IUB PSY-P 101 - Scientific Attitude and Critical Thinking (2 pages)

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PSY 101 1st Edition Lecture 3 Outline of Last Lecture I The History of Psychology Outline of Current Lecture I Goals of Psychological Science II The Scientific Attitude and Critical Thinking III The Scientific Method IV Building Theories Current Lecture I II III Goals of Psychological Science a Describe behavior b Explain behavior c Predict behavior d Influence behavior The Scientific Attitude and Critical Thinking a In whatever sub field and in whatever settings psychologists seek to maintan a scientific attitude b Why We Cannot Rely on Common Sense i Hindsight bias the tendency to believe after learning an outcome t hat one would have foreseen it the I Knew It All Along phenomenon 1 We as human beings like to use common sense because we like to think that we know what is coming we want to have control over what will happen next ii Overconfidence We as humans tend to think we know more than we do iii Perceiving Order in Random Events Even in random data we often find order because random sequences do not look random to us we always want to think things happen for a reason and we are always looking for a correlation or reason for why events occur 1 Just because a set of random events are unusual does not make it special The Scientific Method IV a Scientific Method a set of assumptions attitudes and procedures that guide researchers in creating questions to investigate in generating evidence and in drawing conclusions i Form a hypothesis a prediction to discover why a relationship between two or more sets of data exists ii Run the experiment iii Collect date and statistics to analyze iv Report the results Building Theories a Theory a tentative explanation that tries to integrate and account for the relationship of various findings and observation b The importance of making sure you accept something as true after testing it not just taking it by word of mouth or accepting it as it is i Ex Facilitative Communication for Autistic patients