PSYO 1011 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Confounding, Central Tendency, Blind Experiment

• School: Dalhousie University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYO 1011
• Professor: Leanne Stevens,Shelley Adamo,Kevin Duffy,Jennifer Stamp

Document Summary

The nature of science: science is about testing initiative assumptions regarding how the world works, observing the world, and being open minded to unexpected findings. Common sense: the intuitive ability to understand the world. Common sense can be misleading, however, especially in psychology; our initiative ideas about individuals behaviours are often contradictory or flat out wrong. Another problem with common sense is that we often use the benefit of hindsight to confirm what we believe, sometimes referred to as the hindsight. Hindsight bias: the tendency to overestimate our ability to predict an event, after the event outcome is known. Logic: reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity. Logic can tell us only how the world should work, not how the world actually works. The limits of observation: our knowledge of the world comes through our five senses, but our senses can be fairly easily fooled.