Exam 3

Conspiracy theories are enacted using three classic roles: conspirators, saviors, and dupes (Ruscio, 2006). In the Pizzagate example, the conspirators who supposedly engaged in the nefarious activities were Hillary Clinton, John Podesto, and Comet Ping Pong. The saviors were those who called attention to the conspiracy online and who recruited other saviors to find evidence of the conspiracy in the emails. The dupes were all the mainstream people being fooled by the conspiracy, who accepted the conventional explanation that Comet Ping Pong was just a pizzeria and that pizza was just pizza.

Many conspiracy theories, such as Pizzagate, are political in nature. Two other good examples are the theory that President George W. Bush and government officials knew about the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon beforehand, and the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone gunman who assassinated President John F. Kennedy, as the official Warren Commission had concluded, but was rather part of a conspiracy organized by the CIA, the Mafia, or both. Conspiracy theories like these often arise in response to national catastrophes that leave people feeling powerless and vulnerable in the face of situations that are beyond their control. Likewise, believers in conspiracy theories are often marginalized members of a group who lack power and seek a scapegoat or someone to blame for their disadvantaged situation. Conspiracy theorists believe that they are "in the know," so their special knowledge of the conspiracy may empower them, raise their self-esteem, and make them feel morally superior to those who do not know the hidden truth (Byford, 2011). People who disseminate fake news and false conspiracy theories to individuals in their social media network and to other web-based outlets are likely sending this information to people who are receptive to it. This trend suggests that people who accept fake news and false conspiracy theories are motivated to draw a conclusion that they likely already favor, as discussed more fully in the next chapter. Indeed, the tendency for people to seek out partisan news outlets that are in agreement with their own views makes the web function like an echo chamber in which people hear what they want to hear. This propensity seems to support the idea that conspiracy theorists are irrational and not inclined to critically examine all sides of an argument. Ironically, Harambam and Aupers (2017) have recently found that conspiracy theorists tend to view themselves as critical freethinkers, distinguishing themselves from the "sheepish" people in the mainstream who fail to question conventional explanations. Are they right? Sometimes conspiracy theorists are correct, as happened when an international conspiracy of organized crime groups was suspected of colluding to plan and coordinate criminal activities—a theory that was verified when a meeting of these crime groups was discovered in upstate New York. Yet, as we have seen, many conspiracy theories are implausible and do not seem to be well-reasoned. At this point, it is instructive to examine other conspiracy theories that make claims related to science. For instance, climate change deniers maintain that the notion that human activity causes global warming (anthropogenic global warming) is a hoax perpetrated by scientists and politicians. A second science-related conspiracy theory asserts that NASA's landing of astronauts on the moon was a hoax staged by NASA and shot in the desert to make it appear as though the United States beat the Soviet Union in the space race to the moon.

reconstructive memory

Memory in which one uses prior knowledge and other available information to actively search for material that fills in the gaps in one's memory, which may result in inaccurate memory. This view of memory as reconstructive assumes that we remember by using our prior knowledge and other available information in a situation to actively search for material that could help us fill in the gaps in our memories. Thus, memory is not an exact record that is passively retrieved in its entirety, but rather something that is reconstructed or "pieced together" from our knowledge, expectations, and perceptions and updated by later attempts to remember.

Unfortunately, people often accept false claims and endorse poor practices without even realizing it. For instance, rather than applying treatments with demonstrated effectiveness, some psychologists use therapies that good scientific research has shown to be ineffective. Certain treatments even harm the people they are intended to help (Lilienfeld, 2007). Learning how to think critically provides the tools to evaluate such claims and avoid dangerous practices. Along the same lines, some theories can be shown to be better than others. Failing to realize this, sometimes people say, "Oh, it's just a theory"—implying that all theories are inherently flawed and that one person's theory is as good as another's. For example, opponents of Darwin's theory of evolution often say, "It's only a theory," meaning that it can't be proven. Although no scientific theory or hypothesis can technically be proven to be true, some theories like the modern synthesis version of Darwin's theory of evolution have been much better supported than others (Dawkins, 2009). Darwin's theory of evolution assumes that organisms change over time through mutation and natural selection. Those organisms with traits that help them survive long enough to reproduce can pass along these adaptive traits to their offspring, increasing the frequency of adaptive traits. Darwin's theory is better because it is consistent with more, higher quality, scientific evidence than competing theories. It has been supported by research showing that certain traits become more or less frequent in response to environmental pressures, by research in geology showing that more distantly related organisms tend to be deposited deeper and deeper into older layers of rock, and by research in molecular biology showing that more distantly related organisms share fewer genes (see Coyne, 2009; Dawkins, 2009; Palmer, 2009 for reviews).

