Lecture Chapter 1 Psychology and Scientific Thinking Psychology scientific study of mind brain behavior Many spans of Analysis Social Behavioral Mental Neurological physiological Neurochemical Molecular 5 Factors 1 Human behavior is difficult to predict 2 Psychological influences are rarely independent to each other 3 People display individual differences in thinking emotion personality 4 People influence one another Reciprocal determinism 5 Behavior is shaped by culture Na ve Realism the belief that we see the world precisely as it actually is in truth seeing is believing Science as a Safeguard against Bias Confirmation bias tendency to seek out evidence that supports our hypothesis and neglect or distort contradicting evidence Belief perseverance tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them Pseudoscience a set of claims that seem scientific but aren t o Lack safeguards against confirmation bias and belief perseverance that characterize science o Testable belies that are not supported by the evidence o Warning Signs Ad hoc immunizing hypotheses escape hatches to protect against falsification usually a loophole or exception for negative findings lack of self correction overreliance on anecdotes 1 often not representative o Why Pseudoscience of nonsense Our brains are predisposed to make order out of disorder and make sense out 1 Apophenia patternicity tendency to find connections among unrelated or random phenomena o pareidolia form of apophenia seeing meaningful images in meaningless visual stimuli o Why Should We Care Pseudoscience can be very dangerous 3 reasons Lecture Chapter 1 Psychology and Scientific Thinking 1 Opportunity cost 2 Direct harm 3 Inability to think scientifically Not foolproof scientific thinking is our best safeguard against human behavior o Have important alternate explanations for the findings been considered Critical Thinking Principles Ruling out rival hypotheses Correlation isn t causation o Can we be sure A causes B Falsifiability Replicability o Can the claim be disproven o Can the results be duplicated in other studies Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence o Is the evidence a convincing as the claims Occam s Razor o Does a simpler explanation fit the data just as well o Parsimony logical simplicity Great Theoretical Frameworks Structuralism o Wundt o E B Titchener o Aimed to identify the most basic elements of psychological experience o William James o Charles Darwin o Hoped to understand the adaptive purposes of thought and behavior Functionalism Behaviorism Cognitivism Psychoanalysis o Watson o Skinner o Black Box psychology o Focuses on uncovering general laws of learning by looking outside the organism Jean Piaget o o Neisser o Focuses on mental processes involved in different aspects of thinking o Sigmund Freud o o Focused on internal psychological processes of which we re unaware Jung
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