Frequently Asked Questions

I thought psychologists either treated the mentally ill, or ran rats through mazes. What else do psychologists do?

While rats and therapy are what psychologists tend to be best known for, their scope of study encompasses the whole of human behavior (and any animal behaviors that shed light on human behavior). This ranges from the micro level of brain structure and function to the macro level of how large crowds behave. Some psychologists study eye movements to better understand how people read; some analyze physiological responses to learn how people respond to stress, dreams, or emotional stimuli; still others analyze people's diary recordings of their social interactions to understand the dynamics of close relationships. If it helps explain how humans work and why they do what they do, psychologists are involved.

In survey methods, how can one be sure that the respondents are answering honestly?

This is a very difficult problem in psychological research, especially since sometimes the respondents themselves are not aware of what the honest answer is! We can never truly be sure that respondents are being honest. However, psychologists have developed a number of strategies to help minimize problems of dishonesty.

The simplest step a researcher can take is to create an atmosphere of safety by ensuring anonymity and allowing people to give written answers in private. People are more likely to be truthful about embarrassing or negative things if they are writing anonymously than if they must say things out loud to the experimenter.

Some people are simply more likely to misrepresent themselves than others. Thus, another strategy involves measuring how much people tend to lie in order to make themselves look good. If respondents turn out to score high on this tendency, their data can be discarded. To measure this, psychologists ask questions such as "I have never told a lie." Virtually anyone being honest would have to say "false."

A very elaborate strategy for minimizing dishonesty is a technique called the bogus pipeline. Respondents are hooked up to a machine that supposedly measures various bodily changes to determine when someone is lying. Since they believe the machine will check up on them, respondents are motivated to tell the truth to avoid being caught in a lie by the experimenter.