Imagination or prediction in some of the instances, this is what you can perceive as Hypothesis. It’s not this simple to understand and not very difficult either. The psychological definition of the same differs a lot and we are here to have the elementary knowledge of it.
Before we look for a definition of the subject, let’s take an example to make things clearer! Suppose you have an exam tomorrow and you spend the night out with your friends watching movies and all, when asked about the next day exam, you replied by framing a hypothesis of the same. It is more like a specific testable prediction that you expect to happen in certain circumstance. In this case, your hypothesis might be, not studying the day before the exam. That’s the general idea and we want the hypothesis psychological definition.
The purpose of Hypothesis
It’s has various use, particularly in the field of experiments and all. It is mostly used to define how the relationship is between two variables. The core purpose is to find out answers of questions and that’s what a formal hypothesis does. It helps us to find the probable answer that we are trying to find out through an experiment.
The Hypothesis psychology definition foes like: there are two variables and the first one is called independent variable and this part of an experiment can be changed and tested as per the requirement. This happens at the very first place and is considered as the “cause” for any change in the probable outcome.
The other variable
Of course, it is the outcome of the experiment that is called the dependent variable. It we bring back the context of the very first example that we used we will find that, not studying the night before the exam is the independent variable and the projected score of the exam is the dependent variable. Now, we will focus on some of the specific details of Hypothesis psychology definition.
A hypothesis must have these:
- An explanation of your expectation
- Clarity and understandability
- It must be testable and measureable
- Must contain independent and dependent variable
Another important thing to be remembered about hypothesis is that it should be based on research and then only we will get the most apt Hypothesis psychology definition. More so, the purpose of a hypothesis is basically to reach to the answer of a question.