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How can we use psychology to understand why people think, feel and act as
they do?
The scientific attitude requires one to be skeptical but not cynical. humbly
open but not gullible.
The attitude, armed with scientific principles for sifting reality from illusion,
prepares us to think smarter. Smart thinking is known as critical thinking, or
thinking that does not blindly accept arguments and conclusions.
Psychology's own critical inquiry indeed has even open to surprising findings
and critical inquiry convincingly debunked many popular beliefs.
Psychologists Paul Slovic and Baruch Fischhoff and Gordon Wood have shown
how scientific results and historical happenings can indeed seem like obvious
and common sense. They discovered that events that do not seem obvious
beforehand seem so in hindsight. Finding out something that has happened
makes it seem inevitable. This is known as hindsight bias, or the I knew it all
along phenomenon.
We often experience hindsight bias after looking back into history, or tracing
an autopsy.
Jeanne Kirkpatrick in 1980 believe that the point is not that common sense is
usually wrong, but that it is after the fact. Common sense describes what has
happened more easily than it predicts what will happen. Sometimes
Grandmother's intuition has it wrong.
Many people believe that w era better at predicting social behavior. Robert
Vallone and his associates has students predict at the beginning of the
school year whether they would drop a course, vote in an upcoming election,
call their parents more than twice a month, and so forth. The students felt 84
percent confident on making these predictions. However, they were correct
71 percent of the time, even when they were 100 percent sure of
themselves.
A good theory should link the isolated dots and emerge a coherent picture
even before the dots are all connected.
A good theory does not just sound appealing, It must imply a set of testable
predictions, known as a hypothesis.
However, in testing our theory, we should be aware that it can bias our
observations. Having theorized that depression springs from low self-esteem,
we may see what we expect to see.
Case study: research method where one person is studied in depth to find
universal principles (things that apply to all)Drawback is that the individual
being studied could be atypical, results not universally contained
-Experiment