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Psychology Article Summary

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The article I read from The New York Times is about how plastic is threatening to seabirds lives. This has to do with psychology because they study the effects of plastic on the birds, and the brain is effected. Waste and global warming is becoming a major problem on our planet, and many animals are being negatively affected. Studies and experiments like this occur everyday in psychology. Psychology can be defined as the scientific study of behavior and mental processes (textbook p.5). In this case, the behavior of humans leaving harmful plastic around is affecting the behavior of the seabirds. According to Fleur, we know this is an increasing issue because there are several other studies like the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”. It also discusses how the plastic production has doubled globally every 11 years since the 1950s, which is crazy to even think about because its currently 300 million tons per year. …show more content…

The scientific method starts with making observations, and then you can create a hypothesis and prediction based on the observation whether it be descriptive, correlational, or experimental (Research mathods,8/25/15) . In this article, it mostly consists of descriptive research which include, case studies, naturalistic observation, and surveys. They allow a researcher to make careful, systematic, real-world observations (Textbook p.42). In this study, it uses surveys to analyze 135 seabirds to find that today about 90 seabirds have traces of plastic in their stomachs. A survey is what allows us to ask/study large numbers or people (in this case seabirds) questions about attitude and behavior (textbook p.44). The sample size for this specific study would be 135 which is the subset of a population being studied. The population in this case would be all seabirds, which is the entire group from which the sample was taken

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