they want to know about things like depression or levels of aggression or anxiety and these are things that are pretty much impossible to narrow down to a single measurement.
The second problem that we have is that of variation. So the things that we want to measure are changing all the time. If I wanted to measure the length of this coffee table but it kept changing in size it would be a pretty difficult task. That’s exactly what happens with psychological variables so I can measure your level of happiness now and 10 minutes later it might be completely different.
We have this problem of variation within individuals; the same person gets two very different measurements from one time to another. We also have a problem of variation between individuals. So the way that you respond to a particular stimulus might be completely different from the way that I respond to the exact same stimulus and this can make it really difficult for us to generalize our results from one person to another.
The third problem that we have is that measuring actually changes people. So when I measure my coffee table it doesn’t shrink in fear or expand with pride but people can change when we measure them. You might decide to exaggerate your level of happiness to put me at ease or in another situation you might decide to downplay your level of happiness because you want to avoid making me jealous.
This brings us to a problem known as demand characteristics
and demand characteristics refer to aspects of the situation that influence how people respond. So the situation influences the responses that we get. So for example if I were to do a study on illegal drug use and to collect some data I decide to
bring each of my students into my office and, along with a police officer, I ask them if they’ve ever used illegal drugs
Now of course you can see that if my results said “oh my students have never used illegal drugs” you can see the problem here, the problem is I’ve created a situation that demands a particular response and so I’m only going to get that response and that means my data isn’t going to be accurate
Now that’s an extreme example and kind of an obvious one
but this effect can be more subtle and one way that it happens is known as social desirability. This refers to the idea that people give responses that they think are socially acceptable. In other words they want to give the “right” or “correct” response even if that’s not the accurate response. So people want to be “good” or “correct” in terms of what society or what they think the researchers expect from them. And you could see this if you went out and asked people, they’d probably tell you that they exercise a lot more often than they actually do.
We also see how measuring can change people in what’s known as the Hawthorne Effect. This comes from a place known as the Hawthorne Works and this was a Western Electric factory outside of Chicago. And in the 1920s and 1930s some researchers did some studies on worker productivity and what they found was that if they increased the lighting that productivity went up but then it gradually went back to its baseline.
And then they tried dimming the lighting and they found that productivity went up and then gradually returned back to the baseline. Then they tried rearranging some things in the workplace and they found that productivity went up again then gradually went back to normal. So they put things back how they were and productivity went up again and then gradually went back to baseline.
So what was going on? Well what the Hawthorne Effect refers to is the idea that any changes can have an influence. In this case anything they changed influenced the workers but the workers were really just responding to the fact that something changed. They weren’t responding to the specific change, it wasn’t actually lighting that influenced productivity. It was the fact that something in the workplace had changed. And so we can’t say for sure that a particular variable is responsible for a change when maybe it was the case that just having a change had an influence.
These three problems we have of complexity, variation, and responsiveness to situations are problems that we can’t really eliminate from psychological research. They’re always going to be there but we can do our best to be aware of them and then try to reduce their influence in order to get more accurate data on human behavior.
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