Week 3

Question 1

What is psychological pseudoscience?

Answer 1

Body of knowledge, methodology, belief or practice that is claimed to be scientific/made to appear scientific

Question 2

What are aspects of pseudoscience?

Answer 2

Does not adhere to scientific method

Beliefs are common & resistant to change

Question 3

How can pseudoscience be distinguished from psychological science?

Answer 3

• Use of ‘psychobabble’
• Reliance on anecdotal evidence
• Extraordinary claims w/o strong evidence
• Unfalsifiable claims
• Absence of connection to existing science
• Adequate peer review
• Lack of self-correction
• Cherry picking

Question 4

What is psychobabble?

Answer 4

Words that sound scientific, but used incorrectly/in misleading manner

Question 5

What is cherry picking?

Answer 5

Overemphasis of supporting data & excludes contradictory evidence

Question 6

Why are we drawn to pseudoscience?

Answer 6

Apophenia & Pareidolia

Question 7

What is apophenia?

Answer 7

Tendency to perceive meaningful connections among unrelated phenomena

Question 8

What is pareidolia?

Answer 8

Seeing meaningful images in meaningless visual stimuli

Question 9

What is hindsight bias?

Answer 9

Tend to believe, after learning outcome, that we could have foreseen outcome

Question 10

What is overconfidence?

Answer 10

Thinking we know more than we do & more confident in answers than we are correct

Question 11

What are the key features of scientific skepticism?

Answer 11

Critical thinking skills:

• to evaluate claims w/ open mind & carefully
• to overcome bias

Question 12

What are the six principles of scientific thinking?

Answer 12

1. Rule out rival hypotheses: consider important alternative explanations
2. Correlation vs. Causation
3. Falsifiability
4. Replicability
5. Extraordinary claims
6. Occam’s Razor: simpler explanation fit data equally well?

Question 13

What is a theory in the scientific method?

Answer 13

Explains events/behaviours w/ ideas that organise set of observations

Question 14

What is operational definition?

Answer 14

Defines what scientist will manipulate/measure

Question 15

What is a case study?

Answer 15

Observational research focusing on 1/a few people

Question 16

What is naturalistic observation?

Answer 16

Observation & recording of behaviour in its natural environment

Question 17

What is a survey?

Answer 17

• Questions to be answered by research participants

- To predict attitudes/behaviours of population based on representative sample

Question 18

How can wording affect survey results?

Answer 18

More likely to say yes/no

Question 19

What is random sampling?

Answer 19

Representative sample if sample is sufficiently large

Question 20

What is correlation?

Answer 20

Relationship b/w variables

Question 21

What is regression?

Answer 21

Use value of 1 variable to predict value of another

Question 22

What is a scatterplot?

Answer 22

Graphic representation of correlation b/w 2 variables

Question 23

Why is a scatterplot useful?

Answer 23

Shows relationship b/w 2 variables & data points

Question 24

What is the difference between positive and negative correlation?

Answer 24

Positive: values on both variables increase
Negative: values on variable B increase, values on variable A decrease

Question 25

What is a regression line?

Answer 25

Summaries relationship & allows to draw prediction

Question 26

What causes artificial correlation?

Answer 26

Not being aware of multiple groups within data set

Question 27

What are signs of artificial correlation?

Answer 27

Looking at scatterplots to find potential sub groups within group