PSY 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Blind Experiment, The Control Group, Confounding

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 1101
• Professor: Kenneth Campbell

Document Summary

Our thinking, memory, and attitudes operate on two levels: unconscious and conscious. We mostly operate unconsciously on a sort of autopilot. But, our intuition is not always correct and can sometimes be dangerous. Three phenomena: hindsight bias, judgemental overconfidence and our tendency to perceive patterns in random events, illustrate why we cannot solely rely on our intuition and common sense. The tendency to believe that, after the outcome has taken place, one would have foreseen it. Common sense usually describes what has happened rather than what will happen. We tend to think we know more than we do. We are prone to perceiving patterns in our attempt to make sense of the world. Some happenings seem so extraordinary that we struggle to conceive an ordinary, chance related explanation. We must be sceptical but not cynical, open but not gullible to distinguish sense from non-sense.