Entries are compiled from published sources for reference. Verifying the accuracy and suitability of any information for your own use remains your responsibility.

Privacy
Cookies
Terms
Delete account

248

Natural Sciences236

Social Sciences185

Environment & Sustainability160

Law30

MethodStatistics1,836 AI & ML1,661 Decision Sciences932 Research Methods1,354 Measurement1,745 Causal & Evidence532 Research Practice118

29 methods in Psychology · Research MethodsClear

Methods at the intersection of your two filters.

SortPopularity A–Z Z–A Newest

social psychology

Asch Conformity Paradigm

The Asch conformity paradigm, established by Solomon Asch in the 1950s, demonstrates the power of group pressure to make people publicly endorse a manifestly false judgment. A naive participant joins a group of confederates for a simple perceptual task -- matching the length of a standard line to one of three compariso

1 source1956

social psychology

Bogus Pipeline

The bogus pipeline, devised by Jones and Sigall in 1971, is a methodological technique for reducing social-desirability bias in the measurement of attitudes, especially sensitive ones such as prejudice. Participants are connected to an impressive-looking apparatus and convinced that it functions as an accurate lie dete

1 source1971

social psychology

Bystander Intervention Paradigm

The bystander intervention paradigm, pioneered by Latane and Darley in 1968, experimentally demonstrates the bystander effect: the counterintuitive finding that individuals are less likely to help in an emergency when other people are present. In their classic studies a participant encounters a staged emergency -- smok

1 source1968

social psychology

Confederate Paradigm

The confederate paradigm is a foundational methodological design in social psychology in which trained accomplices -- people who appear to be ordinary participants or bystanders but are actually part of the research team -- enact scripted behavior to create controlled social situations. By standardizing what confederat

2 sources1956

social psychology

Cover Story Deception

Cover story and deception design is the methodological practice of concealing a study's true purpose behind a plausible false rationale so that participants behave spontaneously rather than in line with what they think the experimenter wants. Because people who guess a study's hypothesis may consciously or unconsciousl

2 sources1959

social psychology

Cyberball Paradigm

The Cyberball paradigm, introduced by Williams, Cheung, and Choi in 2000, is the most widely used experimental method for inducing social exclusion in the laboratory. Participants believe they are playing a simple online ball-toss game with two or three other people, who are in fact computer-controlled. In the inclusio

2 sources2000

political psychology

Democratic Norms Support Measurement

This approach measures how committed ordinary citizens are to democratic norms by observing the price they are willing to pay to uphold them. Rather than asking abstractly whether people value democracy, Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik's 2020 candidate-choice design confronts voters with a co-partisan candidate who vio

2 sources2020

social psychology

Ego Depletion Paradigm

The ego depletion paradigm, introduced by Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, and Tice in 1998, tests the strength model of self-control, which holds that acts of self-regulation draw on a limited, shared resource that becomes temporarily depleted with use. In the classic dual-task design, participants first perform a ta

1 source1998

political psychology

Elite Cue Experiment

An elite cue experiment isolates the persuasive power of source endorsements by holding a policy message constant and randomly varying who is said to support it. Grounded in John Zaller's receive-accept-sample model of mass opinion, which holds that citizens take cues from trusted political elites rather than reasoning

2 sources1992

political psychology

Emotion Appraisal in Politics

Emotion appraisal in politics studies how distinct emotions, anxiety, anger, enthusiasm, and others, arise from cognitive appraisals of political events and in turn shape attention, information seeking, persuasion, and participation. It combines appraisal theory with affective intelligence theory (Marcus, Neuman and Ma

2 sources2000

social psychology

False Consensus Paradigm

The false consensus paradigm, established by Ross, Greene, and House in 1977, demonstrates a pervasive bias in social perception: people overestimate the extent to which others share their own choices, beliefs, and behaviors. In the canonical procedure, participants indicate their own position on some issue or choice -

1 source1977

social psychology

Free-Choice Dissonance Paradigm

The free-choice paradigm, introduced by Jack Brehm in 1956, measures post-decisional dissonance through the phenomenon of spreading of alternatives. Participants first rate the desirability of a set of items, then choose between two options that they had rated as roughly equally attractive, and finally re-rate all the

2 sources1956

social psychology

Goal Priming Paradigm

The goal priming paradigm tests whether activating a mental construct -- a trait concept, stereotype, or goal -- outside of awareness can directly shape subsequent behavior. In the classic demonstrations by Bargh, Chen, and Burrows in 1996, participants completed a seemingly unrelated language task containing words rel

2 sources1996

social psychology

Induced Compliance Paradigm

The induced (forced) compliance paradigm, introduced by Festinger and Carlsmith in 1959, is the classic experimental test of cognitive dissonance theory. Participants are led to perform a counter-attitudinal act -- typically telling another person that a boring task was enjoyable -- under either low or high justificati

