Lecture
To what extent is psychological experimentation specific in relation to the experimental designs that have developed in the natural sciences?
Options:
The psychological experiment is impossible;
The psychological experiment replicates the paradigm of the natural-science experiment;
Psychological hypotheses and explanations are specific, which means the approach must be modified, namely:
- There must be certain assumptions about the type of experimental manipulation;
- The use of the tools of formal planning is modified (as a result of the different construction of theoretical knowledge and the specific nature of psychological variables)
- Substantive planning likewise cannot be reduced to the norms applied in testing natural-science hypotheses.
The experiment in behavioral psychology was indeed aimed at approximating natural-science norms, but even here the development of designs involving intervening variables introduced the problem of psychological reconstructions.
Psychological reality cannot be fully represented in the indicators recorded by the methods used. Moreover, there always remains a field of hypotheses about the connection of an indicator with a multitude of psychological processes or states. The psychologist can reconstruct, that is, mentally recreate, on the basis of observable and recordable indicators, those psychological processes that are inaccessible to observation.
What is common in the implementation of the experimental method: the psychologist uses the accepted norms for testing causal hypotheses; in grounding a causal explanation, the psychologist takes up those aspects of relating to subjective reality as an object of study that Polanyi called personal knowledge.
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