Chapter 1 Psychology Scientific Thinking What is Psychology Science Versus Intuition William James is regarded as the founder of American Psychology Psychology the scientific study of the mind brain and behavior Levels of analysis rungs on a ladder of analysis with lower levels tied most closely to biological influences and higher levels tied most closely to social influences low rungs molecules to brain structures tied to what we call THE BRAIN high rungs thoughts feelings and emotions social cultural influences tied to THE MIND the mind is just the brain in action Psychologists believe biological factors cause behaviors others believe social factors Multiply determined produced by many factors What makes Psychology Challenging 1 2 human behavior is difficult to predict psychological influences are rarely independent of each other difficult to know which people differ from each other in thinking emotion personality behavior individual cause or causes are happening differences 3 4 5 People often influence each other People s behavior is shaped by culture Albert Bandura 1973 reciprocal determinism the fact that we mutually influence each other s behavior Makes difficult to know what s causing what Our common sense intuition is normally mistaken Ex absence makes the heart grow fonder we trust our common sense mostly because of naive realism Naive realism the belief that we see the world precisely as it is we assume that seeing is believing most of the time naive realism serves us well Ex truck barreling toward us 85 mph we should get out of the way Most of the time we SHOULD trust our perceptions But naive realism can trip us up when it comes to evaluating ourselves and others Ex political views Common sense can also be right when it guides us towards the truth like generating hypotheses that scientists taste later in rigorous investigations science is an approach to evidence empiricism the premise that knowledge should initially be acquired through observation Psychology is about finding out which explanations best fit the date about how our minds work scientific theory is an explanation for a large number of findings in the natural world hypothesis a testable prediction theories are general explanations hypothesis are specific predictions derived from these explanations Two misconceptions of The Scientific Theory 1 A theory explains one specific event FALSE it explains a variety of diverse observa 2 A theory is just an educated guess FALSE theories are not educated evidence have tions background to support them The best scientists recognize their biases and try to find ways of compensating them Traps Scientists Fall Into 1 Confirmation Bias the tendency to seek out evidence that supports our beliefs and deny dismiss or distort evidence and contradicts them GOOD scientists protect themselves and adopt procedural safeguards against errors dicts them the tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contra 2 Belief perseverance Metaphysical claims assertions about the world that we can t test Ex God the soul afterlife Good scientists never claim to prove their theories Pseudoscience a set of claims that seem scientific but aren t lacks safeguards against confir mation bias and belief perseverance that characterize science Warning Signs of Pseudoscience 1 overuse of ad hoc immunizing hypotheses is just an escape hatch or loophole that defend ers of a theory use to protect this theory from being disproven 2 Lack of self correction pseudoscientific claims fall to belief perseverance and are rarely updated in light of new data 3 Overreliance on ancedotes I know a person who assertions basing claims on dramatic reports of one or two individuals Don t tell anything about cause and effect difficult to analyze Why are we drawn to pseudoscience Because our brains are predisposed to make order out of disorder find sense in nonsense 1 search for meaningful connections apophenia perceiving meaningful connections among unrelated and even random phenomena pareidolia seeing meaningful images in meaningless visual stimuli Ex looking at a cloud and seeing an animal 2 Finding Comfort in Our Beliefs we believe what we want to believe terror management theory our awareness of our own inevitable death leaves many of us with an underlying sense of terror we find comfort by adopting cultural world views that reassure us that our lives possess a broader meaning and purpose mortality salience the extent to which thought of death are foremost in our minds logical fallacies traps in thinking that can lead to mistaken conclusions Types of Logical Fallicies 1 emotional reasoning fallacy the error of using our emotions as guides for evaluation the va lidity of a claim affect heuristic 2 Bandwagon Fallacy is the error of assuming that a claim is correct just because many peo 3 Not me fallacy error of believing that we re immune from errors in thinking that afflict that most people are unaware of their biases but keenly aware of them in ple believe it other people 4 Bias blind spot others Why We Should Be Concerned With Pseudoscience 1 opportunity cost what we give up Pseudoscientific treatments for mental disorders can lead people to forgo opportunities to seek effective treatments 2 direct harm pseudoscientific treatments do harm to those who receive them psychological or physical even death Ex Candace Newmaker rebirthing therapy 3 An inability to think scientifically as citizens we need to think scientifically to make edu cated decisions In order to be a scientific skeptic two attitudes must be adopted a willingness to keep an open mind to all claims willingness to accept claims only after they have been sub jected to careful scientific tests critical thinking is a set of skills for evaluating all claims in an open minded and careful fashion scientific thinking Six Principles of Scientific Thinking 1 Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses Whenever we evaluate a psychological claim we should as ourselves whether we ve excluded other plausible explanations for it 2 Correlation Isn t Causation people think that that when two things are associated with each other that one thing must cause the other which is not true The correlation be tween two things doesn t demonstrate a causal connection between them 3 correlation causation fallacy 4 Falsifiability In order for a claim to be meaningful it must be falsifiable capable of being disproven which doesn t mean the claim is false just have evidence against it We
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