More support for the modern version of Darwin's theory comes from the selective breeding of domesticated animals and the relationships with their wild counterparts. For instance, genetic research suggests that all dogs descended from the wolf. Modern dogs can still breed successfully with wolves. Examine Figure 1.2 and ask yourself, "Why do some dogs look more like wolves while others look so different?" At first, the wolves that evolved into dogs were probably those that were willing to get closer to humans so that they could scrounge for food in human garbage dumps (Coppinger & Coppinger, 2002). More of these wolves survived and passed along their genes to their offspring. Then our ancestors used artificial selection, a process like natural selection, to breed this group to be less aggressive and to have specific traits. All of these dogs are the same species and descended from the wolf. Instead of allowing the dogs to change slowly through natural selection, our ancestors artificially selected (bred) them to have very specific characteristics over the last few thousand years.

confirmation bias

Once people find a relationship or form a belief, they tend to look for evidence that confirms or supports their favored belief, often ignoring or minimizing evidence that could disconfirm it; this illustrates a thinking error called confirmation bias. A type of thinking error in which one tends to attend to, seek, and give more weight to evidence that supports one's favored position rather than evidence that could disconfirm it. Confirmation bias is a very common thinking error that affects many kinds of judgments

statistically significant

The minimal criterion that a result would occur by chance fewer than 5 times out of 100. This also helps reduce the probability that any observed difference in the groups was just a random one that might have been simply observed by chance (as in an illusory correlation).

reappraisal

The reevaluation of a situation so as to look for other possible interpretations that may lead to experiencing a different emotion and a different response to the situation.

commonsense psychology

These popular beliefs are not really scientific theories, but they are sometimes called commonsense psychology The use of personal, informal, and often inaccurate commonsense or folk "theories" to explain behavior and mental events. Commonsense psychological ideas are correct, such as the idea that studying more leads to better learning and memory. It does (Baddeley, Eysenck, & Anderson, 2015). Critical thinking and good scientific research can help determine which of your ideas are right and which are wrong. The important thing is that learning how to think critically can help you decide what to think so that you are not stuck with wrong, sometimes dangerous ideas. Unfortunately, considerable evidence suggests that people often do not think critically.

Research on Individuals Who Have OBEs

To obtain scientific evidence, researchers have tested subjects on the accuracy of their perceptions during an OBE by looking for some physical sign in the environment that the OBE subject has left the body. For example, Karlis Osis and Donna McCormick (1980) tested Alex Tanous, an experienced subject who claimed to be able to leave his body. To test the accuracy of his out-of-body perception, they instructed him to "project" himself to another room, where an optical projection device would display a picture stimulus that could be identified only if he looked directly into it. Without telling Tanous, the researchers also placed strain gauges outside the visual projection device to measure possible psychokinetic or other mechanical disturbances in the area. Osis and McCormick (1980) found that Tanous was able to correctly report at least part of the display in 114 of 197 trials (58%)—but it is not clear that his performance was significantly better than the probability of correctly reporting the display by chance alone. They did, however, find that the strain gauge activity from trials with hits was significantly higher than the strain gauge activity during trials without hits. These results are consistent with the idea that Tanous was able to position his perceiving self in front of the device to see the display and that this somehow had a physical effect on his surroundings. Nevertheless, because his performance was not significantly better than chance, he may have been guessing on the trials on which he had hits, and only coincidentally did those trials happen to show higher strain gauge activity than occurred on misses. Unfortunately, no attempt to replicate this result has been published since the initial experiment. Charles Tart (1968) conducted a study in which he asked another subject, Miss Z, who reportedly had many spontaneous OBEs, to identify a specific hidden target on her next out-of-body excursion. Tart also monitored her brain-wave activity on an EEG device that was connected to Miss Z while she reclined in his lab. One night, she was able to exactly identify the target—a five-digit number that could supposedly be viewed only when she left her body (Tart, 1968). Unfortunately, Tart had placed the target on a shelf in the same room where Miss Z was being tested. Although he slept during some of the experiment, Tart argued that he would have noticed if Miss Z had gotten up to look at the target because she would have disturbed the EEG wires, leading to noise in the recordings. In fact, as Parker (1975) has noted, the 60-cycle EEG noise that Tart reported could indeed have been Miss Z moving to see the target. Although both Tart (1968) and Osis and Mitchell (1977) found electrical brain-wave changes on the EEG that they associated with reported out-of-body experiences, OBEs were generally found during stage 1 sleep. It is well known that hypnagogic hallucinations—that is, dreamlike imagery and illusory perceptions—can occur as a person begins to fall asleep (Cheyne, Rueffer, & Newby-Clark, 1999). Questions also arise about why the OBE subjects' demonstrations have not been replicated. Other studies investigating the accuracy of perception during OBEs have shown subjects to be inaccurate (Tart, 1968) and sometimes accurate (Rogo, 1978; Tart, 1998).

Another normal hallucination that often occurs under stressful conditions is the "sensed presence" in which someone senses another person, either living or dead, who is present usually for a limited period of time. Sometimes a sensed presence has served as a "rational" voice to help mountain climbers overcome their fear and survive a catastrophe on the cliffs. Similarly, Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic, came to believe, after hours of sleep deprivation, that there was a presence in his plane guiding him to his destination. At other times, a sensed presence is not helpful. Under the extremely stressful conditions of the 1,000-mile Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska, a competitor named Joe Garnie believed he saw a man riding in his sled. After failing to persuade the presence to get out of the sled, Garnie reported that he swatted at it to get it to leave (Shermer, 2011). Hallucinations, such as the appearance of the man in the dogsled, are internally generated experiences with little input from stimuli in the environment. This suggests that information stored in memory is likely being retrieved and somehow transformed and constructed into experiences that seem real. From this perspective, hallucinations seem like an extreme form of a memory error. As such, hallucinations can serve as the basis of strange experiences that people later remember. For example, a hypnotist may suggest to someone who is especially susceptible to hypnosis that she hears or sees something that is not there. Later, when no longer hypnotized, the person may recall the suggested experience of the hallucination as real. Even outside of hypnosis, a person's background knowledge and perceptual expectations may sometimes dominate mental processing and result in hallucination (Aleman & Vercammen, 2013). Dreamlike states can also produce strange experiences that are later remembered as real. In the cases of recalling alien abduction, discussed earlier, those people likely remembered what was actually an experience of sleep paralysis and the contents of a dreamlike experience that occurs when sleeping and waking cycles fall out of sync (Clancy, 2005). Normally, sleep paralysis prevents us from moving so that we do not act out our irrational dream content, but occasionally people wake up before the sleep paralysis and dream have subsided. They fail to realize that they are still dreaming, which causes them to interpret the experience as actually being paralyzed when aliens draw them up off of their beds and abduct them. These examples suggest the need to examine the contribution of memory and memory errors to our experience and thinking.

