What does the term Cause and effect mean in social psychology?
Cause and effect means that it has been established that the manipulation of one variable causes a change to occur in another variable. This is usually identified through the use of controlled experiments. For social psychology this could be something as simple as does the gender of peers affect the rate of swearing in men. So you have one independent variable (IV):gender, with 2 conditions, male and female. You take 100 male participants who are going to solve a puzzle with a partner. 50 of the men have to solve the puzzle with a female partner, 50 of them solve the puzzle with a male partner. Thus the IV of gender is being manipulated because you are changing whether the partner is male or female. During the puzzle, you record how many times the male participants swear (the partners never swear). The rate of swearing is the dependant variable (DV). You may find that when the male participants are working with a male partner, they swear significantly more often than when working with
