 Hello, and welcome to Behavioral Science 3010, Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences. I'm Bart Paulson, and I'm your teacher for this course. I want to start by addressing really a common issue people have. A lot of people come in and say, I'm not a math person, I'm scared of math, I haven't done math in a long time. Well, the really important thing to remember is, this isn't the math class. We have stats classes over in the math department. We're in the Behavioral Science Department, and I'm not a math professor. I'm a psychology professor. The reason that matters is because we're using statistics, not for its own sake, not for something to make people's minds melt, but to help you better understand people. And believe it or not, it can do that. The whole point of the Behavioral Sciences is that you're doing something methodical. You're trying to look at things carefully, and you're trying to use some evidence to help frame the things that you do, the way that you think about people, the way you help them. And statistics is the language of science. It's the way that you can find hidden patterns. You can find unexpected groupings. It's a way of keeping you honest when you're talking about why people do what they do. And so that's a theme I'm going to return to as we do this class. We use data as a means to understand people. And one of the most important things about that is you need to use your own understanding of your experience, of the people you've been around, of common sense, and of the things you've learned in your other classes, and combine that with data to get a more full, richer understanding of people. You don't have to trade in and become a robot when you start working with data. You still have a soul. You still have your compassion and your human empathy. So use that. Again, you use the data to give you unexpected insights and to help guide you as you try to understand what's happening in the world around you, maybe what's happening in your own life, and the procedures, looking at the data with graphs, getting basic descriptive statistics, maybe even doing inferential procedures are all ways that you can get some more insight from your data. And that's the whole purpose of including this class in the behavioral sciences. And truthfully, it's one of the things that make this my favorite class to be teaching. It really is. And I say that as a person with a background in psychology and a background in art and design. I love this class. I feel it is relevant that it can help anybody do the things that are important to them and do them better. I'll talk about that as we go through the course through little introductory videos I called what, why, and what for for each chapter to try to connect this to the things that are probably important to you. But for right now, thanks so much for joining me. I'm glad you're here and I'm excited to see what we can do together in statistics for the behavioral sciences.