Types of memory include both working memory and long-term memory. Long-term memory (LTM) functions like a vast storehouse that holds massive amounts of information for long periods of time. It stores all the words and facts we know, mental procedures for the things we know how to do, memories of our life experiences, and many other types of knowledge. In contrast, working memory (WM) is a form of short-term memory that temporarily activates very limited amounts of information from LTM and the environment as we do our mental work. Working memory is estimated to hold as few as 3 items (Cowan, 2000), but usually no more than between 5 and 9 items, at one time (Miller, 1956). We use WM to temporarily hold information as we reason, solve problems, make decisions, and engage in other effortful cognitive tasks. Type 2 thinking makes severe demands on WM (Evans, 2008; Evans & Stanovich, 2013). For instance, as you read, your WM accesses information from your LTM so that you can understand the words you are reading. Your WM has to temporarily hold a representation of what you have just read so that you can integrate it with the new information you are reading. As you read more, your WM helps you update your understanding of what you have read with the new information. At the same time, much of the detailed information of what you have read falls out of WM as you continue reading, because WM and its components have very limited capacity, just as we saw with attention. It is not surprising that WM sometimes fails to hold onto the information we need to execute a demanding cognitive task. For example, note-taking during a slide lecture places even greater demands on WM than reading, because to take good notes you often must read what is on a slide, summarize it while also integrating this information with a picture from the slide, and then write this combined information down in a short period of time. Research has shown that note-taking is a complex, effortful task (Piolat, Olive, & Kellogg, 2005). Perhaps not surprisingly given this complexity, you have probably experienced missing part of some new thing your instructor said because you were still trying to write what was said earlier. Many cognitive errors associated with WM occur when information falls out of memory before it can be stored or used. This type of error may occur because the load on memory is too great. Cognitive load is the amount of information that is held or manipulated in WM as we do some task. If the load is too great on this limited capacity system, then performance will decline unless we can find a way to reduce or manage the load (Sweller, 2011). In a complex cognitive task, such as note-taking, cognitive load can increase when an instructor switches rapidly to another topic. One way to manage the load is to do relevant assigned reading before class. This practice helps with note-taking because already possessing knowledge makes it easier to acquire new, related knowledge. Also, increasing the speed with which you can write your notes may help because as note-writing becomes more automatic, it takes fewer cognitive resources. In turn, more resources are available to comprehend what is being said or written (Peverly & Sumowski, 2001).

web-placed Information placed on various websites for differing purposes, typically by individuals, groups, or organizations to promote their own ideas, products, and/or services.

Using a web-based site like PsycINFO does not eliminate the need to use CT to assess the studies found at that site. In fact, even some indexed research is of lower quality than other research. However, accessing web-placed information requires particular care in your analysis because the source may not even use scientific research evidence to support its claims. Specifically, the source may rely on lower-quality evidence such as commonsense belief, statements of authority, anecdotes, and testimonials. How should you evaluate the information found at websites that vary so broadly in terms of their quality and accuracy?

self-correcting

When scientists think critically, they do not seek to confirm a hypothesis. Instead, they set up their test to also make observations that could disconfirm the hypothesis. Then they examine all the data—those that support the hypothesis and those that do not. If we were unable to show that a hypothesis was false, how could we ever find out that our hypotheses and theories were wrong and needed correction? In other words, falsifiability allows for self-correction in science (Myers & Hansen, 2012). The property of science by which it can revise and refine its own premises and assumptions.

Probability

is "the likelihood that a particular event or relation will occur" The likelihood that some event of interest will occur, ranging from 0.00 (not at all) to 1.00 (certain to occur).

