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Experiments cannot show "whether people tend to cooperate or compete."
Carefully designed experiments, such as some reported in'08 in Nature,
might be able to quantify the amounts of competition and coperation in
certain groups. No amount of experimentation can tell you what those
amounts are in all possible groups.
You can drop a ball a trillion times and measure its acceleration, each
time, to be the current value of g. That does not guarantee that the next
time you drop it you will get the same result (calculate the probability
of barrier penetration).
To see how physicists actually proceed, when exploring new phenomena, I
suggest you follow the workings of the Atlas collaboration at the LHC;
the collaboration's first paper has been accepted for publication in
Physics Letters B.
On Thu, 13 May 2010, John Clement wrote:
Experiments can also be used to measure things. For example they can becourse in
used to measure whether people tend to cooperate or compete. And such
experiments do not necessarily have predictions or hypotheses. Of
psychology such experiments are not black or white, they usually do notshow
existence or yes/no. Indeed a large number of experiments never reallyhave
a prediction, but are of the nature, "I wonder what will happen if" or"Is A
more significant than B".vast
Experiments often perhaps even usually do not follow the 5 step method
taught in school, as they often do not have a hypothesis. Actually the
majority of experiments are basically parameter measurements, where ato
hypothesis is never considered.
So the phrase is NOT nonsense. The ideas that experiments are only used
confirm or deny predictions is nonsense.Experiments
John M. Clement
Houston, TX
The phrase "experiments in psychology show" is nonsensical.
false.can provide counter-examples to predictions, thus showing that the
predictions are false; they can also provide examples of successful
predictions, thus showing that the successful predictions are not
That is the limit of what experiments can do.