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U1 · CED 0Research Methods & Statistical Analysis
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LESSON1

What Is Psychology? Building a Scientific Attitude

SWBAT / I can

Define psychology more accurately than intuition allows, and articulate why claims about behavior require evidence rather than common sense.

Science Practice 2 · Research Methods & Design
First day of the courseConfederate needed — arrange the day beforeNewspaper prep — cut and re-taped in advanceDeck: slides 1–11Reading: Unit 1 Readings 1–2

Full screen, one move at a time. Use ← → to move, Space to start, Esc to leave.

Open the deck2026 Day 1 · stop at slide 11
Before you start

Cannot be done at 7:55am

  • The confederate. Pick deliberately — a student you taught last year if you have one in the section. Hand or text them the note the day before. A stranger recruited three minutes before the bell is the single most likely point of failure in the whole sequence: they overplay the surprise, or they tell a friend.
  • The newspaper article. Single column, text only, no photos. Cut under the first line, flip the bottom section around, re-tape it to the title. Copy what is now the bottom line onto a slip, seal it in an envelope, label it with the date and period, and tape it under a desktop.

Also have ready

  • Class-set of envelopes and slips for the Envelopes demo.
  • Printed student packets — the 26 items with the confidence column.
  • Printed syllabi, to hand out at the door without discussing.
  • Learn their names off the student database or the yearbook. It sells the demos, and you get to explain why afterward.

Attach a label to something they just experienced so it is already familiar when it gets taught for real on Days 2–4. Say the word, point at the moment, move on. Do not write definitions on the board.

  • Perceptual set — why nobody noticed the article was mostly upside down.
  • Confirmation bias — why the easiest demo fooled anyone at all after the harder ones.
  • Overconfidence — the certain-but-wrong count. Show of hands: who had three or more?
  • Hindsight bias — the "oh, I knew that" chorus after each reveal. Name it as it happens.
  • Belief perseverance — the student still arguing for learning styles after you have shown the evidence.
  • Confederate — reveal your accomplice and let the class react.
  • Experimenter bias, demand characteristics, double-blind — Clever Hans went from 98% accuracy to 8% once the procedure went double-blind.
  • Falsifiability and verifiability — Popper. A claim that cannot in principle be shown false is not a scientific claim.
  • Replication — "Who chose that newspaper article? What if someone else picked one?"
  • Operational definition — "What exactly would count as me being psychic? Write it so someone else could test it."

Do

  • ✓Say the envelope guardrail line verbatim before anyone writes.
  • ✓Collect the activator writing and hold it. You hand it back at the closer.
  • ✓Say the ethical bookend out loud at the reveal. Thirty seconds, and it pays off on Day 4.
  • ✓Record both numbers from the 26 items before students leave. That is your Days 10–12 dataset.

Don't

  • ✕Explain a demo today. Not even to the kid who figures it out — tell them to wait for the reveal.
  • ✕Define the floated terms. They only need to feel the need for them today.
  • ✕Reach for IV/DV. It moved to Day 2 on purpose.
  • ✕Discuss the syllabus. Hand it out and say "tomorrow," or it eats fifteen minutes.
  • ✕Read all 26 items aloud. Six of them, and self-score the rest.
Pick your condition

Two real sequences for this day, plus a short version. They front-load different things — read both before you pick.

    Key questions

    Bookends
    1. What do you already know about psychology? Is what you know evidence-based? What isn’t psychology?
    2. How would you test whether a claim about human behavior is true?

    #1 is what the T/F items dismantle. #2 is the debrief, and the honest answer is “that’s what Days 2–4 are for.”

    Today’s materials

    Live links

    Homework

    • 01Read Unit 1 Readings 1–2 before Day 2 (about 12 minutes), including the check-ins and the “Am I ready?” checklist. Any class can open with a pop quiz on the reading.
      Open the Unit 1 readings →
    • 02Begin the Graphic Organizer — Ch. 1, Research Methods.
    • 03Student survey — assign as a form; it will not fit in class on a block.
    Alternates and extras

    Twenty-six items will not fit in the debrief. These six carry the day; let the rest self-score.

