2.1. The Scientific Method:
Do the Facts Support Your Educated Guess?
In the days of psychology‘s long philosophical past, the method used to investigate the behavior of human beings was rationalism. This is the point of view that great discoveries can be made just by doing a lot of hard thinking. This is still a workable approach in some fields of philosophy, and it has certainly been a workable method in mathematics.
In psychology, however, rationalism alone can lead to contradictory conclusions. At an informal level, rationalism is sometimes called ―armchair philosophizing.‖ Using only writing and thinking, the British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) decided that there are no inborn ideas. Using the same approach as Locke, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) concluded that the human mind does have some a priori information, meaning that there are inborn ideas of a certain kind. So you can see that rationalism alone is an unsatisfactory method for psychology if it claims to be a science.
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Naturally, thinking is used. However, facts are gathered. Empiricism is the point of view that knowledge is acquired by using the senses—by seeing, hearing, touching, and so forth. Empiricism represents what William James called a tough-minded attitude. The attitude can be expressed with the words ―I‘m stubborn. I can be convinced— but you‘ve got to show me.‖
Today‘s researchers do their best to gather data, information relevant to questions they ask about human behavior. In order to gather data, various methods are used. And these methods are the principal subjects of this chapter.
Before we look at the various individual methods used to gather data, let‘s take a look at the general approach that inspires all of the methods. This general approach is called the scientific method. It is a systematic approach to thinking about