Experimental Psychology

What is Experimental Psychology?

Experimental psychology is not exactly a field of psychological research, so much as a general approach to psychology. Experimental psychologists may study anything from development and learning to perception, cognition, and emotion, from the behavior of isolated individuals to the social psychology of large groups. What unites experimental psychologists is not what they study, but how. Experimental psychology describes a methodology and a kind of psychological career, rather than a body of ideas. The basic principle underlying experimental psychology is that scientific methods of experimentation, mathematical modeling, and testing of specific hypotheses should be the backbone of all psychological research.

There are essentially three types of questions in experimental psychology: descriptive, relational, and causal. A descriptive study is one that seeks to illustrate a particular characteristic about person or group, but usually does not try to explain it with reference to any other variable. A descriptive study might ask what percentage of people will cheat under certain circumstances. The experimenter would set up a scenario that encourages or allows subjects to cheat, and then measure how many people took the opportunity. A relational study looks at two variables (sometimes more, but usually only two) to see if there is any correlation. In our example, the experimenter might want to test whether people are more likely to cheat when they are hungry or well-fed; he or she would then have to test for both cheating and fullness (perhaps by measuring blood sugar, or by distributing a survey). Finally, experimental psychology differentiates between simple relational studies and causal studies. In the previous example, the experimenter is not trying to test whether being full or hungry causes people to cheat; only whether they are correlated. A further study could be done to ensure that it was in fact the meal, not some other untested variable, that caused or prevented the cheating.

Who should Study Experimental Psychology?

Most undergraduate psychology programs require a course in either experimental psychology or “research methods” – these courses teach students how to understand psychological studies, how to evaluate them for reliability, and in some cases they are designed to prepare students to perform their own experiments. This is usually a core class for any psychology major, and significantly more training in experimental psychology is added at the graduate level, especially in MS and PhD programs. For students who are interested in applied psychology, the methods course is primarily important because it helps them understand how a particular idea (about education, clinical depression, perception, or whatever) has been tested and why psychologists either accept or reject it. It is a course in “psychological literacy” rather than a technical or vocational course. For those students who are preparing for careers in psychological research, of course, the matter is quite different – for them, a course in experimental psychology is essential training in one of their most critical career skills.

Of course, in deciding whether it is a good idea for you to take your study of experimental psychology beyond the basics, the essential question you need to ask is whether you want to pursue a career in psychological research. While the career options for experimental psychologists are many and varied, they all focus on one thing: scientific experiments on human behavior. Experimental psychologists need to be rigorous, focused people who are fascinated by psychological questions and prepared to dedicate their career to answering them.

The History of Experimental Psychology

People have been puzzling over questions that we would now call psychological – how do our minds work? What causes our differences in personality? What is memory – since the dawn of human inquiry, but it is only very recently that experimental methods were applied to these questions. In many ways, the birth of modern psychology was the moment when philosophers and doctors began to use the scientific method to address questions that until that time had only been observed in more informal ways. In 1879, a laboratory was opened in Germany that was dedicated solely to the study of human behavior, thoughts, and emotions. This laboratory, the first of its kind, was opened by a German professor named Wilhelm Wundt, who was also one of the first people to refer to himself as a “psychologist.”

Since then, the discipline of experimental psychology has developed sophisticated ethical and methodological guidelines to ensure that psychological research is scientifically rigorous and never harms the subjects under study. Today, experimental psychologists are actively advancing the frontiers of all areas of psychology, from moral and cognitive development to the question of animal minds.