Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 58

What makes for a good social psychological question? The primary criterion is the extent to which the question is answerable using social psychological methods. In other words, a good question is an empirical question—one that can be tackled by systematically collecting and analyzing data. Take a question commonly asked in philosophy classes: “Are humans inherently evil or good?” While a profound and intriguing question, it is not one that can be answered by studying people and gathering data about their thoughts, feelings, or behavior. However, by narrowing it down we can transform it into a question worthy of social psychology. First, pick a behavior that you would say that, when people enact it, they are doing “good” (go ahead and choose one). Perhaps you consider recycling to be a good behavior and want to know why more people don’t recycle. Next you need to identify something about the recycling process that may be a factor in whether or not people recycle. For instance, you could ask what kinds of message appeals are effective in increasing recycling.

The next step is to turn your question into a scientific hypothesis or a prediction about the nature of social phenomena. Oftentimes hypotheses take the form of propositions about how two factors are related to one another. In this case, you might hypothesize that messages that tell people what they should do (which is to recycle) will work better than messages that tell people what they shouldn’t do (which is to stop throwing recyclable materials into trash cans). Once a testable hypothesis has been formed, the study can be designed and conducted. In the next section, we move to the important role of theories in social psychology.

Hypothesis: Prediction about the nature of social phenomena, oftentimes in the form of a proposition about how two factors are related to one another