Nevertheless, the conclusions based on scientific research are only as good as the quality of the evidence they are based on. Therefore, if a scientist did a research study and was not really measuring what was intended or perhaps made errors in measurement, then conclusions based on that research data could be erroneous. Fortunately, science is self-correcting, and the erroneous conclusion of the first scientist could be discovered by other scientists seeking to replicate and make sense of the observations of the first research study. Table 4.3 also implies that we should be particularly persuaded when high-quality scientific research studies are used as evidence. When using scientific research as evidence in arguments, authors often cite the source author(s) and year of publication and mention the kind of research study that was done. Table 4.3 makes it clear that results of certain types of studies, such as true experiments, generally provide stronger support for a claim than do other types, such as case studies or other nonexperimental study designs. Scientific research is also used to support claims when a scientific authority or expert is cited, often someone who has written a literature review, summarizing the results of several studies supporting some hypothesis or theory. These two citation methods demonstrate good practices in using scientific research as evidence, but we often hear arguments in the media and everyday life that do not specifically cite the study or research being discussed. For example, news reports will say, "Research shows . . ." or "Studies show . . ." without documenting the scientific research evidence being referred to. Although they have made a basic argument, their failing to cite specific research has weakened the argument. It also discourages critical thinking (CT) because it is harder to examine the quality of the evidence when no source is cited.

problem A situation in which a person encounters an obstacle and lacks the knowledge or strategy that would enable him or her to move from this initial state to a goal state. creative thinking A type of thinking that requires approaching a problem in new ways to produce a useful solution.

belief perseverance

the refusal to reject or revise one's faulty belief when confronted with evidence that clearly refutes that belief

schema

this prior knowledge is organized in a knowledge structure called a schema A knowledge structure that organizes prior knowledge and can help us acquire new information but which can have selective effects on learning and memory.

theory

A set of general principles that attempts to explain and predict behavior or other phenomena. Isaac Asimov made a similar point when he explained how the theory that the earth is round is superior to the theory that it is flat

illusory correlation

A thinking error in which one mistakenly perceives a correlation or relationship between two variables when none exists. This thinking error is called illusory correlation because people mistakenly perceive a relationship (correlation) between two variables when none exists.

reproductive memory

According to this flawed view, all of our experiences are "in there," and the problem is simply how to get them out. This view assumes that memory is reproductive, meaning that it reproduces a very accurate record of experience that corresponds in exact detail to the events in the world, similar to naive realism. A view of memory which assumes that what one remembers is reproduced exactly from what occurs as if memory is a copy made on a video recorder; compare with naive realism.

empirical approach

An approach to inquiry that relies on carefully made observations; for example, researchers in science take an empirical approach. The kind of evidence that psychologists and other scientists especially value is empirical data, which come from carefully made observations.

rational-analytic

An approach to thinking characterized by deliberate analysis and reasoning of the information presented; associated with Type 2 thinking. People deliberately analyze and reason about information presented to them. Although we need and engage in both kinds of thinking, we often tend to rely on the intuitive-experiential approach unless we realize that we need to engage in more effortful, rational-analytic thinking. Psychologists have developed a theory called dual process theory that can help us understand the thinking that leads people to accept or reject false beliefs

intuitive-experiential

An approach to thinking characterized by rapid responses to questions and reliance on knowledge of patterns and experience, instead of careful deliberation; it is associated with Type 1 thinking. According to one dual process theory called rational-experiential theory, people who take a more intuitive-experiential approach in their thinking tend to rapidly respond to questions without deliberation, using their vast knowledge of patterns and experience. This approach, also called Type 1 thinking, is what people use when they quickly respond with their commonsense knowledge. Is what people use when they quickly respond with their commonsense knowledge.

false memory

An error in which one mistakenly remembers something that was not seen, heard, or otherwise experienced. Also called a memory illusion (Roediger, 1996), a false memory is an error in which we mistakenly remember something we did not see, hear, or otherwise experience. Memory illusions often occur through some form of suggestion and are associated with activation of a schema. Memory illusions often occur through some form of suggestion and are associated with activation of a schema.

Reappraising a Situation

An incorrect interpretation or appraisal of a situation can lead to an inappropriate or immoderate emotional response to the situation. For instance, when people who are quick to anger look for signs of an attack and provocation in ambiguous situations, they may incorrectly interpret more neutral signals as an attack, which could lead them to retaliate for no good reason. Likewise, people who are anxious or fearful may be quick to interpret harmless signals as posing a threat, prompting them to cower in fear when they should be actively pursuing their goals. In these situations, it often helps to reappraise the situation so that a more adaptive response can be made. Reappraisal involves reevaluating a situation to look for other possible interpretations of an event. Reinterpreting a situation in which strong emotion may interfere with reasoning can lead to a more moderate emotional response or even a different emotion altogether. Notice that reappraisal might be part of an adaptive response, along with the other strategies described. For example, a reappraisal of the evidence for WMDs and other information would have helped Congress make a more rational decision about invading Iraq. Similarly, a reduction in negative emotion is often necessary before a reappraisal can be done.

mesmerism

A pseudoscience involving the influencing of another person's behaviors and experiences; it resembles the modern technique of hypnosis.

This book's purpose is to help you learn how to think more effectively about questions, both in psychology and in everyday life. This is very different from telling you what to think or believe. Learning how to think critically about psychological questions is important because it often results in psychologists producing their best thinking. It is also important for you, as a student and citizen, to learn how to draw well-reasoned conclusions because doing so will serve you well throughout life. We live in the "Information Age," wherein we are bombarded with vast amounts of information from the media, online sources, and new scientific research studies. We need critical thinking (CT) to help us sort through, analyze, and evaluate this ocean of information. But what exactly is critical thinking?

