Ch.1 Flashcards
Levels of psychological analysis
Social and cultural influences (high)
Social or behavioural level:
Involves relating to others and personal relationships
Psychological (Medium)
Mental or neurological level:
Involves thoughts, feelings, and emotions
Biological (low)
Molecular or neurochemical level:
Involves molecules and brain structure
5 challenges that will be revisiting throughout the text
- Human behaviour is difficult to predict, in part because almost all actions or multiply determined— that is, produced by many factors.
- Psychological influences are rarely independent of each other, making it difficult to pin down which cause or causes are operating.
3. People differ from each other in thinking, emotion, personality, and behaviours. This helps to explain why each person responds in a different way to the same objective situation.
- People often influence each other, making it difficult to pin down what causes what.
5.Peoples behaviour is often shaped by culture.
Reciprocal determinism
A person’s behaviour both influences and is influenced by personal factors and the social environment. (Mutually influence each other’s behaviour)
Ex. You’re an extroverted person, you’re likely to make those around you more outgoing. In turn, their going behaviour may “feedback” to make you even more extroverted, and so on.
Emic
Investigators study the behaviour of a culture from the perspective of someone who grew up in the culture. Researchers using emic approach study the personality of inhabitants of an isolated pacific island would probably rely on personality terms used by members of the culture. Those who adopt emic approach may better understand the unique characteristics of a culture, but they may overlook characteristics that this culture shares with others.
Etic
They study the behaviour of a culture from the perspective of an outsider. A researcher using etic approach would probably adopt and translate personality terms used by western culture, like shyness and extroversion, to that culture. Those that use etic approach may be better able to view this culture within the broader perspective of other cultures, but they may unintentionally impose perspectives from their own culture on to others.
Why we can’t always trust our common sense
To understand the causes of our behaviour and that of others, most of us rely on our common sense— that is our gut intuition. Yet, as we’ve already discovered, our intuitive understanding of ourselves and the world is frequently mistaken.
“There’s safety in numbers” shows that if more people are present at an emergency it’s less likely that at least one of them will help.
“Better safe than sorry” “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” Proverbs contradict each other. Common sense can lead us to believe two things that can’t both be true simultaneously, or at least that are largely at odds with each other. This is why scientific Psychology doesn’t rely on intuition and speculation. 
Naive realism
Belief that we see the world precisely as it is. “Seeing is believing”. Naïve realism Can trip us up when it comes to evaluating ourselves and others. Can lead us to draw incorrect conclusions about human nature. Naïve realism often serves us well in daily life, much of the time we should trust our perceptions.
In many cases “believing is seeing” rather than the opposite. Our beliefs shape our perceptions of the world. To think scientifically we must learn when— and when not— to trust our common sense.
Scientific theory
Is an explanation for a large number of findings in the natural world including Psychology world. A scientific theory offers an account that ties multiple findings together into one package. For a theory to be scientific, it must generate novel predictions that researchers contest. Scientists call a testable prediction a Hypothesis.
Theories = General explanations
Hypothesis = Specific predictions. Derived from these explanations. 
Misconceptions
A theory explains one specific event. Such as, “the most likely theory for the robbery at the downtown Bank is that it was committed by two former bank employees who dressed up as armed guards”. Doesn’t explain a variety of diverse observations or Generate testable predictions. Second is that scientific theory is merely a guess about how the world works “just a theory” mistakenly implies that some explanations about the world or “more than theories”. In fact, all general scientific explanations about how the world works are theories. A few theories are extremely well supported by multiple lines of evidence, some theories have survived repeated efforts to refute them and are well confirmed models. 
Confirmation bias
The tendency to seek out evidence that supports our beliefs and dismisses, denies, or distorts evidence that contradicts them. “Once you have a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail” Is a nice illustration of confirmation bias because it highlights the point that once we have a belief in mind, we tend to look for and find evidence that supports it. This can lead to psychological tunnel vision.
Believe perseverance
Refers to the tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even with evidence contradicts them. “Don’t confuse me with facts” effect
Metaphysical claims
Assertions about the world that we cannot test. This includes assertions about the existence of God, the soul, and the after life.
Pseudoscience
A set of claims that seems scientific but isn’t. Lacks safeguards against confirmation bias and belief perseverance that characterize science.
Signs of pseudoscience
•Exaggerated claims
•Over reliance on anecdotes
•Absence of connectivity to other research
•Lack of review by other scholars (peer review) or replication by independent lab
•Meaningless “psychobabble” that uses fancy scientific sounding terms that don’t make sense
•Talk of proof instead of evidence
Ad Hoc immunizing hypothesis
It’s just an escape hatch or loophole the defenders of a theory used to protect it from being disproven.
For Ex: Psychics claim to perform remarkable feet of ESP, like reading minds or forecasting the future. But once brought to a lab and tested under tightly controlled conditions, most bombed, performing know better than chance. But some psychics go on to say the skeptical “vibes” are somehow interfering with psychic powers. This hypothesis isn’t necessarily wrong, it just makes the psychics claims essentially impossible to test.
Lack of self correction with pseudoscience
In science, wrong claims tend to be weeded out eventually, even though it takes a while. In contrast, in most pseudosciences wrong claims never seem to go away, because their proponents fall prey to belief perseverance. Moreover, pseudoscience claims are rarely updated in light of new data. Pseudoscience tends to rely heavily on anecdotal evidence. Anecdotes don’t tell us anything about cause and effect. They also don’t tell us anything about how representative the cases are, most anecdotes are extremely difficult to interpret as evidence.
Patternicity
Our tendency to see patterns in meaningless data. Probably stems from an evolutionary adaptive tendency. Our brains tend to seek out patterns and connections among events because of a basic Evolutionarily principle “better safe than sorry”. All things being equal, it’s usually better to assume that a connection between two events exists, especially when one of the events is physically dangerous.
