chap 1 Flashcards
What is psychology?
The scientific study of the mind and behavior science.
What is the difference between biological, social and psychological ?
Biological: molecules and brain structures
Social: relating to other people/ personal relationships
Psychological: thoughts, feelings and emotions
What are the 5 mains challenges?
- Human behavior is difficult to predict
- Psychological influences are rarely independent
- Uniqueness
- People influence each other
- Behavior is shaped by culture
Science is…?
not a body of knowledge, rather an approach to evidence, based on disproving not proving
Scientific theory
an explanation for a large number of findings in the natural world
Hypothese
testable prediction
Confirmation bias
tendency to seek evidence that supports our beliefs (tunnel vision) seeing what we want to see
Belief perserverance
stick to our initial belief even when evidence contradicts them
Psychological pseudoscience
impostor of science, set of claims that seem scientific but aren’t
Why are we drawn to pseudoscience
our brains are predisposed to to make order out of disorder
apophenia
tendency to perceive meaningful connections with unrelated phenomenons
Pareidolia
seeing meaningful images in meaningless visual stimuli
Emotional reasoning fallacy
using our emotions as guides to validate a claim
Bandwagon fallacy
assuming a claim is correct because lots of people believe it
Not me fallacy
believing we are immune from the errors in thinking that affect other people (unaware of own biases but can clearly pint out others biases= bias blind spot)
scientific skepticism
keeps an open mind, evaluate all claims with the need for persuasive evidence before accepting them
Six principles of critical thinking
- Ruling out rival hypotheses
- Correlation vs causation
- Falsifiability
- Replicability
- Extraordinary claims
- Occam’s razor
Ruling out hypotheses
having important alternative explanations for the findings other then the ones being stated
Correlation vs causation
a correlation between two things doesn’t mean there is a casual connection between them
A-B
B-A
C-A and B
Falsifiability
capable of being dis-proven
Replicability
a studies findings can be duplicated consistently
Extraordinary claims
is the evidence as strong as the claim
Occam’s razor
if two explanations account equally for a phenomenon we should usually pick the simpler explanation,
KISS- Keep It Simple Stupid
5 primary schools of thought that have shape modern psychology
- Structuralism
- Functionalism
- Behaviorism
- Cognitivism
- Psychoanalysis
Structuralism
systemic observations, structures
Functionalism
understand the purpose of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors
Behaviorism
observable behavior
Cognitivism
thinking affects our behavior
psychoanalysis
internal psychological processes, impulses, memories and thoughts that we are unaware of
