[David Goldstein (2013.07.16.10:53)]
Dear Friends,
Here are my answers to the study guide for Chapter 2. I continue to look forward to hearing some more from you.
Chapter 2, Models and Generalizations
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Can
you think of two or three examples of psychological theories that are
examples of âextrapolationâ?- type theories, per Powers description in that
section of Chapter 2?
All psychological testing seems to be of this type. For
example, to predict how well a first grader will learn to read, one can test
them to see how many alphabet letters they can name or how well they can
perform phonemic awareness tasks. A second example, to predict how well a
person will do in college, the SAT is given.
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Can
you think of two or three examples of psychological theories that are
examples of âabstractionâ?-type theories?
Factor analysis studies seem to be of the abstraction type.
The concept of general intelligence, and associated IQ measure, came from the
fact that many ability tests correlate with each other. As a second example,
the so called âbig fiveâ? personality traits are saying that all personality
traits are describable in terms of these five variables which distinguish
people.
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Can
you think of two or three examples of psychological theories that are
examples of âmodelâ?-type theories?
One of my teachers, Dr. David Zeaman, had an
attention-retention model of two-choice retarded discrimination learning. It
did not predict the behavior of an individual, but was an attempt to show how
about 20 generalizations in this particular area of study could be predicted
from the model. I really donât remember being exposed to any modeling approach
like that in PCT.
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David
pointed me to a paper in * American
Psychologist* that is ostensibly about modeling in psychology. I have
made the paper accessible in my dropbox file at:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31298693/AP%20Modeling.pdf
This is a pretty technical and
boring paper (just the kind I like) but if you are willing to read it I would
be interested in hearing whether you think the models described in the paper
are of the extrapolation, abstraction, or model-type described by Powers in
this chapter.
I donât think that it is important to consider the specific
models. His general points is that we should move away from null hypothesis
testing and move towards testing more specific predictions from specific
theories. It is probably not the kind of model that Bill has in mind.
Again, try the two âLeading Questionsâ? at the end of Chapter
2. You might like to speculate on what these questions are leading to.
Leading Questions:
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The average of 6, 8, 12,
and 14 is 10. But none of the arrows hit the target. The standard
deviation of these values leads to z-scores of -1.10, -.55, 55, 1.10. None of these would be considered deviant
enough from the mean of 10 to be âstatistically significant.â?
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This example shows the problem
with extrapolation. The stone wall will stop the tortoise from continuing
to move.