The hypothesis being addressed is to test whether psychics have clairvoyant powers or not. Dr. Peter Venkman is interested in testing this hypothesis and thus showing the existence of ESP. 1b. Dr. Venkman’s standpoint is supported and rejected by a great deal of evidence. This can be seen in many ways. For example, evidence that is for Dr. Venkman’s argument is the story “Futility,” which was written by Morgan Robertson in 1898. Robertson’s novel was about a huge ship called the Titan which was destroyed by the presence of thick fog and therefore, crashed into an iceberg and sunk killing many people. Due to the reason that there was a scarcity of lifeboats on board, the number of fatalities were high. Similar to that of Robertson’s story, …show more content…
He basically knew how a ship functioned and what would happen to it in a certain situation. This demonstrates that Robertson was very knowledgeable about the topic thereby he did not have a form of ESP known as precognition as skeptics would say. As a whole, this is a view seen by many skeptics about the nonexistence of ESP. Another example of the doubtfulness of the existence of ESP is the fact that on an unconscious level, our brain is handling information that our five senses pick up on. Therefore, people tend to make exceptionally right guesses by assembling pieces together and adapting to irrelevant information. In short, skeptics believe that ESP is not real.
2. Method
2a. (i) The participants that I would test for this experiment would be the psychics and the non-psychics. Indeed, for this experiment, the psychics and the non-psychics are the target populations. I would not sample the populations randomly because I want to test the two different groups alone. If I assign a psychic into the non-psychic group or vice versa, it would throw off the results. 2a. (ii) In each group, I would test fifty individuals. I would do so because the more participants I have, the better the results would be. I plan to
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I would perform a statistical test, a t-test on the experiment I designed for Dr. Venkman by taking the difference between the mean between the two groups, the psychics and the non-psychics. Then, I would calculate the variance between the psychics and non-psychics. Furthermore, I would then get a square root by taking the variance of the difference between both groups. Lastly, I would obtain a value for t and analyze it. 3b. I would calculate the variation within groups by taking the standard deviation of both the psychic and non-psychic group, that is the difference of the scores from the mean of the two groups. 3c. Statistical significance is obtained when a p-value is less than alpha (the significance level) which is in most cases 0.05. It represents how closely the outcome occurred due to chance. If the results between the psychics and non-psychics are significantly significant then I would conclude that the variance between both groups is small and the difference between the psychics and non-psychics is comparatively
“ Some Close Encounters of a Mental Kind ” by Stephen Jay Gould is about the tendency for our minds to ‘lie’ to ourselves because of a certain key phrase that can cause people to believe certain events happened. This can be done by altering the types of question you want the victim to hear. It can be a certain modified questions or the way the question are presented to us that can cause our answers to be slightly false.
1.There will be two groups, the control and experimental groups. Each group will have the same amount of participants with equal numbers of boys and girls. The first group will be the control group(rest). The second group will be the experimental group(exercise).
Sheldrake proposes that the concept of the mind existing outside of the body can be proved by a simple scientific experiment. The experiment is simply determining whether or not people can sense or know someone is staring at them with their backs turned away. Sheldrake conducted his own experiments using this method and found that “The overall results from ten different experiments (involving more than 120 subjects) were 1,858 correct guesses as against 1,638 incorrect guesses; in other words 53.1 percent of the guesses were correct, 3.1 percent above the chance level of 50 percent.” (Sheldrake, Seven Experiments 119) How significant is this number? To the average person this seems like a rather insignificant difference, but Sheldrake sees this as “highly significant statistically” (Sheldrake, Seven Experiments 119)
A sample of children ranging from 4 to 13 years old are going to be asked to watch a Rainbow Brite video. The children will be randomly picked from a childcare center. To ensure that the children are going to be randomly assigned, the children will range in different age groups. The first group will consist of 4, 6, and 8 year olds. The second group will consist of 10,12, and 14 year olds. It would have to be a field experiment because you have to go out and collect the data.
The reliability and usefulness of a theory in psychology is extremely important as psychology can deal with very sensitive topics, help implement social policies and treat patients. As psychology is a subject that is involved in a number of areas, the theories that are posited by researchers need to be as accurate as possible. One way to do this is to look back in history and find examples of good scientific practices and understand what made them good.
The Project Implicit organization provides statistical information that is scientifically based on unconscious thoughts and feelings. Now I can say after taking this test I think I would have picked a different test topic. I think I had chosen
David Rosenhans experiment contained two parts; the first was admitting pseudo-patients into psychiatric hospitals without the doctors or nurses knowledge. David Rosenhan and his participants all willingly committed themselves to the psychiatric hospital. “8 people without any history of psychiatric illness presented themselves at various mental hospitals. Each of these pseudo-patients arrived at the admissions office complaining of a single (feigned) symptom: vague auditory hallucinations” (Scribner). All of the participants came from a different background and were admitted into several different hospitals.
For both the monohybrid cross, and dihybrid cross chi-square tables were used to determine whether the deviation of the experiment was due to chance alone. The chi-square result for the monohybrid cross resulted in 6.53, ending up between .05 (X2= 5.991) and .01 (X2=9.210) with a degree of freedom of n=2 (3-1). This result leads to the rejection of the null hypothesis because there was only a 5% chance that the observations were due to chance alone. As for the dihybrid cross, the chi-square data resulted in 4.73 landing in between .20 (X2=4.642) and .05 (X2=7.815). This resulted in the null hypothesis being accepted since it is higher than .05.
In addition all the objects, people and the sky that we perceive, and all our experiences are just the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings. (ibid.). However, he start by posing doubts by asking that if our brains were in a vat, could we say or think that we were (Putnam, 1981:7). He furthermore argued that we could not (ibid.). For Putnam, it cannot be true that, if our brains are a vat and we say or think that we were, for Putnam it is self-refuting (ibid.).
n hypothesis of the experiment is that the group containing four members will perform better than the group containing two members. This is the foundation from which we have conducted our experiment.
Next, compute a score for each participant in the following way: For each question, score a +1 if the participant's personal answer and predicted UB mean are either both below or both above the actual UB mean; score a -1 if the participant's personal score and predicted class mean are on opposite sides of the actual UB mean. Sum all six questions so that each participant now has a single score that ranges between -6 and +6. If people are randomly selected, the average score for all students should be zero. In contrast, if people are in the direction of their own beliefs, the average should be greater than zero. A simple, one-group t-test can be calculated using a predicted difference of zero for the null hypothesis.
Overall, memories does not provide certainty because what we see or remember may not be reality. Also, the way we remember something can be changed throughout time and that memory will eventually fade away. Although certainty is blessing because it provides us warmth, comfort and secure, it is more of a great danger because it gives out false information and tricks our mind into believing something that is not real or true. Therefore, I am fully convinced by Gould’s essay because I completely doubt what people observe or remember since memories does not provide certainty.
The experiments were quite simple, in that there was a seemingly harmless task to be performed, and the participants were instructed to choose the estimation of the lengths of a line when compared to two ...
What she has discovered over her more than thirty-year career, is that when witnesses are primed with leading questions, the suggestibility of even one word can cause that information to be integrated into a person’s memory then combined with other information to create a composite memory of what they believe is an authentic occurrence, but in reality, it is misinformation acceptance. Here some examples that Dr. Loftus has used in her