Shadowing Practice: Psychological Research: Crash Course Psychology #2 - Learn English Speaking with Video
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150 sentences
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Can we call pizza cause psychedelic hallucinations?
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Does coffee make you smarter?
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Or does it just make you do dumb stuff faster?
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Like much of psychology itself, questions like these can seem pretty intuitive.
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I mean, people may not be the easiest organisms to understand, but you're a person, right?
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So you must be qualified to draw, like, some conclusions about other people and what makes them tick.
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But it's important to realize that your intuition isn't always right.
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In fact, sometimes it is exactly wrong, and we tend to grossly underestimate the dangers of false intuition.
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If you have some idea about a person and their behavior that turns out to be right, that reinforces your trust in your intuition.
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Like if I warned my buddy
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Bob against eating that deep dish pizza that's been in the fridge for the past week,
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but he eats it anyway and soon starts to wig out, I'm gonna say, dude, I told you so.
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But if I'm wrong, and he's totally fine, I probably won't even think about it ever again.
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This is known as hindsight bias, or the I knew it all along phenomenon.
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This doesn't mean that common sense is wrong,
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it just means that our intuitive sense more easily describes what just happened than what will happen in the future.
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Another reason you can't blindly trust your intuition is your natural tendency toward overconfidence.
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Sometimes you just really, really feel like you're right about people when actually you're really, really wrong.
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We've all been there.
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We also tend to perceive order in random events, which can lead to false assumptions.
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For example, if you flip a coin five times, you have equal chances of getting all tails as you do getting alternating heads and tails.
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But we see the series of five tails as something unusual,
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as a streak, and thus giving that result some kind of meaning that it very definitely does not have.
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That is why we have the methods and safeguards of psychological research and experimentation, and the glorious process of scientific inquiry.
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They help us to get around these problems and basically save the study of our minds from the stupidity of our minds.
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So I hope that it won't be a spoiler if I tell you now that pizza won't make you trip, and coffee doesn't make you smart.
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Sorry.
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In most ways, psychological research is no different than any other scientific discipline.
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Like step one is always figuring out how to ask general questions about your subject and and turn them into measurable, testable propositions.
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This is called operationalizing your questions.
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So you know how the scientific method works.
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It starts with a question and a theory.
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And I don't mean theory in the sense of like a hunch
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that say a quad shot of espresso makes you think better.
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Instead, in science, a theory is what explains and organizes lots of different observations and predicts outcomes.
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And when you come up with a testable prediction, that's your hypothesis.
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Once your theory and hypothesis are in place, you need a clear and common language to report them with.
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So, for example, defining exactly what you mean by thinking better with your espresso hypothesis will allow other researchers to replicate the experiment.
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And replication is key.
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You can watch a person exhibit a certain behavior once, and it won't prove very much.
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But if you keep getting consistent results, even as you change subjects or situations, you're probably on to something.
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This is a problem with one popular type of psychological research, case studies, which to take an in -depth look at one individual.
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Case studies can sometimes be misleading, because by their nature, they can't be replicated, so they run the risk of overgeneralizing.
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Still, they're good at showing us what can happen, and end up framing questions for more extensive and generalizable studies.
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They're also often memorable and a great storytelling device psychologists use to observe and describe behavior.
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Like, say the smell of coffee makes
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Carl suddenly anxious and irritable.
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That obviously doesn't mean that it has that same effect on everyone.
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In fact, Carl has terrible memories associated with that smell, and so his case is actually quite rare.
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Poor Carl.
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But you would still have to look at lots of other cases to determine that conclusively.
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Another popular method of psychological research is naturalistic observation, where researchers simply watch behavior in a natural environment.
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Whether that's chimps poking anthills in the jungle, kids clowning in a classroom, or drunk dudes yelling at soccer games.
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The idea is to let the subjects just do their thing without trying to manipulate or control the situation.
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So yeah, basically just spying on people.
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Like case studies, naturalistic observations are great at describing behavior, but they're very limited in explaining it.
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Psychologists can also collect behavioral data using surveys or interviews, asking people to report their opinions and behaviors.
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Sexuality researcher Alfred Kinsey famously used this technique
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when he surveyed thousands of men and women on their sexual history and published his findings in a pair of revolutionary texts,
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sexual behavior in the human male and female, respectively.
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Surveys are a great way to access people's consciously held attitudes and beliefs, but how to ask the questions can be tricky.
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Subtle word choices can influence results.
