Description
The starting point of any science is description. In everyday life, we all observe and describe people, often drawing conclusions about why they think, feel, and act as they do. Professional psychologists do much the same, though more objectively and systematically, through
- case studies (in-depth analyses of individuals or groups).
- naturalistic observations (recording the natural behavior of many individuals).
- surveys and interviews (asking people questions).
The Case Study
Among the oldest research methods, the case study examines one individual or group in depth in the hope of revealing things true of us all. Some examples:
- Brain damage. Much of our early knowledge about the brain came from case studies of individuals who suffered particular impairments after damage to a certain brain region.
- Children’s minds. Jean Piaget taught us about children’s thinking after carefully observing and questioning only a few children.
- Animal intelligence. Studies of various animals, including only a few chimpanzees, have revealed their capacity for understanding and language.
“ ‘Well my dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘human nature is very much the same everywhere, and of course, one has opportunities of observing it at closer quarters in a village’.”
Agatha Christie, The Tuesday Club Murders, 1933
Intensive case studies are sometimes very revealing, and they often suggest directions for further study.
But atypical individual cases may mislead us. Both in our everyday lives and in science, unrepresentative information can lead to mistaken judgments and false conclusions. Indeed, anytime a researcher mentions a finding (Smokers die younger: 95 percent of men over 85 are nonsmokers), someone is sure to offer a contradictory anecdote (Well, I have an uncle who smoked two packs a day and lived to be 89). Dramatic stories and personal experiences (even psychological case examples) command our attention and are easily remembered. Journalists understand that, and often begin their articles with compelling stories. Stories move us. But stories can mislead. Which of the following do you find more memorable? (1) “In one study of 1300 dream reports concerning a kidnapped child, only 5 percent correctly envisioned the child as dead” (Murray & Wheeler, 1937). (2) “I know a man who dreamed his sister was in a car accident, and two days later she died in a head-on collision!” Numbers can be numbing, but the plural of anecdote is not evidence. A single story of someone who supposedly changed from gay to straight is not evidence that sexual orientation is a choice. As psychologist Gordon Allport (1954, p. 9) said, “Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.”
Freud and Little Hans Sigmund Freud’s case study of 5-year-old Hans’ extreme fear of horses led Freud to his theory of childhood sexuality. He conjectured that Hans felt unconscious desire for his mother, feared castration by his rival father, and then transferred this fear into his phobia about being bitten by a horse. As Modules 55 and 56 will explain, today’s psychological science discounts Freud’s theory of childhood sexuality but does agree that much of the human mind operates outside our conscious awareness.
The point to remember: Individual cases can suggest fruitful ideas. What’s true of all of us can be glimpsed in any one of us. To find those general truths, we must employ other research methods.
Naturalistic Observation
A natural observer “Observations, made in the natural habitat, helped to show that the societies and behavior of animals are far more complex than previously supposed,” chimpanzee observer Jane Goodall noted (1998).
A second descriptive method records behavior in natural environments. These naturalistic observations range from watching chimpanzee societies in the jungle, to videotaping and analyzing parent-child interactions in different cultures, to recording racial differences in students’ self-seating patterns in a school lunchroom.
Naturalistic observation has mostly been “small science”—science that can be done with pen and paper rather than fancy equipment and a big budget (Provine, 2012). But new technologies, such as smart-phone apps, body-worn sensors, and social media, are enabling “big data” observations. Using such tools, researchers can track people’s location, activities, and opinions—without interference. The billions of people on Facebook, Twitter, and Google have also created a huge new opportunity for big-data naturalistic observation. One research team studied the ups and downs of human moods by counting positive and negative words in 504 million Twitter messages from 84 countries (Golder & Macy, 2011). As Figure 5.2 shows, people seem happier on weekends, shortly after waking, and in the evenings. (Are late Saturday evenings often a happy time for you, too?) Another study found that the proportion of negative emotion (especially anger-related) words in 148 million tweets from 1347 U.S. counties predicted the counties’ heart disease rates. Moreover, it did so even better than other predictors such as smoking and obesity rates (Eichstaedt et al., 2015).
Figure 5.2 Twitter message moods, by time and by day
This illustrates how, without knowing anyone’s identity, big data enable researchers to study human behavior on a massive scale. It now is also possible to associate people’s moods with, for example, their locations or with the weather, and to study the spread of ideas through social networks.
