CAGAYAN STATE UNIVERSITY

Carig Campus
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Psych 106: Experimental Psychology
Last Update: 2024

Grading: PRELIM
Topic: HYPOTHESIS

Learning Outcomes: At the end of this module, you are expected to:
• Enumerate the characteristics of a good hypothesis
• Compare and contrast the inductive and deductive model of hypothesis building
• Formulate experimental hypothesis

INTRODUCTION

The hypothesis represents the end of the long process of thinking about a research idea.
The hypothesis is the thesis, or main idea, of an experiment. It is a statement about a predicted
relationship between at least two variables. Some non-scientific synonyms are speculation,
guess and hunch. The statement of a research hypothesis is designed to fit the type of research
design that has been selected

Remember:
• A non experimental hypothesis is a statement of your
predictions of how events, traits, or behaviors might be
related-not a statement about cause and effect.
• Some nonexperimental designs, particularly those that do
not restrict subjects' responses, do not typically include a
hypothesis. Phenomenology, case studies, naturalistic
observation, qualitative studies, and surveys of attitudes or
opinions, for example, are primarily intended to explore and
describe behaviors as they occur naturally. And it would be
difficult to make guesses about behaviors or events that
might or might not occur.
• In a true experiment, the hypothesis predicts the effects of
specific antecedent conditions on some behavior that is to
be measured.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF AN EXPERIMENTAL HYPOTHESIS

Every experiment has at least one hypothesis. Complicated experimental designs that
compare several treatments at the same time may test various hypotheses simultaneously. Each
experimental hypothesis is a tentative explanation of an event or behavior. It is a statement that
explains the effects of specified antecedent conditions on a measured behavior. By the time you
are ready to formulate your hypothesis, you have already thought a great deal about a behavior.
You may have discarded s several improbable explanations of it and are ready to propose one
explanation that seems plausible.

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 CAGAYAN STATE UNIVERSITY
Carig Campus
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Psych 106: Experimental Psychology
Last Update: 2024

Suppose you began to make a list of all the conditions that

could affect a behavior. Say the behavior is the speed at which you
are reading this module. Some factors that affect your reading
speed include your typical reading speed, and the size and clarity
of the typeface. Your pace might also be affected by the amount of
noise outside, the amount of light in the room, and whether or not
you have eaten. Perhaps it is even affected by the number of people
who watching the Black Clover, reading the Boruto manga or trying
out the new Tiktok challenge. An enormous number of factors might
affect your behavior at any given time. Before doing an experiment
to determine which factors are critical to your reading speed, you
would want to narrow down the possibilities.

Things far removed from one another are not likely to be causally related. Thus, we would
not consider the anime watchers, manga readers or Tiktokers as a likely explanation for reading
speed (duh). However, factors such as your normal reading speed, typeface, or lighting probably
do determine your speed. If you have not had lunch, images of food could certainly reduce your
speed. This process of whittling away at the number of possible factors affecting your reading
speed is the key to formulating a hypothesis.

Now that we have selected a small, finite number of possibilities, we are ready to propose
an explanation for your reading speed. We are ready to state a hypothesis. To be scientific, each
hypothesis should meet certain basic criteria. Believing that something is true or interesting is not
enough to make it a useful hypothesis. Hypotheses must be synthetic statements that are
testable, falsifiable, parsimonious, and (we hope) fruitful.

Synthetic Statements

Synthetic statements are those that can be either true or false. Each experimental
hypothesis must be a synthetic statement so that there can be some chance it is true and some
chance it is false.

"Hungry students read slowly" is a synthetic statement that can be supported or

contradicted. Can you think of other true or false statements for this topic?

Non-synthetic statements should be avoided at all costs. These fall into two categories:
analytic or contradictory.
An analytic statement is one that is always true.
For example, the prediction "The weight of dieters will fluctuate" is
essentially an analytic statement because it is sufficiently vague to be true
for everyone. Everyone's weight fluctuates a bit, whether dieting or not.
When stating a hypothesis, we want to be concise enough to be proven
wrong.

Another example is “I am either pregnant or not pregnant.” This is certainly

true always even for a guy!

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 CAGAYAN STATE UNIVERSITY
Carig Campus
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Psych 106: Experimental Psychology
Last Update: 2024

A contradictory statement is one with elements that oppose each other because
contradictory statements are always false.
"I have a brother and I do n have a brother" is an example of a contradictory
statement.

