Psychology & TOK

•Reason

Can we assume that human beings are rational animals?

Many people tend to mix up one's intelligence with one's logic and reason towards a certain subject(rationality), so lets break down both of these terms:
Rationality: having an argument that is backed up with some type of evidence (scientific or study-based)
Intelligence: based one one's knowledge and how they think and if they have a given 'gift'
Rationality can be argued to be environmental based whereas intelligence can be believed to be genetically based
Intelligence tests measure important aspects of our minds, however they don not measure how rationally we think, therefore we can not link one to the other, as this would be very imprecise and inaccurate

•Emotion

How can a social scientist avoid becoming emotionally involved?

Experimenters are expected to be as objective as they can be to avoid a any bias in the experiment (participant bias, response bias or any type of bias), but how can they do that? Aren't they normal humans with feelings just like us?
There are actually a number of feature that must be taken into account; some of these are:

• Their work must be checked by another individual- to see if the interpretations of situations are different or similar
• They must be detached from what they are studying, if it is a case study, they must not form a close relationship with the person they are studying to avoid subjective interpretations 

Ethics

•How do ethical factors limit experiments?

Ethics nowadays are believed to be somehow strict, this is to avoid any harm and danger, this is positive aspect, however the negative aspect is they limit our ability to collect explicit data that could possible harm an individual or an animal.

•Language:

Can questionnaire be written in a neutral language?

Many questionnaires these days are argued to have misleading questions which lead to response bias and research bias, which can eventually lead to a collection of invalid and unreliable results.
Misleading Question: Do you hate/love your little brother?
Neutral Question: How do you feel about your little brother?

Loftus and Palmer conducted a study in 1974 which aimed to investigate how the language used in eyewitness testimony can alter our memory and they aimed to show that leading questions will distort one's eyewitness testimony 
 They asked participants "About how fast were the cars going when they (smashed / collided /
bumped / hit / contacted) each other?”
the verb 'smash' received a prediction of the highest speed, this is because it is a very violent verb that makes one visualise a situation worse than what it might of actually been.