If you want to understand how behavior occurs, one of the best ways to gain information is to simply observe the behavior in its natural context. However, people might change their behavior in unexpected ways if they know they are being observed. How do researchers obtain accurate information when people tend to hide their natural behavior? As an example, imagine that your professor asks everyone in your class to raise their hand if they always wash their hands after using the restroom. Chances...

Observational studies are a type of analytical study where researchers observe events without any interventions. In other words, the researcher does not influence the response variable or the experiment's outcome.
There are three types of observational studies – Prospective, retrospective, and cross-sectional.
Prospective Study
Prospective studies, also known as longitudinal or cohort studies, are carried out by collecting future data from groups sharing similar characteristics. One...

A spontaneous process is one that occurs naturally under certain conditions. A nonspontaneous process, on the other hand, will not take place unless it is “driven” by the continual input of energy from an external source. Processes have a natural tendency to occur in one direction under a given set of conditions. Water will naturally flow downhill (spontaneous process), but uphill flow (nonspontaneous process) requires outside intervention such as the use of a pump. Iron exposed to...

Another way in which a group presence can affect performance is social loafing—the exertion of less effort by a person working together with a group. Social loafing occurs when our individual performance cannot be evaluated separately from the group. Thus, group performance declines on easy tasks (Karau & Williams, 1993). Essentially individual group members loaf and let other group members pick up the slack. Because each individual’s efforts cannot be evaluated,...

People tend to know what behavior is expected of them in specific, familiar settings. A script is a person’s knowledge about the sequence of events expected in a specific setting (Schank & Abelson, 1977). Essentially, scripts are a particular kind of schema, one containing default values for the features within an event. In the restaurant example, the script's features include the props (e.g., tables, menu, food, and money), the roles to be played (e.g., customer and waiter),...

Mechanical engineering involves the study of motion, energy, and force, and is concerned with designing, manufacturing, and maintaining mechanical systems. One important concept in this field is the couple moment, produced by two equal and opposite forces acting at two points in a rigid body separated by a certain distance.
When the rigid body undergoes a differential displacement due to a couple, its motion can be divided into two parts: equal translation of the two points to their final...