"Critical thinking is reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do" Reasonable also implies that thinking is sound, logical, and fair. To say that CT is "reflective" means that it involves thinking deeply about things, especially about the quality of one's own thinking. Reflective thinking involved in the evaluation of evidence relevant to a claim so that a well-reasoned conclusion can be drawn from the evidence. Examining the word critical can help, too. In everyday language, being "critical" often means being judgmental or making overly negative comments. In contrast, referring to one's thinking as "critical" implies careful evaluation or judgment (Halpern, 2014). The latter sense of the word critical reflects its origins in the Greek word kriterion, derived from crites, meaning "judge" (Beyer, 1995). Notice that kriterion is very similar to the English word criterion, which refers to an accepted standard used in judging. Critical thinkers use criteria to make reasoned judgments (Lipman, 1991).

counterargument

A claim and any corresponding evidence that run counter to or disagree with a previous claim or argument.

qualified conclusion

A conclusion that is true under certain conditions.

falsifiable

A condition whereby a hypothesis, theory, or claim can be shown to be false; good hypotheses are falsifiable. In this regard, a good scientific hypothesis is falsifiable, or can be shown to be false (Popper, 1959).

placebo

A fake treatment; it is commonly used in science as a control for the effects of expecting to receive an active treatment. A placebo control involves administering a fake treatment, such as a sugar pill, to create the expectation that the person is receiving an active treatment. People who receive placebos often show improvement and relief of their symptoms even though they did not receive the active treatment that was expected to produce these effects (Beecher, 1955; Brown, 2013). A placebo serves as a control that allows the experimenter to test the effects of expectation. The mesmerism committee's placebo treatment involved telling one subject that she was to drink water that had been magnetized by the mesmerist when, in fact, the water had not been magnetized. She immediately fainted in response to drinking the water. Upon recovery, she was given water that had been magnetized, but the committee did not tell her so. When she drank it, she did not faint.

phrenology

A pseudoscience in which the study of the bumps and indentations on one's skull was thought to indicate one's specific characteristics and abilities.

To illustrate, get a piece of paper and a pen or pencil so you can write down some words. First, read the following list of words, about one word every 2 seconds. Then put the book aside and recall as many of the list words as you can in any order. After each word you recalled, rate your confidence that it was on the list using a 1-5 scale in which 1 = not at all confident, 3 = somewhat confident, and 5 = very confident. The list words are: bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, snooze, blanket, doze, slumber, snore, nap, peace, yawn, drowsy. This list was carefully designed to lure you into falsely recalling a word that was not on the list but was strongly associated with the other words on the list. Did you recall the lure word sleep? If so, how confident were you that it appeared on the list? Roediger and McDermott (1996) found that with college students, participants incorrectly recalled a lure word approximately 40% of the time. Moreover, the students were very confident that the lure word was on the list. Researchers have used various techniques to produce false memories, including hypnotic suggestion (Laurence & Perry, 1983), false computer feedback, interview procedures (Loftus & Bernstein, 2005), feedback from psychologists interpreting participants' dreams, and suggestions from relatives to remember events. False memories can be successfully implanted when the suggested memory is plausible, that is, when it seems to fit within a person's life narrative and comes from a reliable, trusted source (Laney,

An individual's position on the M-B question can greatly affect his or her approach to understanding the world. M-B dualism can even be a dangerous position, as evidenced by the mass suicide of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult who, as they put it, "exited the vehicle" (i.e., killed the body) so that their spirits could be free to rendezvous with aliens in a spaceship approaching Earth (see Chapter 4). In this extreme dualistic view, the body is merely a conveyance for carrying the spirit around. If the spirit is assumed to be separable and the most important part of a person, then sacrificing the body does not seem to be much of a sacrifice at all. Your own stance on the M-B question can influence which theory you endorse and which approach you take to psychological questions. For example, many scientists studying the brain who are physicalists may be less inclined to examine subjective experience and more inclined to focus on the brain. If they neglect subjective mental states, their explanation of the mind and brain may be incomplete. Sometimes lawyers take extreme materialistic positions in defense of their clients, arguing as an excuse for a criminal's behavior that "his brain made him do it." As evidence, they may present images of damage in the client's brain or show a scan of abnormal activity in a brain area, comparing it with the scan of a normal brain (Thornton, 2011). This extreme materialistic approach is wrong-headed, in that it assumes that we are only our brains. The mind and the brain are closely related—they are part of the same person. Saying that a person's "brain made him do it" ignores the interconnected nature of the brain and mental processes that emerge as the brain operates in a complex environment—one in which some environmental events are simply random. Locating a brain area that becomes activated when a person behaves a certain way may seem to demonstrate the cause of the behavior, but this assumption is unwarranted. Brain-scanning technology is not yet able to predict who will commit a crime, and events often have multiple causes. In contrast, radical behaviorism is a materialistic approach assuming that mental processes are unimportant. John Watson, the founder of behaviorism, argued that psychologists should not study mental processes because the mind is not directly observable. Instead, psychologists should study the relationships between stimuli and responses, which are observable. One consequence of the dominance of behaviorism in U.S. psychology was that many psychologists were discouraged for decades from studying memories, mental imagery, emotion, consciousness, and other mental events. Finally, the assumptions that some M-B dualists make can prevent the scientific study of the relationship between mind and brain. Suppose someone believes that the mind is nonphysical and the brain is physical; then what kind of observation could show the action of the mind? In psychology, we make observations of external, physical events as indicators of the action of the mind. How can we do this if the mind is nonphysical?