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For example, more forceful words like ban or censor may elicit different reactions than limit or not allow.
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Asking do you believe in space aliens is a much different question than do you think
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that there is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe.
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It's the same question, but in the first, the subject might assume that you mean aliens visiting
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Earth and making crop circles and abducting people and poking them.
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And if how you phrase surveys is important, so is who you ask.
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I could ask a room full of students at a pacifist club meeting what they think about arms control,
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but the results wouldn't be a representative measure of where students stand, because there's a pretty clear sampling bias at work here.
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To fairly represent a population, I'd need to get a random sample where all members of the target group,
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in this case students, had an equal chance of being selected to answer the question.
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So, once you've described behavior with surveys, case studies, or naturalistic observation, you can start making sense out of it, and even predict future behavior.
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One way to do that is to look at how one trait or behavior is related to another, or how they correlate.
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So let's get back to my buddy
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Bob, who seems to think that his refrigerator is actually some kind of time machine that can preserve food indefinitely.
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Let's say that
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Bob is just tucked into a lunch of questionable leftovers, pizza that may very well have had a little bit of fungus on it.
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But he was hungry, and lazy, and so he doused it in sriracha.
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Suddenly, he starts seeing things.
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Green armadillos with laser beam eyes.
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From here, we could deduce that eating unknown fungus predicts hallucination.
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That's a correlation.
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But correlation is not causation.
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Yes, it makes sense that eating questionable fungus would cause hallucinations, but it's possible that
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Bob was already on the verge of a psychotic episode, and those fuzzy leftovers were actually benign.
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Or, there could be an entirely different factor involved, like maybe he hadn't slept in 72 hours, or had an intense migraine coming on,
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and one of those factors caused his hallucinations.
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It's tempting to draw conclusions from correlations, but it's super important to remember that correlations predict the possibility of cause and effect relationships.
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They cannot prove them.
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So we've talked about how to describe behavior without manipulating it, and how to make connections and predictions from those findings.
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But that can only take you so far.
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To really get to the bottom of cause and effect behaviors, you're gonna have to start experimenting.
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Experiments allow investigators to isolate different effects by manipulating an independent variable and keeping all other variables constant, or as constant as you can.
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This means that they need at least two groups.
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The experimental group, which is going to get messed with, and the control group, which is not going to get messed with.
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Just as surveys use random samples, experimental researchers need to randomly assign participants to each group to minimize potential confounding variables,
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or outside factors, that may skew the results.
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You don't want all grumpy teenagers in one group and all wealthy Japanese servers in the other.
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They gotta mingle.
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Now, sometimes one or both groups are not informed about what's actually being tested.
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For example, researchers can test how substances affect people by comparing their effects to placebos or inert substances.
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And often, the researchers themselves don't know which group is experimental and which is control, so they don't unintentionally influence the results through their own behavior.
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In which case, it's called, you guessed it, a double -blind procedure.
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So let's put these ideas into practice in our own little experiment.
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Like all good work, it starts with a question.
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So the other day, my friend Bernice and I were debating.
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We're debating caffeine's effect on the brain.
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Personally, she's convinced that coffee helps her focus and think better, but I get all jittery like a caged meerkat and can't focus on anything.
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And because we know that overconfidence can lead you to believe things that are not true, we decided to do some critical thinking.
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So let's figure out our question, do humans solve problems faster when given caffeine?
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Now we gotta boil that down into a testable prediction.
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Remember, keep it clear, simple and eloquent so that it can be replicated.
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Caffeine makes me smarter is not a great hypothesis.
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A better one would be, say, adult humans given caffeine will navigate a maze faster than humans not given caffeine.
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The caffeine dosage is your independent variable, the thing that you can change.
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So you'll need some coffee.
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Your result or dependent variable, the thing that depends on the thing that you can change,
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is going to be the speed at which the subject navigates this giant corn maze.
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Go out on the street, wrangle up a bunch of different kinds of people, and randomly assign them into three different groups.
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Also at this point, the American Psychological Association suggests that you acquire everyone's informed consent to participate.
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You don't want to force anyone to be in your experiment, no matter how cool you think it is.
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So the control group gets a placebo, in this case decaf.
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Experimental group one gets a low dose of caffeine, which we'll define at 100 milligrams, just an eye -opener and like a cup of coffee's worth.
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Experimental group two gets 500 milligrams, more than a quad shot of espresso dunked in a Red Bull.
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Once you dose everyone, turn them loose in the maze and wait at the other end with a stopwatch.
