Week 3 Flashcards
The Need for Psychological Science, The Scientific Method, Methods - Description of Behaviour & Methods - Correlation
What is psychological pseudoscience?
Body of knowledge, methodology, belief or practice that is claimed to be scientific/made to appear scientific
What are aspects of pseudoscience?
Does not adhere to scientific method
Beliefs are common & resistant to change
How can pseudoscience be distinguished from psychological science?
- 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
What is psychobabble?
Words that sound scientific, but used incorrectly/in misleading manner
What is cherry picking?
Overemphasis of supporting data & excludes contradictory evidence
Why are we drawn to pseudoscience?
Apophenia & Pareidolia
What is apophenia?
Tendency to perceive meaningful connections among unrelated phenomena
What is pareidolia?
Seeing meaningful images in meaningless visual stimuli
What is hindsight bias?
Tend to believe, after learning outcome, that we could have foreseen outcome
What is overconfidence?
Thinking we know more than we do & more confident in answers than we are correct
What are the key features of scientific skepticism?
Critical thinking skills:
- to evaluate claims w/ open mind & carefully
- to overcome bias
What are the six principles of scientific thinking?
- Rule out rival hypotheses: consider important alternative explanations
- Correlation vs. Causation
- Falsifiability
- Replicability
- Extraordinary claims
- Occam’s Razor: simpler explanation fit data equally well?
What is a theory in the scientific method?
Explains events/behaviours w/ ideas that organise set of observations
What is operational definition?
Defines what scientist will manipulate/measure
What is a case study?
Observational research focusing on 1/a few people
What is naturalistic observation?
Observation & recording of behaviour in its natural environment
What is a survey?
- Questions to be answered by research participants
- To predict attitudes/behaviours of population based on representative sample
How can wording affect survey results?
More likely to say yes/no
What is random sampling?
Representative sample if sample is sufficiently large
What is correlation?
Relationship b/w variables
What is regression?
Use value of 1 variable to predict value of another
What is a scatterplot?
Graphic representation of correlation b/w 2 variables
Why is a scatterplot useful?
Shows relationship b/w 2 variables & data points
What is the difference between positive and negative correlation?
Positive: values on both variables increase
Negative: values on variable B increase, values on variable A decrease
What is a regression line?
Summaries relationship & allows to draw prediction
What causes artificial correlation?
Not being aware of multiple groups within data set
What are signs of artificial correlation?
Looking at scatterplots to find potential sub groups within group