2 sources1959

political psychology

Issue Framing Experiment

An issue framing experiment manipulates how a political issue is described, emphasizing different considerations, to test how framing shifts opinion. Nelson, Clawson and Oxley's (1997) classic study showed that framing a Klan rally as a free-speech issue versus a public-order issue changed tolerance judgments, and Chon

2 sources1997

social psychology

Lost Letter Technique

The lost letter technique, introduced by Milgram, Mann, and Harter in 1965, is an unobtrusive field method for measuring community attitudes by exploiting a small act of everyday helping. Researchers distribute stamped, addressed envelopes in public places as if they had been accidentally dropped, with the letters addr

2 sources1965

social psychology

Mere Exposure Paradigm

The mere exposure paradigm, established by Robert Zajonc in 1968, shows that simply being repeatedly exposed to a stimulus, with no reinforcement or even conscious recognition, increases liking for it. In the canonical procedure, participants are exposed to novel stimuli -- unfamiliar ideographs, foreign words, faces,

1 source1968

social psychology

Milgram Obedience Paradigm

The Milgram obedience paradigm, devised by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s, measures the extent to which ordinary people will obey an authority figure's commands to harm another person. A naive participant is assigned the role of teacher and instructed by an experimenter to administer increasingly severe electric sh

1 source1963

social psychology

Minimal Group Paradigm

The minimal group paradigm is an experimental procedure, introduced by Henri Tajfel and colleagues in 1971, that strips intergroup conflict down to its barest possible cause: mere categorization. Participants are sorted into two groups on a trivial or random basis (for example, an alleged preference for one painter ove

1 source1971

political psychology

Misinformation Correction Experiment

A misinformation correction experiment tests whether a factual correction can reduce belief in a political misperception. In Nyhan and Reifler's influential 2010 design, all respondents read a misleading claim and a random subset also read a correction, after which their factual beliefs are measured. Their alarming fin

2 sources2010

political psychology

Motivated Reasoning Experiment

A motivated reasoning experiment tests whether people process political information to reach conclusions they are directionally motivated to hold rather than the most accurate ones. Building on Kunda's (1990) theory and crystallized by Taber and Lodge (2006), these designs expose partisans to attitude-congruent and inc

2 sources2006

political psychology

Open-Ended Political Response Coding

Open-ended political response coding is the systematic content analysis of verbatim survey answers, classically the American National Election Studies likes/dislikes about parties and candidates, into a categorical scheme so they can be analyzed quantitatively. It applies content-analysis methodology (Krippendorff, 200

2 sources1952

political psychology

Partisan Motivated Reasoning Paradigm

The partisan motivated reasoning paradigm is the experimental template for showing that citizens process political information to protect their existing loyalties rather than to reach accurate conclusions. In Taber and Lodge's foundational 2006 design, partisans who read balanced pro and con arguments rated congenial a

2 sources2006

social psychology

Round-Robin Design

The round-robin design is a data-collection structure for dyadic research in which every member of a group interacts with, or provides ratings of, every other member, generating the full set of directed pairwise observations. Because each person serves repeatedly as both perceiver and target, the design produces the cr

1 source2006

social psychology

Stereotype Content Model

The Stereotype Content Model (SCM), introduced by Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, and Xu in 2002, proposes that stereotypes of social groups are organized along two fundamental dimensions: warmth (whether a group is friendly and well-intentioned or hostile) and competence (whether it is capable and effective or not). Crucially, m

1 source2002

political psychology

Terror Management Experiment

A terror management experiment tests terror management theory (TMT), which holds that awareness of one's own mortality creates potential anxiety that people manage by defending their cultural worldview and self-esteem. The canonical mortality-salience paradigm (Greenberg et al., 1990) experimentally reminds participant

2 sources1990

social psychology

Thin-Slicing

Thin-slicing, established by Ambady and Rosenthal's 1992 meta-analysis, is the finding and method that judgments based on very brief samples of expressive behavior -- sometimes only a few seconds -- can predict consequential interpersonal outcomes with surprising accuracy. In the paradigm, short clips (thin slices) of

2 sources1992

political psychology

Value Conflict Measurement

Value conflict measurement quantifies the tension citizens feel when an issue pits two values they both cherish against each other, and traces its cognitive consequences. Philip Tetlock's value pluralism model holds that people reason in integratively complex ways precisely when an issue activates conflicting values th

2 sources1986

social psychology

Within-Subjects Factorial Design

The within-subjects factorial design is an experimental framework in which each participant is exposed to every combination of two or more manipulated factors, allowing researchers to test the main effect of each factor and their interactions while using each person as their own control. Because the same individuals ex

2 sources2004