PSY-101 1st EditionLecture 3Outline of Last LectureI. The History of Psychology Outline of Current Lecture I. Goals of Psychological ScienceII. The Scientific Attitude and Critical ThinkingIII. The Scientific MethodIV. Building Theories Current LectureI. Goals of Psychological Sciencea. Describe behaviorb. Explain behaviorc. Predict behaviord. Influence behaviorII. The Scientific Attitude and Critical Thinkinga. In whatever sub-field and in whatever settings, psychologists seek to maintan a scientific attitude.b. Why We Cannot Rely on Common Sensei. 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.III. The Scientific Methoda. 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.IV. Building Theoriesa. 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