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In considering what makes a good exam answer likely to earn a high mark, you should of course first consult the general level 3 handbook. In addition, there is a section on generally what makes a first class answer in the Critical Review document that is relevant.
For this particular course, good answers will not only show critical thinking, but attempt to show critical appraisal of psychology from outside, in relation to other disciplines, and/or in relation to its history.
Answer sketch:
The pure approach might look for universal distinctions such as working memory
vs. long term memory, episodic vs. semantic memory. An applied approach might
study eyewitness testimony, and methods that the police could use to elicit
the most from witnesses they are interviewing. For the pure approach,
research should test whether the distinctions hold up under very different
contexts (at work, for trivial tasks such as chatting, over lifetimes and over
a short period), but for some standard test. For applications, the focus will
be on all the elements that are important for success e.g. if memory for
faces, events, and objects is different, then how can an interview combine
three techniques? If recall turns out to depend on the level of the
participant's arousal, then how can the interviewer calm down an over-aroused
(e.g. terrified) witness, and make an under-aroused witness more alert?
Qu.2
What are the three elements of a scientific "method" that follows the
Newtonian pattern? How does the method of experiment relate to this?
Illustrate with examples from psychology.
Answer sketch:
Theory, observation, and prediction are the classic Newtonian elements.
Observations without theory mean you don't know what aspects of observations
should be attended to (is it their age, colour, or IQ that will predict their
abilities?). Theory without observations (except perhaps in maths) is just
abstractions unconnected with the world; and theory and observation but
without prediction is a story that explains things post hoc but doesn't ever
test the theory and so rule out other equally plausible stories.
Experiments are a form of observation, but only one form, although they have
special advantages: they fix the direction of causation, but more importantly
they isolate one factor and by varying it independently of others, shows its
effects independently of all other factors.
Qu.3
Discuss the alternative basic argument structures that a scientific
paper or book might be organised around.
[With a question like this, you should take for granted that the answer should
include examples from psychology to illustrate the answer.]
Answer sketch:
Some of these are:
a) A grand theory and all the evidence that supports it. Traditionally a
book (e.g. by Piaget) would be the format, but today perhaps a large review
article or a paper presenting a meta-analysis of past data. In all cases, the
danger is that so much space is taken up with supporting evidence that the
critical thought represented by contradictory evidence may not get enough
space.
b) One new piece of data and some alternative theories that might explain
it. E.g. a report on a new visual illusion or suprising phenomenon.
c) Same logical structure but different purpose: a decisive experiment
distinguishing between two rival theories already established. E.g. twin
studies showing what mixture of nature and nurture applies to some feature.
d) One theory and the extent to which one new empirical study does or does
not support it. The bulk of published psychology papers tend to use this
structure. Its weakness is that it doesn't explore alternative theories.
Qu.4
What are the distinctive features of psychology compared to other
sciences?
Answer sketch:
One distinctive feature is the desirability of employing and relating
three types of data:
(Neuro)physiology, behaviour, and what the participants say (what their
conscious awareness is). (See question 5 for how to elaborate this.)
Another may be that the prediction of an individual's behaviour (unlike that
of a planet) seems to be generally out of reach, yet reliable trends or
tendencies are very frequently found: so that psychological "laws" seem to be
statistical in nature.
Another perhaps is that it combines (perhaps not very well) aspects of human
behaviour that are separated in other disciplines: the social and in the
individual. E.g. Politics, sociology, linguistics deal only with the social;
while physiology deals only with the individual.
Qu.5
What types of data does psychology use, and is it important for a
given topic to employ them all?
Answer sketch:
(Neuro)physiology, behaviour, and what the participants say e.g. measures of
attitudes i.e. what they report about their awareness. There are repeated
attempts to do science using only one or another of these kinds of data; but
generally people feel a psychological explanation is unsatisfactory if it
cannot connect them. For example a "theory" of emotions that predicted
physiological states, but failed to connect to how people say they felt
wouldn't seem to have captured what everyone normally means by "emotion".
Conversely theories that predicted responses to attitude surveys but failed to
predict behaviour at all would not seem as satisfactory as ones that did.
Vision science seems successful because it is advanced in relating the physics
of light, the physiology of retinal receptors, the neural pathways of
perception, the related behaviour e.g. in experiments on visual
discriminations, but also our conscious percepts e.g. visual illusions and
work on the categories we perceive.
Qu.6 (A question from 2010)
Pick a current research topic in psychology and offer a critique based on
broad historical and conceptual perspectives.
Answer sketch: general:
You would pick a "research topic" partly to suit your own interests and
knowledge. For instance, history has made relatively little difference to
visual perception, but a huge amount to Abnormal. Here I've picked rather
broad topics, partly to make more sense to most of you; but if you happened to
know a lot about a narrow topic (e.g. sleep disturbances) that would be just
as good.
Looking over my answer sketches, I see I've omitted to mention argument formats. It might be better if I had; and particularly important say in neuro topics, where case studies of brain damaged patients are very important, rather than controlled experiments.
Answer sketch 1:
Picking the case of Abnormal:
A striking issue is how Freud's legacy became completely divorced from
academic psychology for a long period, until re-merging occurred. This field
is also a striking case of the separation, but now potential re-merging, in
the data-type focussed on. Freud and now CBT focus on "talking treatments",
corresponding to what the patients are internally aware of. Drug approaches
go with a physiological approach. The third strand is behavioural (looking at
what patients do, regardless of what they say about it). With the recent data
showing that regular exercise is as effective in treating depression as the
best drugs (and so with CBT), it seems all three strands are independently
effective.
