PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Thought Experiment, Personality Test, Seminary
Document Summary
"i could have told you that. : once we hear some new fact, we can think of reasons why it might be expected to be true. It"s a useful thing to do, except that dredging up those reasons often leaves us with the feeling that we could have predicted the outcome; often, we really couldn"t have. Social psychologists can demonstrate this hindsight bias by telling some people a fact and asking them if they would have predicted it, and not telling other people about the fact and asking for their predictions. Like an unproven explanation for something: theory is not fact. In affect, the participant has "chosen" the level of all variables - those that are measured and those that are not. In a studying looking at married couples, for example, investigators do not know whether the people in the relationship are sunny or gloomy, healthy or unhealthy physically, easygoing or high-maintenance; these various qualities are self-selected as opposed to researcher-selected.
