SPED102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Central Tendency, Pathological Science, Multiple Comparisons Problem
2 Jun 2018
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Week 12 SPED102: Review
Topic 1: We can all be misled
• We tend to rely on personal experience and judgement to make assessments
and decisions
• Regardless of education, intelligence or background – we can ALL be fooled
• We trust our perception and experience
Topic 2: Why might we sometimes be misled?
• The fallacy of personal validation
• How accurate were our psychics?
o All profiles were exactly the same – vast majority rated profile as
accurate or very accurate
o Overall, 74% (n =206 of 279) of you reported that the computerised
personality profile provided a very accurate or accurate prediction of
your personality
o • 8% reported that the computer program had provided an inaccurate
description and 2% indicated it provided a very inaccurate description
o Overall, 73% (n =201 of 275) of you reported that the psychics had
made a very accurate or accurate prediction of your personality based
only upon your name and birthdate
o 8% reported that the psychics had provided an inaccurate description
and 1% indicated they provided a very inaccurate description
• Cognitive biases
o Pareidolia → martian pareidolia (elephant on Mars)
• Pareidolia and priming effects (preconceptions)
• Misunderstanding probability and randomness
o We believe we have control over random events
o Fail to recognise the lumpy nature or randomness
o Law of large numbers – failing to recognise coincidences
o Misunderstanding of relative and absolute risk
o Prosecutors fallacy – prosecuting primarily on the basis of probability
Topic 3: More Biases Including Memory Biases
• Anchoring effects
• Framing effects
• Dunning-Kruger
• Confirmation bias
• Fallibility of memory
• Week 3 – video of a crime → excellent observations conditions (informed
would observe crime, high quality video, clear and extended view of suspect)
– misinformation effects (Reading and lecture)
Topic 4: Science vs. Pseudoscience
• Key features of scientific approach –
o Reliance on evidence (vs. authority)
o Objectivity
o Falsification – whether a proposition can be proven wrong
o Transparency
o Replication
o Generality
o Cumulative
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Week 12 sped102: review: we tend to rely on personal experience and judgement to make assessments and decisions, regardless of education, intelligence or background we can all be fooled, we trust our perception and experience. Important concepts: independent and dependent variables, experimental and non-experimental research, internal and external validity, threats to internal validity (maturation, testing, regression etc. , randomised control design (rct, descriptive and inferential statistics, central tendency and dispersion, p values. Topic 7: bad research: multiple comparisons fallacy and sharpshooter fallacy research applications, other strategies to bias your research, some tricks to misinterpret your presentation of data. Topic 8: educational pseudoscience: much education is pseudoscientific, misuse of concept of a theory" (well verified and accepted with multiple converging lines of evidence) If an explanation meets standard of theory, we can use it to interpret new information and address practical problems.