Two studies have tested both of these hypotheses at once; the results supported social learning theory and contradicted drive theory. Arms, Russell, and Sandilands (1979) asked sports spectators to rate their hostility before and after viewing professional wrestling, hockey, or swimming. They found, in general, that hostility increased after watching wrestling and hockey but not after watching swimming.

Another experiment by Ebbesen, Duncan, and Konecni (1975) tested aerospace workers who had just been laid off, assigning them to three different conditions of verbal expression of their anger. In a first session of exit interviews, they induced the workers to verbally express their anger toward the company, their supervisor, or themselves. When the workers were later asked to direct their anger either toward the same or a different target, Ebbesen and colleagues found that workers who directed their verbal aggression toward the same target had significantly higher ratings of aggression than workers who directed their anger toward a different target. Social learning theory would predict that verbal expression of aggression would disinhibit the workers' later expression of aggression toward the same target, whereas drive theory would predict that the aggression would decrease after the workers had expressed or vented the first time. Which prediction turns out to be accurate? Considerable research has supported social learning theory, not catharsis. Social learning theory is important because of its implications for the potentially dangerous effects of observing violence in the media, which has been consistently shown to be related to aggression (Friedrich-Cofer & Huston, 1986). Playing violent video games has sometimes been linked to subsequent aggressive behavior (Anderson et al., 2010), but not always (Ferguson, 2015). Thus, predictions deduced from social learning theory about the aggressive behavior of children after observing violence on TV would more likely be accurate than predictions about what happens after children play video games. In contrast, numerous studies have shown that catharsis, or venting aggression, leads not to a reduction in aggressive behavior but rather increases it (e.g., Bushman, Baumeister, & Stack, 1999; Geen, Stonner, & Stope, 1975). Although 63% of college students believe that "blowing off steam" is a good way to reduce aggression (Brown, 1983) and many sports enthusiasts believe that watching a violent sport reduces aggression (Wann et al., 1999), the research reviewed shows otherwise. Why, then, do people hold the mistaken belief that catharsis reduces aggression? This may be due to a misinterpretation of their personal experience. People sometimes report feeling less angry after venting and show reduced heart rate after aggression, but catharsis does not reduce later aggressive behavior—it may even increase it (Verona & Sullivan, 2008). The results from the research we reviewed are more consistent with social learning theory, so predictions from it are more likely to be accurate than those deduced from the drive and catharsis theories. One important implication of this conclusion is that therapists should not encourage their clients, especially if they are children, to vent their aggression (Schaefer & Mattei, 2005); rather, they should help their clients learn to control it. Like all theories, social learning theory could be improved by testing predictions under different conditions. Newer versions of the theory, sometimes referred to as social cognitive learning theories, emphasize cognitive factors (e.g., background knowledge of situations) that are associated with aggression to help explain what happens when a person observes aggression (Saleem, Anderson, & Gentile, 2012). For example, merely seeing a weapon can prime, or activate, knowledge of aggression (Anderson, Benjamin, & Bartholow, 1998), and so can the anticipation of watching a violent movie (Leyans & Dunand, 1991). Social cognitive learning theories are powerful in that they predict conditions not only for antisocial behaviors like aggression but also for prosocial or beneficial behaviors such as helping (Saleem et al., 2012). According to social cognitive learning theory, if a person observes another person helping, then the observer will be more likely to help someone else.

Countering Appeals to Emotion

Appealing to emotion is a strategy used in argumentation in which a person tries to elicit fear, anger, pity, or another emotion to support a claim or persuade another person. This approach may be intended to deflect attention away from relevant evidence. For example, a defense lawyer may appeal to pity to persuade a jury that his client's criminal actions are understandable given the abusive conditions that characterized the client's childhood. Pity for a defendant's unfortunate childhood is not relevant in deciding a person's guilt, but it might be relevant when considering leniency in the sentencing phase of a trial (Neimark, 1987). Politicians often appeal to fear to persuade citizens to support a war. For instance, in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, President George W. Bush and his administration often warned that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and was developing nuclear weapons that it might use against the United States (Isikoff & Corn, 2006). This appeal to fear was successful and resulted in Congress authorizing a war that cost thousands of lives and $1 trillion—even though no WMDs were ever found. To counter an appeal to emotion, it helps to separate the claim from the emotion being appealed to. If lawmakers had realized that the Bush administration's appeal to fear was related to its claim that the problem was urgent and needed a quick solution, then they might have refocused the argument on the quality of evidence for WMDs. Instead, they rapidly agreed to invade Iraq based on the hasty generalization that Iraq was threatening us with WMDs.

Drug effects on the brain can also produce OBEs. Ketamine, called "Special K" on the street and used as an anesthetic before surgery, is one example of a drug that can induce these experiences. Karl Jansen (1997) has argued that the experience produced by ketamine is very much like the near-death experience in which users often report floating above their body, traveling through a dark tunnel into the light, seeing God, and being convinced that they actually died briefly. Moreover, Jansen has proposed that nerve cells in the temporal lobe can respond to ketamine instead of to their usual neurotransmitter, with ketamine producing an artificial version of a non-drug-induced OBE.