The contrasts between these strands in this area also show up
differences in relationships to neighbouring disciplines: medicine, ....
Judged by the standards of how well psychology has met the pre-existing
challenge (in this area, that of mental illness), one might say "a whole lot
less well than our approach to infectious disease, but a whole lot better than
we used to do".
This is of course a mainly applied area, or great practical importance.
It is also one where the arts vs. science contrast remains active and
unresolved: should we focus on the meaning of the illness to patients, or only
on viewing it as a materialistic phenomenon of the body?
Answer sketch 2:
Alternatively, picking the case of visual perception:
Lots of perception has been shown to stem from the physiology or even the
physics of light and of our eye, and subjective perceptions explained partly
in those terms. Furthermore people certainly guide a lot of their behaviour
by perception: so this topic does particularly well in spanning and
connecting the 3 types of psych. data. You might have to look hard for a
good example of applied perception (it generally does better in explaining
how things work after the fact rather than helping to construct new
appliances). It is a case of cross-disciplinary collaboration: a boundary of
psychology (connecting to medicine, animal physiology, ....).
Answer sketch 3:
Picking the case of personality: an answer could discuss how this field deals
well with the links between behavioural and verbal data (the questionnaire
instruments are verbal, but predict behaviour e.g. in what professions
different personality styles go into), but doesn't seem to have a strong
connection to physiological data. It is primarily a theory field, but the use
of personality tests in job selection processes is an example of a big applied
connection. It is one of psychology's bigger successes in that many different
studies have in the end converged on more or less the same big 5; and that
these are dimensions that emerge from the data, and so are new concepts.
Answer sketch:
[Here is a very personal sketch. You might easily design a quite different
answer.]
Almost nothing about the origin of hypotheses tends to emerge in published literature in science in general, and psychology in particular. In one way this is a strength: focussing the literature on evidence, not speculations. Just as in a court of law, suspicion should not be mentioned without evidence to back it up. But from the viewpoint of training researchers and understanding the discipline, remaining silent about crucial parts of what it is to be a researcher is unhelpful, even deceitful. Another general problem here is Pirsig's point that it is much faster to generate a hypothesis than to test it; so science must depend (even if this is not admitted) on generating mainly only good hypotheses: there would never be time to disprove all the ones you could think of. So hypotheses must be filtered somehow before they are tested.
In psychology, one obvious answer might be open-ended methods such as focus groups, informal observations. One more technical origin is exploratory factor analysis (FA), where a lot of questionnaire items (and responses) are analysed, and the FA software clusters them into "factors" which however have no meaning yet in theory. A researcher might take such a factor and start to attribute meaning, and to design new items that express this more directly FA software clusters them into "factors" which however have no meaning yet in theory. A researcher might take such a factor and start to attribute meaning, and to design new items that express this more directly.
Another source is other disciplines, which psychologists then adopt and look for psych. evidence. Evolutionary theory is one recent source. Another is rational theory of various kinds (cf. Kahneman's work on human heuristics): hypotheses about what any rational agent should do. Or in emotions: psychologists may adopt hypotheses from the physiology of hormones e.g. adrenalin; or from zoologists observations of displays in other animals; or ...
An apparently lame theory might just be to say hypotheses come from "genius". A way of being less magical about this could be to argue that we all have implicit skills: things we can do and perceive yet cannot articulate how we do it. (Any experiment where you have to use human judgement relies on this, and recording inter-coder reliability is a way of checking that there really is a constant thing being judged there.) Applied to hypotheses, it might be a long process but it wouldn't be mad to generate hypotheses about one's implicit behaviour and then test them out. E.g. many students behave as if underlining bits as they study a text, helps them. But is it true?
Qu.8
Pick a topic in psychology where more than one type of data (behavioural,
physiological, or verbal report) has been used. What has the contribution of
each type been, and in what way was each essential?
Answer sketch:
This is an invitation to pick almost any topic you have learned about and
discuss it from this angle. In the lectures I talked about emotions and their
relationship to actions (e.g. fight and flight), physiology (e.g. adrenalin),
and what people say about them (ability to perceive emotions).
Personality dimensions are based on questionnaires (verbal report) but relate
to behaviour such as choice of profession etc. Vision science relates the
physiology of the retina and brain; and what percepts we becomne aware of and
can report on. Visual illusions make it obvious the role of report plays
there. In abnormal psych, "symptoms" may be a mixture of what the patient
reports (anxiety, voices in the head), sometimes physiology (cortisone
levels), and certainly actions (agitated, difficulty in getting out of bed,
....). And so on.
Qu.9
What is it about psychology that makes the use of statistics so essential?
Don't other subjects need statistics just as much?
Answer sketch:
Qu.10
What is the key advantage that experiment gives over other methods in
psychology such as case histories of brain damage, or surveys? And what kinds
of uncertainty about this advantage nevertheless often remain? Illustrate
your answer with examples.
Answer sketch:
Above all, experiments can demonstrate the direction of causality between
co-occurring (correlated) factors.
However in itself, an experiment showing that A causes B doesn't say anything
about whether there is also an effect of B causing A; nor about whether the
causal link demonstrated is the usual cause of B in real situations, or an
unimportant one (with small effect size).
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