PSYCH291 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Confounding, Availability Heuristic, Psych
Document Summary
Where do our beliefs about psychological constructs come from: experience, intuition, authority. We will conclude that none of these are suf cient to provide validity, but rather gathering and looking at data is a much more reliable way. What are some potential problems with relying on our experiences for knowledge: it"s hard to rely on your memory. Autobiography experiences become unreliable over time, you remember them in fragments and piece wrong pieces together and the story changes: your experiences don"t apply to everybody, not accurate either. Historical example: dr benjamin rush and bleeding as a disease cure. He needed a comparison group to see what would have happened to people whose blood didn"t get drained. Could be on chance alone, 20% of people would have gotten better anyways. In the absence of a comparison group you could mistakenly conclude that something you"re doing is making a difference when really it"s just chance.