How could physical events in the natural environment produce electrochemical changes in the brain that lead to OBEs? One possibility proposed by Michael Persinger (1995) is that variations in the earth's magnetic field produced by movement of the planet's tectonic plates could lead to OBEs under the right conditions. Persinger obtained data on the changes in the earth's geomagnetic activity from the National Geophysical Data Center so that he could keep track of the particular activity level that each subject experienced during testing. He also asked subjects to rate on a questionnaire the degree to which they felt detached from their bodies. At a separate session, subjects answered questions from which Persinger could infer each subject's history of complex, partial epileptic-like experiences. The subjects who had the most epileptic-like experiences also tended to report the most detachment from their bodies on days when geomagnetic activity was at a medium level. The magnetic disturbance may have destabilized activity in their temporal lobes. Another group of researchers used ESB to produce a more convincing OBE in a 43-year-old epileptic woman (Blanke, Ortigue, Landis, & Seeck, points in the right angular gyrus within the temporal parietal junction (TPJ), shown in Figure 7.4. This stimulation produced various disturbances in the perception of her body. When stimulated at different intensities, the woman reported feeling that she was "sinking into the bed," "falling from a height," and seeing parts of her body shorten (p. 269). At one point, she had an OBE in which she saw her trunk and legs from above—the same portion of her body she had felt when stimulated before. However, when they stimulated the epileptic focus in her temporal lobe more than 5 cm away from the angular gyrus in the TPJ, she did not have an OBE.

Positive Affect and Rationality

If strong, negative emotions often impair thinking, then one might expect that positive affect and emotions could, in turn, facilitate reasoning and decision making. Some emotion experts have argued that positive affect can improve cognitive processing. For example, Scherer (1984) has suggested that low levels of a positive emotion, such as happiness, may help maintain behavior. According to Thorndike's law of effect, a person is more likely to engage in a behavior when it leads to a pleasant outcome. In this way, positive affect can aid learning. Moreover, the urge to minimize negative emotion can encourage belief formation (Berenbaum & Boden, 2014). More to the point, Carnevale and Isen (1986) found that positive mood can improve the efficiency and thoroughness of thinking, especially when people are engaged in complex tasks. Additionally, Djamasbi (2007) found that people induced to be in a positive mood after receiving a small gift used more cues in a decision support system than did participants who did not receive the small gift. Their judgments were also more accurate. Other research has shown that positive mood can bias thinking and judgment. For instance, Isen and Daubman (1984) found that positive mood causes people to be more inclusive when grouping things into categories. For example, people in a positive mood would be more likely than participants not in a positive mood to say that the object ring belongs in the category "clothing." Similarly, participants in a positive mood would rate poorer instances of the category "vehicle"—such as elevator, camel, and feet—higher than participants who were not in a positive mood. Schwartz and Bless (1991) have argued that people in a positive mood are likely to use a processing strategy that lacks logical consistency and attention to detail. Although positive mood may impair performance on tasks requiring logical, detail-oriented strategies, it may actually help us when we undertake more creative tasks (Isen, Johnson, Mertz, & Robinson, 1985). Creative thinking often requires that we see remote connections between stimuli, so positive mood might help in solving problems that require more unusual associations. In another study, Isen and Means (1983) found that participants who were put into a positive mood were more efficient in their decision making compared with participants who were not in a positive mood. In their review of research from an edited book and other studies on emotion and decision making, Roy Baumeister, DeWall, and Zhang (2007) argued that emotion can both improve and hinder decision making. Emotion is most likely to hinder decision making when we experience a current, full-blown emotion. In contrast, milder emotion often operates unconsciously to guide us toward effective judgments and choices. The anticipation of which emotion we will experience if we pursue a particular course of action can also help us respond more adaptively as we seek to achieve certain goals. Moreover, emotions provide feedback that helps us learn how to deal with future events and how to distinguish right from wrong in moral decision making. In another review of the research presented in her edited book on emotion and reasoning, Isabelle Blanchette (2014) argued that emotion affects reasoning in multiple ways. Although it may sometimes impair reasoning, emotion can have an adaptive effect and lead to correct responses on tasks with logically correct answers. The effect of emotion depends on the particular emotion aroused in relation to the task performed. Blanchette also reviewed several studies showing that the emotional content of the material with which we reason can affect that reasoning, sometimes hindering it and sometimes facilitating it. For instance, in an early study, Lefford (1946) found that participants made more logical errors in a deductive reasoning task when the syllogisms contained emotional content than when the syllogisms did not contain emotional content. In more recent studies, Blanchette, Gavigan, and Johnston (2014) have observed that if what we are reasoning about has emotional meaning or relevance to us, then we sometimes reason more effectively than when the content is not relevant to us.

Modifying Strong Negative Emotion

Because strong negative emotions often impair a person's ability to think rationally, it can help to reduce or change the emotion so that rational thinking can proceed. For example, anger can provoke us to draw a rapid conclusion or respond aggressively to an insult or attack without much thought. This response demonstrates how a strong emotion may lead us to rely more on fast Type 1 thinking than on slower Type 2 thinking. A good strategy to reduce anger is to slow down your response to the elicitor of anger, such as by counting to 10 before responding. This delaysponse, rather than launching into a thoughtless reaction. Another strategy for reducing emotional response is to try to relax the mind and body. It is very difficult to experience strong emotion when a person is relaxed (Benson, 1975; Jacobsen, 1929). A third strategy is to shift attention away from the negative situation, such as thinking about positive events and happy memories. A good example of this approach is seen in how Dounia Bouzar's French de-indoctrination team handled a potentially volatile situation: They prevented a young Muslim man who had kidnapped his daughter from sacrificing their lives in jihad in Syria (Bouzar, 2016). The team urged the man's wife, Meriam, to remind him of positive events when they communicated—such as when they had met, the birth of their child, and places they had visited—and not to try to reason with him about his beliefs or plans. After 10 months, the young man returned his daughter to his wife. According to Bouzar (2016), in this and 500 other cases, researchers found that changing emotion—not reasoning—returned the person to a more rational outlook. This tactic is similar to Haidt's suggestion that when trying to persuade individuals to change their thinking about a moral or political question that goes against their intuition, you should first appeal to their Type 1 thinking (Haidt, 2012).

