PSYC 2001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Serendipity, Availability Heuristic, Internal Validity

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2001
• Professor: Deanna Whelan

Document Summary

Observations of the world around us (serendipity) Confounds: a general term for a potential alternative explanation. Confounds to research findings are a threat to internal validity. In real world, there are usually several possible explanations for an outcome. Example: research on older adults and cognitive functioning. Group 1 attended exercise classes, group 2 told not to exercise. Can control for other possible explanations (confounds) Research is probabilistic: findings are not expected to explain all of the cases all of the time (exceptions) Psychological research conclusions are meant to explain some proportion of the possible cases (95%) Persuaded by what comes easily to mind (availability heuristic) Failing to think about what we can not see (present bias) The intuitive thinker vs. the scientific reasoner. We make mistakes when we base our reasoning on intuition rather than science. Researchers create comparison groups and look at all the data.