How we study psychology

Hey hey hey, now there are a fair few ways in which we study psychology but I'm going to talk about experiments. Lab experiments are experiments where the researcher controls all variables. This ensures only the independant variable is what is being measured. all extraneous or confounding variables are removed from the equation. An example illustrating laboratory experiment conditions is the experiment conducted by Simon Baron- Cohen. His experimet looked into people with higher functioning autism to test for 'Theory of Mind' (ToM). This is the ability to look at something from another persons point of view or for lack of a better word empathise. Using what he found was a purely ToM task, the eyes task, Baron Cohen compared scores between the autistic group, a group of people with tourettes syndrome and a group who, and i know this isnt fair to say but, could be considered normal... It was found that the autistic group struggled the most when attempting to decipher the emotion behind each set of eyes. the scores came somewhere along the lines of 20.4 for the 'normal' group and roughly 16 for the autistic group. The tourettes group too scored into the 20s. their role in this experiment was to act as a control to see if ToM was absent in other people with disorders but it was not the case. Here we can see that the use of controls and non bias tests makes the lab experiment a useful way to gather information.