Being a scientist, doing a science

Written by Rob Davies

NoteOverview

This week Rob introduces you to what it means to do psychological science.

You can navigate to each in the side bar on the right.

Lectures

Interactive lecture – Being a scientist, doing a science: watch this to get started on learning and thinking about what we are going to be doing in Psychology

You can watch the lecture for the video using the video playback windows shown next. The lecture is broken into five parts, each about 15 minutes long (some a bit longer).

  1. Big ideas, difficult questions
  2. The hardest science
  3. The logic, the challenges
  4. Science is a thing that is done by people
  5. Science is a social activity: fads, inequities and biases
Tip

During the lecture, I suggest some questions you can think about. Reflecting on your responses to these questions will help you to learn.

You can download the lecture slides as a .html file you can open in any browser.

The slides end with a references list but don’t worry about reading what’s in the references list, we give you recommended readings in Section 2.

Tip

The slides presented in the next videos can be downloaded as a web page: doing-being-science.html.

When you download the file, double click on it to open it in your usual web browser for viewing.

Next, you can see the lecture elements. We recommend that you watch them in sequence.

  1. Big ideas, difficult questions (~17 minutes). What is science, how do we do it?

  1. The hardest science (~15 minutes). Why learning about people is hard, and why revolutionary new ways of doing psychological science are our response to the challenges.

  1. The logic, the challenges (~25 minutes). The logic of the scientific method, and the challengesin doing science when it involves trying to understand people.

  1. Science is a thing that is done by people (~18 minutes). How is it that groups of people who may not know or like or trust each other can produce this thing: science?

  1. Science is a social activity: fads, inequities and biases (15 minutes). What do we study? Who does the studying? Fads, inequities and biases, and taking responsibility.

Reading

TipEasy access to readings

All reading is accessible via the library.

  • Essential: We expect you to be familiar with these reading. You will be assessed on this.
  • Recommended: We highly recommend these readings. They often provide a different perspective, or explain things in a different way.
  • Optional: Further readings for those interested.

This week, the reading is optional but Recommended:

  • McMillan, B. T. M., Baumgartner, H.A., Bergmann, C. et al. (2026). What 5000 babies can tell us about developing minds and how to study them. Communications Psychology, 4, 1-5. Recommended
  • Peterson, D. (2016). The baby factory: Difficult research objects, disciplinary standards, and the production of statistical significance. Socius, 2, 1-10. Recommended
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