1. Week 1 - Being a scientist, doing a science

Written by Rob Davies and Margriet Groen

Overview

This week we focus on two strands of learning:

  1. Rob introduces you to what it means to do psychological science.
  2. Margriet talks you through how to get started in RStudio.

The materials we have prepared to support your learning are arranged in four parts:

  • Lectures
  • Reading
  • Pre-lab activities
  • Lab activities

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

Lectures

What this module is about: begin here

Introduction to the module (~18 minutes)

Watch this part first. It gives an overview of what the module is about, how the module is organised, how you’ll be assessed and how you can ask for help. The video has captions, in case you find that helpful. You can download the slides and a transcript from the links below the video.

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, we suggest some questions you can think about. Responding to these questions will help you to learn.

It would be great if you cared to enter your questions to me (Rob) about the lecture. You can do that anonymously by clicking on this link and typing in your thoughts:

https://app.sli.do/event/gChjffSSfLvkAJSr9GNuCA

In our practical classes in Week 1, we will return to three questions as part of our opening discussions:

  1. What psychological claims do you see online are pseudoscientific?
  2. How do you recognize if you are looking at credible science?
  3. What is the next revolution for psychological science? Are we already there?

This is a quick (~4 minutes) walk through of how you can watch the video lecture, with tips on how to make playback accessible and convenient.

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.

Getting started with your practical work: you need this for the labs

  1. How to work with R-Studio (~15 minutes)
  1. How to build a plot(~28 minutes)

Reading

Easy access to readings

All reading is accessible via the library. You can go to Moodle -> Library Resources -> Resource List or you can follow this link. Readings have one of the following tags:

  • 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.

The reading list is divided into multiple sections:

  • Reading associated with statistics: this contains links to readings useful for the development of statistical concepts and skills. The main textbook Fundamental statistics for the behavioral sciences by Howell (Essential) lives here.
  • Reading associated with psychological research principles and design: this contains links to readings that provide a good basis for foundational knowledge around research design.
  • Reading associated with Open Science principles and practices: this contains links to key literature on the Open Science movement.
  • Week by week: these contain links to key reading for that week that are not listed on any of the more general lists above.

For week 1, the reading is:

  • 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. Essential
  • Peterson, D. (2016). The baby factory: Difficult research objects, disciplinary standards, and the production of statistical significance. Socius, 2, 1-10. Recommended
  • Wright, D. B., Barnett, J., & Breakwell, G. M. (2020). Psychology as a science: What is science? In G. M. Breakwell, D. B. Wright, & J. Barnett (Eds.), Research methods in psychology (5th ed., pp. 119–138). SAGE Publications. Recommended

Pre-lab activities

We often ask you to do a few things in RStudio before you attend your lab session. Not this week though, so you are ready for the in-person lab session. Well done!

Lab activities

Lab activity 1: Reading in data and creating a plot

Background

We’ve all been there: you may be trying to focus on a lecture, but a thought on what you would like to have for lunch pops into your mind. Mind wandering describes the common experience of one’s thoughts drifting away from the task at hand towards self-generated thoughts and feelings (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). Today, we’ll work with some publicly available data from a research project on mind wandering. Anna Schubert and colleagues (Schubert et al., 2024) conducted a study in which they created a 12-item questionnaire that measures how often your mind wanders without meaning to, how often you let it wander on purpose, and how aware you are when it happens. You can have a look at the questionnaire here.

Aims of the activity

We are going to:

  1. Download the files
  2. Setup the appropriate bits and pieces in RStudio
  3. Read in the data
  4. Build a plot
Watch the ‘How to’ lecture

If you haven’t done so already, this is a good time to watch the ‘How to’ video (here Section 1.3) on ‘How to build a plot’.

Step 1: Download the files

To complete this lab activity you will need two files:

  1. We’ll work with an example script called 4141_wk1_lab_act1.qmd. This is a Quarto document.
  2. We need a data file called data_bmw3.csv. This is a file that contains the responses of the participants in one of the studies reported on in the paper by Schubert et al. (2024). It is a file of the type .csv. This means that individual bits of data are separated by comma’s. We’ll often use .csv files.

You can download the files here: 4141_wk1_lab.zip. Usually they will be saved in your ‘Downloads’ folder.

Next, upload the zip-folder as it is to your Files space on the R-server (bottom right quadrant; no need to extract the files first).

Finally, open the example script by clicking on the file called 4141_wk1_lab_act1.qmd in the Files space on the R-server.

Steps 2, 3 and 4

For steps 2, 3 and 4, you’ll be working in RStudio.

References

Schubert, A.-L., Frischkorn, G. T., Sadus, K., Welhaf, M. S., Kane, M. J., & Rummel, J. (2024). The brief mind wandering three-factor scale (BMW-3). Behavior Research Methods, 56(8), 8720-8744. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02500-6

Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2006). The restless mind. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6),{target=“_blank” rel=“noopener”}

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