PSYCH101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Normal Distribution, Naturalistic Observation, Jean Piaget

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH101
• Professor: Christine Logel

Document Summary

Psych 101 - lecture 6 - research methods. Three phenomena that illustrates why we cannot rely solely on intuition and common sense: hindsight bias, judgmental overconfidence, and tendency to perceive patterns in random events. These often lead us to overestimate our intuition, but scientific inquiry can help sift reality from illusion. Tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it. Sometimes, intuition informed by countless casual observations can be wrong. Our tendency to think we know more than we do. Knowing the answers to questions = make us overconfident. Our prone to receive patterns, our rage for order . Fact = random sequences often don"t look random and are over interpreted. Curiosity: passion to explore and understand without misleading or being misled. Scientific attitude is to be skeptical, but not cynical, be open, but not gullible. Before reaching certainty, one must first doubt .