Vanessa M. Chavez
Psychology 321
Assignment 1
January 18th, 2015 A professional personality psychologist’s determines personality by the person’s uniqueness. Determining who the person really is and how they are different from others. Including their biological, social and cultural background (Ryckman, 2013). However, a layperson defines personality as socially acceptable, depending on how well they get along with others. For example, a person that has a “strong” personality is said to not get along with many others because they are not afraid to “tell it like it is”. There are many different techniques to test a theory but according to our text, there are three major methods of testing (Ryckman, 2013). Those are the experimental method, correlational techniques, and case studies. In the experimental method, a psychologists changes a variable. The manipulated variable is called the independent and the other is called a dependent variable. The people are then split into two groups, the experimental group and the control group. The experimental group is the group that the variable has been manipulated and the control group has not been manipulated. The correlation method compares two or more different characteristics from the same group or people. The study is used to look for relationships between variables. There are three possible results: a positive correlation, a negative correlation, a no correlation. When either variables increase or decrease at the same time, that is a positive correlation. Negative correlation is when one variable increases and the other decreases (vice versa). If there is no relationship between the two variables increase or decrease that is known as no correlation. Case studies are in-depth study of a person, group or community. It can take several years to conduct a case study but psychologists get a better understanding of why they act the way they do. Priori explanations are tests that the experimenter intended to test before collecting any data. Post hoc explanations are test or comparisons that the experimenter has decided to test after collecting