PSY 306 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Cognitive Dissonance, Thought Experiment, Participant Observation

• School: University of Oregon
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 306
• Professor: Elliot Berkman

Document Summary

Helps people to deal with critical societal challenges. Provides us with clearer understanding of less weighty elements in our everyday lives. Insight into the reasons for other people"s behaviors as well as our own. Hindsight bias: tendency to believe that you could have predicted some outcomes that you"ve learned about. Thought experiment: thinking about how you would test a given idea can lead you to new ideas. Used when testing would have insufficient resources or would be unethical. Hypothesis: prediction about what will happen under particular circumstances, especially in a research study. Theory: set of related propositions intended to describe some phenomenon or aspect of the world. Dissonance theory: theory that people like their thoughts to be consistent with one another. Will do substantial mental work to achieve such cognitive consistency. Looking at a phenomenon in a systematic way, with a view to understand what is going on.