Pigeons Loft

Psychology is an empirical discipline, so we gather information to answer our question. Most of the time, this information goes by the name data and most of the time it involves numbers. If we study a large group of people (rats, Pigeons, etc.), we generate a lot of information and we have to make sense of it. The most common way of reducing the number of data so we are not swamped with too much information is to find the average score.There are several distinct averages, each computed differently.

The common averages are the mean and median, and the mode. The most frequently used is the mean, which is the technical term for the score you obtain by adding all your numbers and dividing by the number of scores you added. In every day language, most people use the word average to reflect the mean .Sometimes we also want to find out whether the scores are bunched together or spread apart, so we find the standard deviation. Together,these two statistics gives us a sense of the typical score ( the average ) and how far from the typical score we can expect other scores to be (the standard deviation).

A second use of statistics is to allow us to evaluate the similarities and differences of groups. So if we have a group of, say, 100 measurements from one group and 100 measurements from another group, we can compute two numbers for each group, the mean (the average score) and the standard deviation (an indicator of the spread of the scores),

If you make clear to your reader why you are using a particular statistics, you will be helping your reader to understand the points you are making.

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