Chapter 3. Neuroscience and Behavior

Topic: Concussion rates in high school and college athletics

Psychology, like all other scientific fields, relies on empirical evidence to draw conclusions about the world. The introductory story for this chapter makes clear the serious consequences of damage to the brain. This makes understanding how the brain works, the primary topic of this chapter, all the more important. Understanding when, where and why brain injury is most likely to occur helps coaches, athletes, and parents make better decisions about taking preventative actions.

Sometimes the data support commonly held folk beliefs, and sometimes the data reveal new or surprising relationships between the variables involved. The best way to see if your beliefs about how the world works are true is to collect data and see what story they tell. However, you must also be careful to make sure that your data collection techniques are as free from potential biases and confounding variables as you can.

This applet uses data that was collected by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council on the rates of sports-related concussions for men and women playing high school and college sports. While exploring this data, you should be thinking about how your intuitions may or may not line up with the actual empirical evidence and how data collection methods may influence the data and, as a result, the subsequent conclusions.