INTRODUCTION AND BASIC CONCEPTS

Intended Learning Outcomes

• Identify the significant people that contributed in the development of

psychological statistics

• Discuss the events that led to the development and propagation of psychological
statistics

• Discuss the importance of statistics in psychology

• Identify the categories of statistics

• Discuss the different categories of statistics

What is Statistics?

The word statistics often awaken the awareness of the images of numbers
assembled upon numbers in a vast table. In common understanding the word statistics
is synonymous with the word data.

Statistics is defined as a branch of mathematics which deals with the collection,

organization, presentation, analysis and interpretation of numerical data for the purpose
of assisting in making a more effective decision.

Collection of data refers to the process of gathering numerical information.

Methods of gathering pertinent information include interview, questionnaire,
experiments, observation, and documentary analysis.

Presentation of data refers to the exposition and arrangement of data in an

appropriate tables and graphs. Graphical presentation includes bar graphs. frequency
polygon, pie-graphs and many others.

Analysis of data refers to the activity of describing the properties, characteristics,

behavior of the data or the possible correlation of different quantities or variables of the
data gathered.

Interpretation of data refers to the activities that involve explanation of the

meaning of the statistical finding for the formation of valid conclusions and inferences.
Such methods involve testing the significance of the results. Correct interpretations of

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results will lead to a valid conclusion of the study and hence can aid in taking correct
decisions.

Historical Roots of Psychological Statistics

Psychology is science that deals with the study of human behavior and cognition
or mental process. This definition is the product of the rigid activities resulted from
natural observation and scientific exposure and interactions of the early philosophers
and psychologist who untiringly look for explanations, reasons, causes and effects on
what, why and how nature and nurture affect individuals.

People in the early period believed that thoughts came from the gods in the
heaven. Such belief led them to think that humans have little control over their emotions
and actions. The Great Greek triumvirates Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle believed
otherwise. The influence of Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.) in psychology is his belief that
thoughts and knowledge come from within us and the understanding of self allows one
to live a virtuous life. Plato (427-347 B.C.E.) introduced to us that human is a rational
being, that we are born with the ability to understand the relationship of the events
around us. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) stressed on the importance of experience rather
than reasons, that man’s reasoning is a form of making generalizations from
experiences and observations made. Today they are considered the predecessors of a
much modern perspective in psychology.

The origin of experimental psychology can be traced back to 1796, when then
Reverend Dr. Nevil Maskelyne (1732-1811 C.E.) the fifth British Astronomer Royal of
the Greenwich Astronomical Observatory, dismissed his 24 year old assistant David
Kinnebrook, on the ground that Kinnerbrook differed from him by 800 milliseconds in
judging stellar transits that is, in estimating the moment a given star passed the
meridian wire in the Greenwich telescope. Kinnerbrooks mistake was proven serious
statistically.

Upon reading the incident report in 1816, Friedrich Bessel (1784-1846 C.E.), an
astronomer from Konigsberg. prompted to conduct a study in 1820. He wanted to know
the differences between himself and other well-practiced observers in their observations
and recording. He introduced the concept of “personal equation” an attempt to correct
for the constant errors of particular observers, and his measurement led to the general
realization that perceptual and cognitive processes took a quantifiable time.

In 1830, through the writings of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887 C.E.) there
were claims that he was the one who started the formal beginning of experimental
psychology. Fechner was born in Gross-Sachen, Prussia. Fechner’s psychological
interests began toward the end of the 1830s in papers on the perception of
complementary and subjective colors. Between 1851 and 1860, Fechner worked out the
rationale for measuring sensation indirectly in terms of the unit of just noticeable

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difference between two sensations, developed his three basic psychophysical methods
(just noticeable differences, right and wrong cases, and average error) and carried out
the classical experiments on tactual and visual distance, visual brightness, and lifted
weights that formed a large part of the first of the two volumes of his work the “Elemente
der Psychophysik." Fechner‘s aim in the Elemente was to establish an exact science of
the functional relationship between physical and mental phenomena. Distinguishing
between inner (the relation between sensation and nerve excitation) and outer (the
relation between sensation and physical stimulation) psychophysics, Fechner
formulated his famous principle that the intensity of a sensation increases as the log of
the stimulus (S = k log R) to characterize outer psychophysical relations. In doing so, he
believed that he had arrived at a way of demonstrating a fundamental philosophical
truth: mind and matter are simply different ways of conceiving of one and the same
reality. His reputation as a well-trained, systematic experimentalist and a competent
mathematician made a great impact to other scientists who further pursue the scientific
manner of studying human behavior.

