In order to investigate an individual’s behavior, researchers may use diffe-rent levels of analysis-from the broadest, most global level down to the most minute, specific level. Suppose, for example, you were trying to describe a pa-inting you saw at a museum (see Figure 1.1). At a global level, you might d-escribe it by title, Bathers, and by artist, Georges Seurat. At a more specific
level, you might recount features of the painting: some people are sunning themselves on a riverbank, while others are enjoying in water, and so on. At a
very specific level, you might describe the technique Seurat used-tiny points ofpaint-to create the scene. The description at each level would answer different questions about the painting.
Different levels of psychological description also address different questions. At the broadest level of psychological analysis, researchers investigate the b-ehavior of the whole person within complex social and cultural contexts. At t-his level, researches might study cross-cultural differences in violence, the orig-ins of prejudice, and the consequences of mental illness. At the next level, ps-ychologists focus on narrower, finer units of behavior, such as speed of reacti-on to a stop light, eye movements during reading, and grammatical errors ma-de by children acquiring language. Researchers can study even smaller units ofbehavior. They might work to discover the biological bases of behavior by id-entifying the places in the brain where different types of memories are stored, the biochemical changes that occur during learning, and the sensory paths resp-onsible for vision or hearing. Each level of analysis yields information essenti-al to the final composite portrait of human nature that psychologists hope ulti-mately to develop.
However tight or broad the focus of the observation, psychologists strive
to describe behavior objectively. Collecting the facts as they exist, and not as
the researcher expects or hopes them to be, is of utmost importance. Because every observer brings to each observation his or her subjective point of view- biases, prejudices, and expectations—it is essential to prevent these personal fa-ctors from creeping in and distorting the data. As you will see in the next ch-apter, psychological researchers have developed a variety of techniques to maintain objectivity.
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