II. Thinking Critically about Psychology:

1
II. Thinking Critically about Psychology

• Why science and not intuition?

2
A. Introduction

• Where does intuition/common sense start?
• Perceptions - Noticing, attending to,
  interpreting, remembering stimuli...experiences
  YOU encounter
• Are these carbon copies of reality?
• Consider this
• How many stimuli could you focus on at this
  moment?
• 50,000 facts about every topic!
• 500 times the Encyclopedia Britannica!

3
B. Perceiving our world

• How do we manage to navigate our perceptions?
• 1. Tendency to categorize
• a. Schemas
• Cognitive structures that represent knowledge
  about a concept, event, person, etc,
• Categories then make us efficient but...

4
B. Perceiving our world.

• Folk
• Croak
• Soak
• Folk
• Croak
• Soak

5
B. Perceiving our world.

• Categories/expectations can lead to biases...
• 2. Biases in perceptions and thinking
• Expectations - thefilter or lensof your
  perceptions
• a. Assimilation Interpreting new information
  in terms of our existing beliefs.
• Rebellion is a good thing

6
B. Perceiving our world.

• Quick demo.
• b. Confirmation Bias
• Tendency to search for information that confirms
  our preconceptions (expectations).
• Darley Gross (1983) Hannah Study

7
B. Perceiving our World

• d. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Peoples expectations lead them to act in ways
  that cause others to confirm those expectations.
• Rosenthal Jacobson (1968)
• Bloomers Study

8
B. Perceiving our world

• e. Belief Perseverance
• Persistence of ones initial conceptions, even
  when they are proved to be incorrect.
• Anderson et al., (1980) Firefighter Study
• Conclude Why is intuition problematic?
• Based on perceptions - which can be biased due to
  our tendency to be efficient processors of
  stimuli (i.e. we use short cuts - categories
  and expectations)

9
Arent we right sometimes?

• Nisbett Wilson (1977)
• Pantyhose Study

10
C. Attempting to problem solve Efficient or
accurate?

• 1. Algorithm
• Step-by-step exhaustive procedure, using trial
  and error to solve problems.
• 2. Heuristics
• Simple, rule-of-thumb strategies for solving
  problems.

11
C. Problem Solving

• 2. Heuristics
• HHTTHTTH HHHHTTTT
• George
• a. Representativeness Making a judgement about
  something based on how similar it is to a typical
  case in its category.
• - may lead to ignoring base-rate information.

12

• 2. Heuristics
• Which is more common or more likely?...
• b. Availability Judge the likelihood of
  something happening in terms of how easy examples
  come to mind.

13

• Important to think critically about psychology
  and how we interpret our world
• Cant rely ONLY on intuition, common sense, or
  folk wisdom...
• When perceiving our own and others behavior, we
  are vulnerable to biases.
• However, those biases serve us well most of the
  time.
• Make us capable of dealing with the enormous
  amount of stimuli and information we encounter.

14
Conclusions.....

• Psychology is
• Very broad and diverse.
• Findings/conclusions not always obvious.
• Why we are science (more on this to come)