In 1855, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand Helmholtz also known as Hermann von

Helmholtz (1821-1894 C.E.) born in Potsdam, Kingdom of Prussia, Germany and
educated at the Potsdam Gymnasium and at the Friedrich Wilhelm Medical Institute in
Berlin, moved to Bonn and from Bonn, in 1858, to Heidelberg to serve as Director of the
Institute of Physiology. It was during the Bonn and Heidelberg periods that Helmholtz
made his most fundamental contributions to the newly emerging experimental
psychology. In his work the Optik, Helmholtz extended Hermann von Muller's doctrine of
the specific energies of nerves to Helmholtz offer a comprehensive theory of color vision
and a famous unconscious inference theory of perception.

In the theory of color vision, Helmholtz reasoned that just as the differences
between sensations of sound and light reflect the specific qualities of auditory and visual
nerves, sensations of color may depend on different kinds of nerves within the visual
system. Since the laws of color mixture suggest that virtually all hues can be obtained
by various combinations, it seemed to Helmholtz that the perceived hue, brightness,
and saturation of color must be derived from varying activity in three primary kinds of
nerve fibers in the eye.

In 1859, the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) established the

continuity between animal ang human, it made comparative psychology important.
Following Darwin's principle, some psychologists believed the consciousness,
emotions, and other psychological processes would be understood if the relation
between these processes and how they serve the adjustment of people to their
environment become known.

Between 1365 and 1868, another great physiologist, Franciscus Cornelius

Donders (1818-1889 C.E.) born in the town of Tilburg, in the Netherlands, and entered
the University of Utrecht as a medical student, assimilated the reaction-time procedure

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to psychology, employing it to study the time taken up by mental operations. Donders
separately assessed the time taken to respond to a stimulus under conditions of choice
and simple non-choice. Subtracting simple from choice reaction-lime, Donders
computed Donders computed the interval taken by the decision process. In 1868, in a
classic paper appearing in German, ”Die schnelligkeit psychischer Processe”, Donders
provided the definitive report of the results of this work and its extension to
discrimination times. Although the specifics of Donder’s findings are of little interest
today, his use of the reaction technique to measure the time taken by mental processes
exerted a major impact on his contemporaries and reaction-time was installed, along
with psychophysics, as a method of choice in the early through the prerequisites of an
experimental psychology, Helmholtz, his immediate superior, the Director of his
Institute, was in many ways already engaged in carrying out such a program in
experimental laboratory.

As Donders investigated reaction-time, Wundt, still at Heidelberg, began to work

toward the conception of physiological psychology that was to serve as the basis for his
systematic approach to experimentation. Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920 C.E.), was then
the assistant of Helmholtz in 1858, to direct the Physiological Institute. Wundt was born
at Neckarau, in the vicinity of Mannheim and received his early education at the hands
of a private tutor and at the Bruchsal Gymnasium. Wundt seems to have availed himself
but little of his contact with Helmholtz. Carrying out much of his experimental work in his
own home and on his own time, Wundt began the study of sense perception that led to
a series of publications collected in 1862. His work, Beitraige zur Theorie der
Sinneswahrnehmung consisted of six previously published articles on sense perception
preceded by a methodological introduction. In these articles, Wundt provided the basics
of a psychological theory of the perception of space (including some discussion of the
need for unconscious inference, apparently arrived at in independence of Helmholtz),
reviewed the history of theories of vision, analyzed the psychological function of
sensations arising from visual accommodation and eye movement, presented the
results of experiments on binocular contrast effects and stereoscopic fusion, and
argued, contra Herbart, that the content of consciousness at a given instant always
consists of a single, unconsciously integrated, percept as the young Wundt was
engaged in thinking.

In 1874 Wundt accepted a call to the University of Zurich, where he remained

only a year, moving in 1875 to Leipzig to assume the chair in philosophy. From 1875 to
1879, Wundt devoted himself largely to the duties entailed in his new teaching position.
Wundt seems as in the early as the Winter of 1879/1880 to have nonetheless allowed
two students, G. Stanley Hall and Max Friedrich, “to occupy themselves with research
investigations.” This research took place in a small classroom in the Konvict Building
that had earlier been assigned to Wundt for use as a storage area. Humble though it
may have been, this small space constituted the first psychology laboratory in the world
devoted to original psychological research. Experimental psychology, born with
Fechner, nurtured by Helmholtz and Donders, was to be raised by Wundt. Over the

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years until his retirement in 1917, Wundt served as the de facto parent of the ”new”
psychology.

Students from all over the world, especially from the United States, journeyed to
Leipzig to learn experimental technique and to return to their home institutions imbued
with the spirit of scientific psychology. Four known psychologists among this batch were
William James (1842-1910 C.E.) formed a psychology laboratory at Harvard University;
his lab was used for teaching demonstrations rather than experimentation and original
research. He was considered to be the ”Dean of American Psychologist", Granville
Stanley Hall (1846-1924 C.E.). Hall was the first president of the American
Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University. In 1883, he created
the first experimental psychology lab in the United States at John Hopkins University.
James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944 C.E.), the first professor of psychology in the United
States at the University of Pennsylvania. Edward Bradford Titchener (1866-1927 C.E.).
He published the ”Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice.”

