Assignment title: Information


The purpose of the second written assignment is to extend your scientific thinking about psychological issues. We will ask you to choose a research scenario and: (1) check it for factual mistakes or inconsistencies, (2) think about how the principles of scientific thinking and warning signs of pseudoscience apply to it, and (3) critique the research methods used in it.Below, you will find 3 scenarios, one from each of following topics: Sensation and Perception; Consciousness; and Learning. Choose one of these scenarios. Part 1: You should perform a fact check on the materials, finding 3 facts or definitions that are inconsistent with your lectures and/or the textbook. So, you need to base your responses on the information provided in lectures and/or Lilienfeld et al. (2014). Where the material in the scenario is inconsistent with the course material, you need to say what the inconsistent fact is, provide the correct information and the source from which the correct information was found – i.e. the textbook or lecture notes.Part 2: You should analyze the claims according to 1 of the 6 principles of scientific thinking and 1 of the 3 warning signs related to pseudoscientific claims. It is up to you to select the most relevant principles but in every case, if you think the scenario does a good job of following one of the principles, provide a detailed response as to why you think that. If you think the scenario does not do a good job of following one of the principles, provide a comprehensive answer and also say what would need to be done to make sure the scenario follows the principle.Part 3: You should analyze the research scenario and the claims it makes in relation to 2 different aspects of the research methods discussed in class or in Lilienfeld et al. (2014) in Chapter 2. In the lecture and textbook, a number of other issues related to research methods have been discussed. Below are some examples of things you might look for in the scenarios. Remember though that not every point will relate to every scenario and you may even find other weaknesses in research design that are not listed below:(1) Reactivity - refers to the often-social nature of data collection in psychology and how the act of observation might impact the data. In other words, is it possible that the participants in the study changed their behaviour because they knew that they were being observed? If participants react to being observed, then researchers may no longer be observing the kind of behaviour that they really wanted to observe.Social desirability bias – this refers to the possibility that people may not always tell the truth when asked questions, or may attempt to improve their performance on a task to impress the experimenter. In other words, is it possible that participants in the scenario gave untruthful answers in response to questions in order to look good? Alternatively, do you think participants in a study may have tried extra hard at something in order to impress the experimen