PSY 203 Exam 1 Questions And Answers With Verified Study Solutions

authority, common sense, intuition, rationalism, empiricism (best), personal experience - ways of knowing when someone influential says so - authority what everyone knows, backed by personal experience - common sense "feeling of knowing" something but not quite sure where the knowledge came from - intuition a priori (before results) method; knowledge derived from reasoning or logic - rationalism knowledge from experience or observation; relies on data (same results over and over again) - empericism heavily selective, colored by expectations and biases; selective information: incomplete info, only successes not failures, cannot reach conclusion - personal experience cherry-picking data or only presenting confirming evidence and hiding disconfirming evidence - confirmation bias something particularly memorable or salient skews your view of the world ex: plane crashes can make people afraid of flying; however, the likelihood of dying in a car accident is far higher than dying as a passenger on an airplane - availability heuristic all behavior has a cause and thus is predictable - determinism laws of probability can be used to predict the likely # of events of a given kind that will occur in a given population under certain defined conditions - statistical determinismwhen a person's health appears to improve after taking a placebo treatment (shouldn't have had an effect) - placebo effects self-corrective method claims and predictions falsifiable empirical questions & solvable problems science assumes determinism - scientific method data-driven questions that can be answered by collecting data and are falsifiable - discoverability (empirical questions) collecting data in a structured manner in order to evaluate claims or hypotheses (distinguish between different POVs) - systematic empiricism when methods and data are objective (not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts) and available to the public eye - publicly available information & objectivity conclusions drawn from data are always tentative, subject to revision based on future research conclusions are not absolute but there is confidence that research gets closer and closer to the truth - tentative conclusions providing others with enough info so they can reproduce methods and get the same results (hopefully) - replication independent experts review articles before they are published - peer review states that there is no relationship between two variables - null hypothesis looking at whether there's enough change (or relationship between variables) to be able to reject the null hypothesis - alternative hypothesisan idea about how something works set of logically consistent statements about some phenomenon that: summarizes existing knowledge of the phenomenon, organizes the knowledge into precise statements of relationships among variables, proposes an explanation for the phenomenon, and serves as a basis for making predictions about behavior - theory should be able to collect data that goes against hypothesis - claims and predictions falsifiable objective process that incorporates new info and updates beliefs about the world depending on the available evidence ex: Wakefield study said there was a link between vaccines and autism, but Lancet eventually retracted this paper and lost his license; MMR vaccine is given when a child is 18 months old, which is the same time when signs of autism can reliably be diagnosed - self-correcting mechanism when individuals believe that personality descriptions apply specifically to them, even though the description is filled with info that applies to a lot of people - PT Barnum effect uses language of science & mimics the procedure, shifts burden of proof when claims are challenged, uses anecdotal evidence or testimonials, uses currently unexplained phenomena as evidence, complains of shunning, misuses rules of evidence - characteristics of pseudoscience