For some, the term psychology brings to mind the image of a black leather sofa accompanied by a shrewd-looking old gentleman with a pointed beard, jotting down brilliant inferences about your life from a dream you had about standing naked in the middle of Harris Teeter.
Psychology is not, however, simply a shallow interpretation of minute details about one’s life; it involves research, experimentation, data-collection and analysis. It is, in short, a science — a science that studies the mind.
The experiments conducted in the University’s psychology department rely on both undergraduate and graduate students to facilitate such studies, as either participants, research assistants or designers of the experiments themselves. The average study generally includes of questionnaires, videos or computer tasks. Every student who takes a 100- or 200-level psychology course for the first time is asked to participate in six hours of experiments or, if the student prefers, to read research articles for the same amount of time, Psychology Prof. Tim Wilson said.
Aside from doing research at the University, Wilson also serves on the Institutional Review Board for Social and Behavioral Sciences, which approves research proposals for human participants, including students.
“We do take our educational function seriously,” Wilson said. “Researchers are required to take time after the study to explain to the participants what it was about [and] give them a written explanation that has to [have gone] through a committee to make sure that it’s understandable for an intro-level student.”
Fourth-year College student Steven Song, an undergraduate research assistant in the psychology department, said his tasks include debriefing research participants and data entry. Song said the goal of many professors is for participants to learn not only about the study but also about themselves.
“I guess since it’s supplementary to most of their ... introductory-level psych courses, it’s supposed to give another dimension, so [the class is] not just book-reading and testing,” he said.
The experiments provide an educational experience for the students taking these courses and for the research assistants, who play a critical role in the experimentation process, graduate student Jesse Pappas said.
“Yes, they’re in the labs, enacting these experiments and making them happen, but at the same time, we’re trying to make it an experiment where they are learning how to design [and] the ins and outs of experimental studies,” Pappas said. “The longer they stay, the more responsibility [they will] have.”
For some participants, though, the studies are not as informative as the participants would have liked. Second-year College student Janine Graziano recalled a study in which she participated that tested her fear of heights.
“They didn’t actually go over the results, and at the end, they give you a debriefing form, [but] most people don’t read them,” Graziano said. “I enjoyed it and read [the form but] I don’t think you learn that much.”
In general, all of the students who agree to participate in experiments go into a large pool that contains about 1,000 students, graduate student Selin Kesebir said. At the beginning of the semester, these students answer a brief demographic survey, followed by an optional pretest required for invitation code-only studies. Although students can be selected at random to participate in studies, the invitation code-only studies have restrictions to filter out people without certain attributes.
The number of people selected for each study varies depending on the number of conditions that the experiment is designed to test, Pappas explained.
“Generally, the bare-bone minimum is 30 people per condition, so if you’re just running a very simple experiment where you have one group of people doing one thing and one group doing another, the bottom line is probably 60 to 70 participants,” Pappas said.
When drawing conclusions from the studies conducted, research assistants must take into consideration participants’ background.
“You have to worry about the participants being only undergraduate, psychology majors, so they might already think alike or might already have certain beliefs or even [prior] knowledge,” Song said. “So, if they’re taking a social psychology class like Psych 260 and they come in for one of our social psychology experiments, chances are they’ll have seen some of the questionnaires or have learned some of the effects of them in class.”
Wilson noted that for studies involving basic human tendencies, however, the results would not vary severely across the population.
“I think the way most of us feel is that college students are the starting point ... a sample of convenience, we might say,” Wilson said. “Let me put it this way, I don’t think any of us would build a huge theory of psychology based only on college students.”
Regardless, students who participate in these studies play an important role in the field of psychology.
“They might not think about it that much, but what they do really contributes to science and to our understanding of why people do what they do, how they behave ... all those kinds of questions,” Kesebir said. “We have better answers to those questions today than we had 20 years ago because all of these students have participated in all of these studies over the years, so they really make a contribution there, and we are really grateful for that contribution.”
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