Abstract
Imagine you are a student taking a course in experimental psychology (not too hard to imagine is it!) and the tutor told you to undertake the following task. ‘Take this rat that hasn’t been fed since 5 p.m. yesterday and time him at running this maze!’ Will you be performing an experiment? Before you try to answer we shall sketch out the major criteria for an experiment. An experiment occurs when the environment is systematically manipulated in order to observe the effect of this manipulation upon some behaviour. Aspects of the environment that are not of interest, and hence not manipulated, are held constant so as not to influence the outcome of the experiment. To answer the question above, we must introduce two special terms — independent and dependent variables — to describe how the environment is manipulated and how behaviour is observed.
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© 1981 R. B. Burns and C. B. Dobson
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Burns, R.B., Dobson, C.B. (1981). Variables. In: Experimental Psychology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-7241-7_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-7241-7_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-0-85200-369-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-7241-7
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