In 1884, Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911C.E.) established his anthropometric

laboratory in London. Galton confirmed and extended the findings of Bessel. The
beginning of the psychological testing movement around the turn of the century gave
great impetus to the study of individual differences. Galton invented the statistical
technique of correlation and develop the index, to be named the coefficient of
correlation.

In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909 C.E.) reported his studies in learning

and memory, which were directly inspired by Fechner’s measurement of sensation.
Many experiments were conducted and performed using different methods. conditions,
and principles. As a result, different viewpoints were promoted and presented as
schools of thought.

Another body of influence on psychology came from medicine and psychiatry,

especially from the treatment of the mentally ill. It started with the work of Frenchmen
Franz Anton Mesmer (1734 -1815 C.E.) was a German physician with an interest in
astronomy, who theorized that there was a natural energetic transference that occurred
between all animated and inanimate objects, he called it animal magnetism, sometimes
later referred to as mesmerism. The theory attracted a wide following between about
1780 and 1850.

In 1843 the Scottish physician James Braid proposed the term hypnosis for a
technique derived from animal magnetism; today this is the usual meaning of
mesmerism. Later, with the work of an Austrian physician Sigmund Freud (1856-1939
C.E.), a new branch of medical psychology was born.

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 Between 1910 and 1550, a number of psychological schools or systems of
theories were developed, and opposing viewpoints on the nature and functions of
psychology continued to 'arise among the group psychologist and researchers

Importance of Statistics in Psychology

Psychology like other scientific field has general goals that guide its investigation about
human nature. These main goals of psychology are the following:

1. To describe the different ways of how people behave. It is the accurate and detailed
record of behavioral observations.

2. To explain the various causes of why certain processes and behaviors occur.

3. To predict and determine how the organism will behave in a certain situation.

4. To control or change an organism’s behavior and mental processes by learning how

to modify or alter undesirable behavior.

There are many important factors worth mentioning referring to the relevance of
statistics in the field of psychology. To mention a few, the following are considered
important for the purpose of this learning material.

1. To scientifically accomplish the goal of psychology, there is a strong need to undergo,

explore and adopt the common practices of scientist in coming up conclusion based
from empirical studies and researches. Statistics is the acceptable instrument the binds
all the scientific study into a universally valid, reliable and accepted new discovered
knowledge.

2. Psychological research is the cornerstone of the field, an experimental research is

very important to provide better strategy of treatment and better methods. Statistics is
essential for determining if the certain treatments or methods are effective or not.

3. Psychologists need to keep up with the fast-paced and ever-changing lifestyle,

literature, entertainment, and environmental development. Statistics provides methods
and procedures that will aid psychologists and researchers how and what are the
important factors to gather in order to cope with the above mentioned reality.

4. For college students, they can organize their time and interpret the situation and
information in a meaningful way.

5. Statistics enables the researcher to draw general conclusions: the process of

extracting conclusions is carried out according to accepted rules. In explaining various
causes of why certain processes and behavior occurs. With the use of statistics the

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researcher is forced to use precise procedures and methods in the conduct of research
to have a result that can supply valid and reliable conclusions, hence, it will clarify and
determine the cause and effect on the occurrence of behavior.

6. Statistics enables the researcher to predict ”how much” of a thing will happen under
conditions he knows and has measured.

7. Statistics is everywhere: If you are planning to pursue graduate studies, higher or

sophisticated statistical tools will be introduced to fit with the demands of the degree you
are pursuing. If you are planning to be a professional, then, you have to take the board
exam. A component of the board exam inquires your knowledge about statistics. If you
are practicing your profession in the field or in the academe you need to conduct
research. Therefore, there’s no reason for us to dislike statistics, but to put our hearts
into it, and everything will be put in place.

Categories of Statistics

1. Descriptive Statistics refers to the field of statistics that includes the methods of
collecting, classifying, graphing, and averaging the data. The objective is simply
describing and summarizing the important features, properties or characteristics of the
data on hand without attempting to give inference.

Example of Descriptive Statistics

• The IQ level of psychology students will be organized in a table called frequency

distribution or bar or pie graph that will give the IQ level and description when
grouped according to year level and gender.

2. Inferential Statistics demands a higher order of critical judgment and mathematical

methods. Its main concern is to analyze the organized data leading to prediction of
inferences. It implies' that before carrying out an inference, the researcher is equipped
to employ appropriate and correct descriptive measures to bring out valid and reliable
result. The area of inferential statistics called hypothesis testing is a decision making
process for evaluating the statements about a population, based on the information
gathered from the samples.

Examples of Inferential Statistics

• Compare the effectiveness between two interventions or methods of

psychotherapy

• Predict academic performance of college students

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Prepared by:

Alexie E. Basileyo, RPm, MSPSYCP, PhD (Cand)

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