Individual Article Review #1 Let's practice identifying the degree to which psychological research may focus on different goals. Research can vary along a continuum from basic research to applied research (see pages 11-13 of your text). Additionally, research may pursue different goals (see pages 8- 11). Let's also try out identifying conceptual variables and variables that have been given an operational definition (see pages 63-67). For example, a conceptual variable might be "happiness," whereas one operational definition of happiness might be the sum score on a happiness self-report scale. 1. Where would you place the research of Loftus and Palmer (1974) on the continuum from basic to applied? Most importantly, justify your placement. o Very basic o Somewhat basic o Somewhat applied o Very applied Please type your responses in blue. 2. Which of the four scientific goals does this research seek to address? Talk about each of the four goals and justify why the research does or does not seek to address the four scientific goals of research in psychology? Make sure to justify each of your assessments and take care that you are using the terminology carefully.
Describing behaviour: I believe that the research of Loftus and Palmer(1974) didn't aim at describing behavior. Since this research is trying to investigate the relationship between the verbal language and people's memory regarding their witnessed event. In the introduction of this report, the authors first discussed about the frequently inaccuracies in reporting numerical distance, time, and speed, and then proposed their hypothesis, the phrasing of question may elicit the speed misjudgement by the witnesses, which was trying to identify a relationship between question forms and people's judgement, and was beyond the ability of describing behavior, which might be "people answer the speed of car in accidents". Predicting behaviour: From my perspective, this research is not seeking to address the goal of preciting behaviors as well. This is because predicting behaviors requires the report to state a correlational relationship instead a causal one. In this case, if this report serves to predict behaviors, then the description should be "there are more inaccuracies in judging speed of cars in accidents that track when leading questions are asked, and the authors might need to avoid using "elicit", "leading to", "shifing"and "causing" in their report. Determining causes: In my view, finding a causal inference is the goal of this research pursuing. Showing in the discussion of experiment 1, two interpretations towards the result of the first experiment ( Most subjects who are asked question with verbs to different degree are very deviated from the average speed in the film, among which participants whose questions are with smach reported the most differential speed ) are question form biases people's reponse and question form changes subjects' memory. The "biases" and "changes" all refer to direct alters on peoples'influence, which are obvious indicators of causal relstionship between the two variables. Explaining behaviour: As for explaining the behaviors, I think the authors clearly depicted this purpose in the second