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Phenomena

18 November, 2015 - 11:16

A phenomenon (plural, phenomena) is a general result that has been observed reliably in systematic empirical research. In essence, it is an established answer to a research question. Some phenomena we have encountered in this book are that expressive writing improves health, women do not talk more than men, and cell phone usage impairs driving ability. Some others are that dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple personality disorder) increased greatly in prevalence during the late 20th century, people perform better on easy tasks when they are being watched by others (and worse on difficult tasks), and people recall items presented at the beginning and end of a list better than items presented in the middle.

Some Famous Psychological Phenomena

Phenomena are often given names by their discoverers or other researchers, and these names can catch on and become widely known. The following list is a small sample of famous phenomena in psychology.

  • Blindsight. People with damage to their visual cortex are often able to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see.
  • Bystander effect. The more people who are present at an emergency situation, the less likely it is that any one of them will help.
  • Fundamental attribution error. People tend to explain others’ behavior in terms of their personal characteristics as opposed to the situation they are in.
  • McGurk effect. When audio of a basic speech sound is combined with video of a person making mouth movements for a different speech sound, people often perceive a sound that is intermediate between the two. For a demonstration, see http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~rosenblu/VSMcGurk.html.
  • Own-race effect. People recognize faces of people of their own race more accurately than faces of people of other races.
  • Placebo effect. Placebos (fake psychological or medical treatments) often lead to improvements in people’s symptoms and functioning.
  • Mere exposure effect. The more often people have been exposed to a stimulus, the more they like it—even when the stimulus is presented subliminally.
  • Serial position effect. Stimuli presented near the beginning and end of a list are remembered better than stimuli presented in the middle. For a demonstration, see http://cat.xula.edu/thinker/memory/working/serial.
  • Spontaneous recovery. A conditioned response that has been extinguished often returns with no further training after the passage of time.

Although an empirical result might be referred to as a phenomenon after being observed only once, this term is more likely to be used for results that have been replicated. Replication means conducting a study again—either exactly as it was originally conducted or with modifications—to be sure that it produces the same results. Individual researchers usually replicate their own studies before publishing them. Many empirical research reports include an initial study and then one or more follow-up studies that replicate the initial study with minor modifications. Particularly interesting results come to the attention of other researchers who conduct their own replications. The positive effect of expressive writing on health and the negative effect of cell phone usage on driving ability are examples of phenomena that have been replicated many times by many different researchers.

Sometimes a replication of a study produces results that differ from the results of the initial study. This could mean that the results of the initial study or the results of the replication were a fluke—they occurred by chance and do not reflect something that is generally true. In either case, additional replications would be likely to resolve this. A failure to produce the same results could also mean that the replication differed in some important way from the initial study. For example, early studies showed that people performed a variety of tasks better and faster when they were watched by others than when they were alone. Some later replications, however, showed that people performed worse when they were watched by others. Eventually researcher Robert Zajonc identified a key difference between the two types of studies. People seemed to perform better when being watched on highly practiced tasks but worse when being watched on relatively unpracticed tasks (Zajonc, 1965). 1 These two phenomena have now come to be called social facilitation and social inhibition.