HOW DOES A PSYCHOLOGIST START A RESEARCH STUDY?
A psychologist’s research can start in two different ways. One approach is to start with a theory to develop hypotheses to predict empirical observations like in the JLo example where we took a premise of observational learning theory as a start. The other approach is to start with observations of behavior. For example, if you were a server in a restaurant and noticed that some servers got bigger tips than others and tried to figure out why, you would be using induction by looking at the specifics about servers that varied with tip size. You might reach a tentative generalization that servers who introduced themselves by name got bigger tips. You would then formulate a hypothesis (1) “Name introductions lead to higher tips.” and design an experiment that will either confirm or disconfirm this hypothesis. So here the psychologist uses induction to analyze all the specific facts and come up with a tentative hypothesis. Then, using deduction, the psychologist figures out the specific fact
