Читать книгу Methods in Psychological Research - Annabel Ness Evans - Страница 49

Very often, some life event inspires a researcher. Many years ago, one of your authors met a man who could not remember anything he had just learned. She had to introduce herself to him every time she met with him because he could not remember ever having met her before. She found this to be such an interesting phenomenon that she decided, when she began her graduate training, that she would focus on human memory.

Have you noticed that people in elevators rarely make eye contact with you? Have you ever found yourself trapped on the phone by a telemarketer, unable to just hang up? These kinds of personal experiences are a great source of research ideas. As psychology students know, Pavlov did not set out to discover the basic laws of classical conditioning. He was not even interested in psychology. But he noticed something odd in the behavior of his dogs when doing research on digestion. This personal experience led him to begin investigation into an entirely new area.