The Goals of Science

Hello. I'm Helena Patterson, and I'm a lecturer at the University of Glasgow.

My subject is psychology,

and, um, I do both teaching here, and I also study difference.

Studying difference means that I'm interested in

what makes us unique as human beings,

but not only that more to do how other people perceive that.

And so I study social psychology.

one of the important things about my science is that

it is related to things like prejudice and stigma,

which means that we really have to understand the science that

I that we use in order to make our conclusions and to

make interventions or to give advice to people about how they can

either combat those things or understand them better within our society.

In this series of lectures,

I'm going to talk a little bit about psychology as a science,

I'm going to talk about things like the scientific method.

I'm going to talk about some of the important things that we

need to pay attention to when we are learning about science,

but also and when we're when we're using science.

But also,

the other important thing is just to evaluate the science a

little bit more because a few years ago our science broke,

and that is a bit that I'm going to talk about

a little bit towards the end of the series of talks.

Okay, in this first lecture,

I'm going to talk a little bit about the goals of science,

just the things that we're interested in achieving with our science.

There is a real motivation to do science, right,

And maybe you've come across some things already as

you have studied psychology that's related to learning.

But there's many myths about learning.

For instance,

maybe you've learned about this idea of right brained and left brained people.

Well, that is kind of something that's based a little bit on fallacy.

It doesn't necessarily work exactly like that.

The different parts of our brains are interconnected.

Maybe you've heard learned about things like preschooler

stimulation,

where you have to get a little baby really stimulated

and do lots and lots of things for them,

for their brains to be able to grow.

But again,

that is based on science that is not necessarily being shown to help Children.

Instead,

you often get very overstimulated little

preschoolers because people are trying to

make their spaces to active or too busy.

Or maybe you've learned about learning styles,

the idea that different people learn in different ways and that

we need to pay attention to those kinds of learning styles.

All of these things are based on ideas and theories that

have proven not to be on the strongest of foundations.

And it's really important because all of those things

have resulted in changes to the behaviour that people have

made and changes to the way the teachers deal with

people to the way that parents deal with Children.

And so it's really important for us to be able to understand a little bit more about

the science that we

that we use in order to learn about the world and learn about human behaviour,

so that when we give advice to people or when we make suggestions to people,

or when we put knowledge behind our evidence behind the claim

that we know that that is on a solid foundation,

that there is strong evidence that a person can use properly.

So the scientific method is a systematic and dynamic

procedure of observing and measuring the world around us,

but not the world around us,

necessarily when we're psychologists were interested in

the behaviour of people within that world

that is slightly different from the observation of the natural world for instance,

biology where you might be studying plants or you might be study diseases.

Human behaviour is very complicated and it's got many complex

inter place to it and psychology is a large subject.

We were just at the beginning of understanding a lot of that.

So one of the goals of science that is to make new knowledge to or to

observe the world and understand a little bit

more about what goes on within our world.

We also want to then explain that we want to

observe it first and then we want to explain it.

We want to explain why the things happen like this.

We want to generate theories and understand

human behaviour from within a framework,

and then beyond that, we want to predict what's going to happen next.

We want to be able to say, If I do one thing, what's going to happen next?

What is going to be the next thing that's going to happen?

How could I predict what's going to happen if I were to teach a child in

a certain way what will happen at the end when that person says an exam,

will I have made a good thing for them?

Or will there be something that is a challenge for them?

So these are all things that we're interested in doing with science.

We want to observe the world. We want to then explain the world.

And then we want to be able to predict what's

going to happen in the world if from our actions.

If if we do certain things

and this is all achieved through research,

the systematic and careful collection of data and the analysis of that data,

the scientific method then involves

the observing and measuring of phenomena.

Measurement is one of the most important tools in our arsenal of

tools for measuring behaviour and performance.

We have to be able to count things.

We have to be able to say how one kind

of behaviour is different from another kind of behaviour.

We have to be able to show things like improvement from one thing to another,

if that's the intervention that we're interested in,

and we also want to be able to say, What are the difference between different people,

for instance, or what are the results of the interventions that we have made

another important tool. That we use our theories?

This is the theories that we generate in order to understand

and make frameworks are about the world and about human behaviour,

so that we can understand how things fit together so

we can understand how the different parts of our physiology,

for instance,

or a cognition or our social world all fit together

in order to make for one set of behaviours.

And so theories interact very closely with the way that we

measure things because we cannot have a theory without measurement,

and we can't have measurement without first making

a framework of what we're going to be

studying.

So these things work intimately together in order for

us to advance our science and understand human behaviour.

So in summary,

this section was about introducing the scientific method.

We're interested in understanding a little bit more

about observing things,

explaining things,

predicting things and then learning a little bit more about the control,

what we can, how we can manipulate the world around us based on this knowledge.

In the next section, we're going to talk a little bit more about different theories