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All that's left is to measure your results from the three different groups
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and compare them to see if there were any conclusive results.
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If the highly dosed folks got through it twice as fast as the low dose or placebo groups,
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then Bernice's hypothesis was correct and she could rub my face in it saying she was right all along. But really,
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that would just be the warm flush of hindsight bias telling her something she didn't really know until we tested it.
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Then, because we've used clear language and defined our parameters, other curious minds can easily replicate this experiment
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and we can eventually pool all the data together
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and have something solid to say about what that macchiato was doing to your cognition.
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Or at least the speed at which you can run through a maze.
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Science.
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Probably the best tool that you have for understanding other people.
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Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Psychology.
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If you paid attention, you learned how to apply the scientific method of psychological research through.. case studies, naturalistic observations, surveys, and interviews, and experimentation.
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You also learned about different kinds of bias in experimentation, and how research practices help us avoid them.
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Thanks especially to our Subbable subscribers who make this and all of Crash Course possible.
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If you'd like to contribute to help us keep
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Crash Course going, and also get awesome perks like an autographed science poster, or even be animated into an upcoming episode,
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go to subbable .com slash crash course to find out how.
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Our script was written by Kathleen Yale and edited by Blake T.
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Pastino and myself.
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Our consultant is Dr. Ranji Bhagwat.
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Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins.
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Our script supervisor is Michael Ronda, who is also our sound designer.
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And our graphics team is Thought Cafe.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Psychological Research: Crash Course Psychology”. This video has 99 sentences and 2143 words to shadow. The speech runs for 10:40. The speaker talks fast, about 201 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 80% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| experiment noun | /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/ | A test under controlled conditions made to either demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of… |
| psychological adjective | /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/ | Of or pertaining to psychology. |
| researcher noun | /ˈɹiˌsɝ.t͡ʃɚ/ | One who researches. |
| caffeine noun | /ˈkæfiːn/ | An alkaloid, C₈H₁₀N₄O₂, found naturally in tea and coffee plants, which acts as a mild stimulant on the central nervous system. |
| experimental adjective | /ɪkspɛɹəˈmɛntəl/ | Pertaining to or founded on experiment. |
| observation noun | /ˌɑbzɚˈveɪʃn̩/ | The act of observing, and the fact of being observed (see observance) |
| variable adjective | [ˈvæɹ.i.ə.bl̩] | Able to vary or be varied. |
| hypothesis noun | /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/ | A tentative conjecture explaining an observation, phenomenon or scientific problem and that can be tested by further observation, investigation, or… |
| pizza noun | /ˈpi.tsə/ | A baked Italian dish of a thinly rolled bread crust typically topped before baking with tomato sauce, cheese, and other ingredients such as meat or vegetables. |
| bias noun | /ˈbaɪ.əs/ | Inclination towards something. |
| predict verb | /pɹɪˈdɪkt/ | To make a prediction: to forecast, foretell, or estimate a future event on the basis of knowledge and reasoning; to prophesy a future event on the basis of… |
| correlation noun | /ˌkɔɹ.əˈleɪ.ʃən/ | A reciprocal, parallel or complementary relationship between two or more comparable objects. |
| maze noun | /ˈmeɪz/ | A labyrinth; a puzzle consisting of a complicated network of paths or passages, the aim of which is to find one's way through. |
| replicate verb | /ˈɹɛplɪkeɪt/ | To make a copy (replica) of. |
| intuition noun | /ˌɪn.tjuːˈɪʃ.ən/ | Immediate cognition without the use of conscious rational processes. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| get around verb | To move to the other side of (something, such as an obstruction) by deviating from a direct course or following a curved path. | |
| get back to verb | Return to (an activity) | |
| get through verb | /ɡɛt ˈθɹu/ | To overcome; to endure. |
| run through verb | To summarise briefly. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is known · is called · can't be replicated |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | that's been · you've described · have had |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | events, which can · group, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 42 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, you're, won't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/, wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: observation /ˌɑbzɚˈveɪʃn̩/, correlation /ˌkɔɹ.əˈleɪ.ʃən/, intuition /ˌɪn.tjuːˈɪʃ.ən/, prediction /pɹɪˈdɪkʃən/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/
- Long words — get the stress right: experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, psychological /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/, experimental /ɪkspɛɹəˈmɛntəl/, hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/, correlation /ˌkɔɹ.əˈleɪ.ʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like experiment, psychological, researcher.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.