    • #5 — candle flame at 30 miles. The best item of the day. Textbooks including Myers key it TRUE; the figure traces to an illustrative table in Galanter (1962), not a measurement. The real distance is about 1.6 miles, and Earth's curvature blocks a ground-level flame at 30 miles anyway. A claim repeated for sixty years because nobody checked the source. Ask: how would you test this?
    • #23 — bystander effect. Philpot et al. (2020) reviewed CCTV of 219 real public conflicts: someone intervened in 91%, and more bystanders meant more help. Teach it as context-dependent, not debunked. Sets up Kitty Genovese on Day 10.
    • #12 — serotonin and depression. Handle with care. FALSE does not mean depression isn't biological or that medication doesn't work — drug efficacy is a separate question from the serotonin theory. Say that explicitly.
    • #1 — learning styles. Expect pushback; most teachers still endorse it. Have the crossover-design logic ready: visual learners would need to do better with visual AND worse with auditory. That interaction does not appear.
    • #19 — "students recall 10% of what they read." The numbers are fabricated, traced through decades of false attribution. The tell: every figure is a round multiple of five. Real data does not look like that.
    • #26 — "Mr. Cummings has psychic abilities." Save it for last and let it land. It is the bridge from "my intuitions are unreliable" to "and I just watched myself get fooled by a taped-together newspaper."

    1 · The envelopes need a guardrail

    As originally written, students seal "something true about themselves" in an envelope you will appear to read aloud. On day one, with a teacher they don't know, some fraction of a class writes something genuinely private. The verbatim line is in the move above.

    2 · Don't use the suggested recovery line

    The original suggests salvaging Pick a Number by blaming the volunteer's "inability to concentrate or interference from classmates." Publicly pinning a failure on a student on day one is a bad trade for a demo that is supposed to be the easy one. Do the arithmetic with the whole class, or let it break and say so.

    3 · Pick the confederate deliberately

    Not the first person off the roster you spot in the hallway. Someone you taught last year, briefed the day before.

    4 · The Phone Book demo is retired

    It needs two identical physical phone books, two rulers, and an accomplice stationed in the hallway within shouting distance. Three demos already gives you the decreasing-difficulty arc. Keep the eight minutes.

    Awkward day to miss, because the demos cannot be recreated for one person — the effect depends on the room. Don't try. Give them the conclusion instead and let the argument come secondhand.

    Smallest thing that gets them current

    • Do the 26 items on their own, with the confidence rating. Bring both numbers.
    • Tell them plainly: the first fifteen minutes of class were three fake psychic demonstrations, and the point was that a room full of smart people got fooled and then had to design a study to catch it.
    • Answer the closer's Q3 in writing — design an experiment to test a claim of ESP. That is the real objective check.
    • Unit 1 Readings 1–2, and start the graphic organizer.

    They will be short one thing you can't hand them: having personally been deceived and debriefed. Name that when research ethics comes up on Day 4 so they know what the rest of the room is referring to.

    • Days 10–12 · statistics. The confidence data is your dataset. Class scores out of 26 give you mean, median, mode, range and standard deviation on numbers the students personally generated, and the distribution is usually visibly skewed. Better than a worksheet because they remember producing it. Record both numbers before they leave.
    • Days 4–5 · research ethics. Today's deception-and-debrief is the reference case for informed consent and debriefing. Students who have themselves been deceived and debriefed argue about Milgram very differently than students who have only read about it.
    • Day 10 · case studies. Item 23 sets up Kitty Genovese — and the classic "38 witnesses who did nothing" account is itself substantially inaccurate, making it a second self-correction case rather than just a bystander illustration.
    • Day 12 · review. Confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and overconfidence were all named today with a concrete instance attached. Point back rather than reintroducing them.
    • Why IV/DV is not here. The source plan listed IV/DV identification among Day 1's objectives, but the sequence never reaches it — it sat parked in a "TOMORROW" block. Moved cleanly to Day 2 so Day 1 does one thing well. The 2026 notes reach the same conclusion independently. The closer's optional stretch item is there if you want a diagnostic read on who already has it.
    PreviousUnit 1 · Research Methods overview