Because analytic statements are always true and contradictory statements are
always false, we do not need to conduct experiments to test them: We already
know what the outcome will be.

To ensure that a hypothesis is a synthetic statement, we must evaluate its form. A

hypothesis meets the definition of a synthetic statement when it can be stated in what is known
as the "If ... then" form. This form is another way of expressing the potential relationship betwem
the antecedents and the behaviors to be measured "If you look at an appealing paragraph then
your pupils will dilate" is such a hypothesis. It expresses a potential relationship between a
particular antecedent condition (looking at an appealing photograph) and a behavior (pupil
dilation). The statement can be true or false.

Testable Statements

An experimental hypothesis must also be testable—that is, the means for manipulating
antecedent conditions and measuring the resulting behavior must exist.

Many interesting hypotheses are currently of no scientific use because they do not meet
this criterion. For example, have you ever wondered whether your dog dreams? Dogs can
certainly make movements and sounds in the sleep that resemble the way they behave when
they are awake and engaging in familiar activities if its legs move and it barks just like it does
when it chases the cat, maybe it's dreaming about chasing the cat. And some people hypothesize
that dogs dream because they exhibit behaviors that correspond to behaviors associated with
dream muscle twitches, even occasional vocalizations

Suppose we propose research hypothesis in the "If ...

then" form: "If dogs display muscle twitches and vocalizations
during sleep, then they must be dreaming." We now have a
hypothesis in proper form. But how do we proceed to test it? We
could manipulate any number of antecedents to encourage sleep.
We might start with a simple comparison of dogs fed warm food
versus those fed room-temperature food. Some might sleep more
than others, and some might bark and twitch more than others
while asleep. But how will we know if they are dreaming? We can
ask them, of course! although we cannot expect any useful
answers. The difficulty here is that we have an interesting but untestable hypothesis. The
means for observing and recording the behavior of interest-namely, dreaming in dogs—does not
currently exist.

Still, untestable hypotheses are not necessarily useless. Scientists who speculated on
what it would be like to walk on the moon probably generated quite a few untestable hypotheses
at the beginning of the space program. But there is always the hope that new technology will open

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 CAGAYAN STATE UNIVERSITY
Carig Campus
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Psych 106: Experimental Psychology
Last Update: 2024

new areas of discovery. Someday, perhaps, dreams will be projected on television screens. We
will then know not only whether dogs dream but also-if they do-what they are dreaming about.
Falsifiable Statements

Statements of research hypotheses must be falsifiable (disprovable) by the research

findings. Hypotheses need to be worded so that failures to find the predicted effect must be
considered evidence that the hypothesis is indeed false.

Consider the following "If then" statement: "If you practice breathing exercises in the
morning, then your mood will somewhat improve”

Suppose you did practice 5-minute breathing exercises

in the morning and after you finish, your mood was assessed.
Your mood did change a bit but it was not significant. Given the
wording of the statement (it contains a qualifier “somewhat”), it
would be difficult to negate the hypothesis. As the hypothesis
was worded, it simply is not falsifiable because any failures to
produce the predicted effect can be explained away by the
researcher.

Parsimonious Statements

A research hypothesis should also be parsimonious. A simple hypothesis is preferred

over one that requires many supporting assumptions. The hypothesis "If you look at an
appealing photograph, then your pupils will dilate" would be preferred over "If you look at an
appealing photograph, then your pupils will dilate if it is a warm Saturday in June."

Fruitful Statements

Ideally, a hypothesis is also fruitful; that is, it leads to new studies. It is often difficult to
know in advance which hypotheses will be the most fruitful. There is some indication that a
hypothesis is fruitful when we can think of new studies that will become important if the hypothesis
is supported. An example of a fruitful hypothesis is Watson and Rayner's 1920 study of classical
conditioning. These researchers hypothesized that fear of otherwise neutral objects could be
acquired through learning. Their hypothesis might be stated in the "If .. then" form as follows: "If
a child, Albert, is repeatedly exposed to a loud, cry-inducing noise in the presence of a harmless
furry animal, then Albert will begin to cry at the sight of the animal alone.” This hypothesis and its
confirmation led to a multitude of studies on classical conditioning in human subjects that continue
today.

REFERENCES:

Myers, A and Hansen, C (2012), Experimental Psychology, Cengage Learning Asia Pte. LTd,
Singapore

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