Part 1: Theory

Philosophers and psychologists have long observed that people’s take on reality can be highly relative; two people looking at the same thing can perceive very different things. We can all confirm this ourselves by browsing through the comments section of any news story posted on social media. Our next door neighbors may hold different views than we do on politics or social issues because they have grown up in a different social reality than we did. Every human mind is compelled to create narratives about reality that appear to make sense and that serve the many practical purposes required for individual and collective functioning (Mar, 2004). Scientists are no different, but the way we develop our narratives is grounded in objectivity, based on evidence. That evidence is provided to us using the scientific process (sometimes referred to as the scientific method), which you have undoubtedly learned about in several science-based courses since elementary school, and we will cover yet again in Chapter 2 of the textbook. 

The narratives that scientists use to explain and understand phenomena are referred to as theories. A theory is a set of interrelated propositions (i.e. educated/informed explanations) concerning some set of phenomena. What makes these different from the everyday theories that laypeople hold? First, our theories must be tested, hence why we are also covering Chapter 3 on Research Methods in this Lesson, as the two are inextricably tied together. It is not enough for a social psychologist to observe some behavior in the real world and declare a theory based on their informal observations. They must take those observations and develop a research study that can confirm or disconfirm their initial observations with empirical evidence.

How do we test a theory? Well, first we start out with a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a prediction about a relationship between variables. Let's use an example of caffeine and performance on the quizzes in this course. If we start with a theory that states that caffeine improves cognitive performance, what prediction could we derive from this? Well, how about students who consume caffeinated coffee 30 minutes before taking the quizzes will perform significantly better than students who drink decaffeinated coffee 30 minutes before taking the quizzes. It is important to note the specificity of this hypothesis....there is no guessing what the prediction is. There is no ambiguity. This makes the hypothesis falsifiable, that is, it can be specifically tested and it will either be supported or it will be falsified. We can assign students to drink caffeinated coffee or decaffeinated coffee and see how their quiz performance differs. This is hypothesis testing, which is where we utilize research methods to determine if our hypothesis is supported or not. Let's assume we run this study, and we find that caffeinated students perform, on average, 10% better than decaffeinated students on the quizzes, this observation of the data provides support for our original theory. Thus the theory that caffeine improves cognitive performance is supported.

It is important to note that this does not set the theory in stone. As you will note from Figure 2.1 in the textbook, this is a never ending cycle. The theory is always subject to testing and refining. For instance, there may be boundary conditions that limit how generalizable the theory may be. For instance, what if we repeated our caffeine study in a really difficult mathematics course, where students reported having more anxiety than they do in this course. Perhaps the caffeine condition would make those students too jittery to perform well on the quizzes, and hence decrease performance. Additionally, it is important to replicate our original findings, preferably using different study parameters, to make sure our findings were not a fluke. For instance, re-running this study using Applied Social Psychology students at another university to ensure that the results don't simply apply to a subgroup of individuals.