Like the case study, naturalistic observation does not explain behavior. It describes it. Nevertheless, descriptions can be revealing. We once thought, for example, that only humans use tools. Then naturalistic observation revealed that chimpanzees sometimes insert a stick in a termite mound and withdraw it, eating the stick’s load of termites. Such unobtrusive naturalistic observations paved the way for later studies of animal thinking, language, and emotion, which further expanded our understanding of our fellow animals. Thanks to researchers’ observations, we know that chimpanzees and baboons use deception: Psychologists repeatedly saw one young baboon pretending to have been attacked by another as a tactic to get its mother to drive the other baboon away from its food (Whiten & Byrne, 1988).
Naturalistic observations also illuminate human behavior. Here are three findings you might enjoy:
- A funny finding. We humans laugh 30 times more often in social situations than in solitary situations (Provine, 2001). (Have you noticed how seldom you laugh when alone?)
- Sounding out students. What, really, are college psychology students saying and doing during their everyday lives? To find out, Matthias Mehl and his colleagues (2010) equipped 79 such students with electronic recorders. Using this experience sampling method, the researchers then eavesdropped on more than 23,000 half-minute life slices of students’ waking hours. Was happiness related to having simple talks or deeply involved conversations? The happiest participants avoided small talk and embraced meaningful conversations. Happy people would also rather talk than tweet. Does that surprise you?
- Culture and the pace of life. Naturalistic observation also enabled Robert Levine and Ara Norenzayan (1999) to compare the pace of life—walking speed, accuracy of public clocks, and so forth—in 31 countries. Their conclusion: Life is fastest paced in Japan and Western Europe, and slower paced in economically less-developed countries.
An EAR for naturalistic observation Psychologists Matthias Mehl and James Pennebaker have used electronically activated recorders (EARs) to sample naturally occurring slices of daily life. What are the advantages and disadvantages of naturalistic observation, such as Mehl and his colleagues used in this study?1
Naturalistic observation offers interesting snapshots of everyday life, but it does so without controlling for all the factors that may influence behavior. It’s one thing to observe the pace of life in various places, but another to understand what makes some people walk faster than others. Nevertheless, descriptions can be revealing: The starting point of any science is description.
The Survey
A survey looks at many cases in less depth, asking people to report their behavior or opinions. Questions about everything from cell-phone use to political opinions are put to the public. In recent surveys:
- half of all Americans reported experiencing more happiness and enjoyment than worry and stress on the previous day (Gallup, 2010).
- 1 in 5 people across 22 countries report believing that alien beings have come to Earth and now walk among us disguised as humans (Ipsos, 2010).
- 68 percent of all humans—some 5 billion people—say that religion is important in their daily lives (Diener et al., 2011).
But asking questions is tricky, and the answers often depend on how questions are worded and how respondents are chosen.
Wording Effects
Even subtle changes in the order or wording of questions can have major effects. People are more approving of “aid to the needy” than of “welfare,” of “not allowing” televised pornography than of “censoring” it, of “gun safety” laws than of “gun control” laws, and of “revenue enhancers” than of “taxes.” Because wording is such a delicate matter, critical thinkers will reflect on how the phrasing of a question might affect people’s expressed opinions.
Random Sampling
In everyday thinking, we tend to generalize from samples we observe, especially vivid cases. Given (a) a statistical summary of auto owners’ evaluations of their car make and (b) the vivid comments of two frustrated owners, our impression may be influenced as much by the two unhappy owners as by the many more summarized evaluations. The temptation to succumb to the sampling bias—to generalize from a few vivid but unrepresentative cases—is nearly irresistible.
It’s often not possible to survey the whole group. So how do you obtain a representative sample—say, of the students at your high school? How could you choose a sample that would represent the student population, the whole group you want to study and describe? Typically, you would seek a random sample, in which every person in the entire group has an equal chance of participating. You might number the names in the general student listing and then use a random number generator to pick your survey participants. (Sending each student a questionnaire wouldn’t work, because the conscientious people who returned it would not be a random sample.) Large representative samples are better than small ones, but a smaller representative sample of 100 is better than a larger unrepresentative sample of 500.
Political pollsters sample voters in national election surveys just this way. Using some 1500 randomly sampled people, drawn from all areas of a country, they can provide a remarkably accurate snapshot of the nation’s opinions. Without random sampling (also called random selection), large samples—including unrepresentative call-in or website polls—often give misleading results.
The point to remember: Before accepting survey findings, think critically. Consider the sample. The best basis for generalizing is from a representative sample. You cannot compensate for an unrepresentative sample by simply adding more people.