Nevertheless, negative emotion can sometimes improve reasoning.

CRITICAL READING: DO EMOTIONS MAKE THINKING IRRATIONAL? Emotion and Rationality The idea that our emotions make us think and behave irrationally is an old one in Western thought that remains popular today. You have no doubt heard someone say, "Don't get emotional," during a heated discussion, which assumes that people experiencing emotion cannot "think straight." People often view emotion as an involuntary state that cannot be controlled, whereas reason is viewed as voluntary and deliberate. Penalties for crimes in the U.S. justice system reflect this distinction. For example, the punishment for premeditated murder committed "in cold blood" is stiffer than that for murder committed in a fit of passion (Oatley, 1990). In particular, people often assume that negative emotions (e.g., anger and anxiety), rather than positive emotions (e.g., joy and interest), make us irrational. But is this view correct? To find out, we examine the evidence on both sides of the question for negative emotions as well as for positive emotions. First, however, we will define rationality and identify how emotion might interfere with being rational. One sense of the word rational is that a person is following the norms and rules for good reasoning (Stanovich, 2011). A rational person thinks logically and clearly. Irrationality, in this sense, means that a person is thinking in a way that violates the norms for rationality. If emotion impairs a person's rationality, then a person who becomes emotional may make worse decisions, draw less reasonable conclusions, or be more susceptible to thinking errors and biases than a person who is less emotional. Conversely, if emotion (perhaps positive emotion) is thought to improve a person's ability to think or behave rationally, the opposite outcomes are expected to occur. Another sense of the word rational defines this term as thinking that helps a person achieve his or her goals (Baron, 2008). Conversely, if emotion induces individuals to act or think in ways that go against their goals, then they are thinking or behaving irrationally. A good example is an excellent wrestler I knew in college, who, after losing a tournament match, got so angry he punched a glass door, severely injuring his hand. His decision to respond this way was irrational because the damage he incurred could have seriously impaired his ability to ever compete again or to reach many other goals that required use of his hand. Negative Affect and Rationality The tension between the passions (emotion) and reason was an important theme in early Greek philosophy, culminating in the writings of the philosopher Plato in the fourth century BCE. Plato wrote that reason must subdue and master emotion to reach an ideal state of being (Russell, 1972). The notion that reason is in conflict with emotion has persisted into our own time. It is not surprising that an informal survey of Georgetown University students showed that most of them associated emotion with a disruption in thinking (Parrott, 1995). Several lines of evidence suggest that emotional states, especially negative ones, impair the ability to think rationally. Many studies have shown that negative, irrational thinking is related to depression (Ellis, 1977b). According to Albert Ellis (1977a), people become depressed because they hold irrational beliefs about themselves and the world. Depressed people who do not believe they can succeed in life look for evidence that success is not possible. In so doing, they create a situation that makes it unlikely they will succeed, thereby confirming their irrational belief. This serves to maintain their depression, which in turn makes negative thoughts and beliefs more accessible (Auerbach, Webb, Gardiner, & Pechtel, 2013). However, it is difficult to show cause and effect when studying clinical depression because it is unethical to cause a person to become clinically depressed. A major advance in the scientific study of emotion was the development of mood induction procedures to experimentally manipulate emotions and moods. In one such procedure, a participant is made to feel depressed after reading negative, self-devaluing statements; made to feel happy after reading positive statements; or put in a neutral state after reading factual statements not expected to induce a particular mood (Velten, 1968). Using the experimental induction of depressed mood, happy mood, and neutral mood, Palfai and Salovey (1993) found that depression does not always impair performance on reasoning tasks. Depressed participants demonstrated significantly slower performance on an inductive reasoning task than participants in a neutral mood, but happy participants performed significantly more slowly than depressed and neutral mood participants on a deductive reasoning task. Other research has shown that fear and anxiety can interfere with rational thinking, too. Fear often involves an emotional reaction to an imminent threat, whereas with anxiety the threat may be something that could happen farther into the future (Schirmer, 2015). Keinan (1987) found that participants in whom fear was induced by the threat of an electric shock were less likely to examine alternatives on an anagram problem-solving task than were participants who were not made to feel such fear. Leon and Revelle (1985) found that more anxious and stressed participants made more errors on an analogical reasoning task than did less anxious participants. As for research in student testing, Zeidner (2007) reviewed many studies in which test anxiety negatively impacted cognitive performance. Test anxiety can impair performance by distracting the test taker from thinking about the task at hand and instead focusing attention on self-doubt, a counterproductive, test-taking strategy. Moreover, test-anxious students may avoid studying for a test because this focuses their attention on the anxiety-inducing event, an irrational strategy for preparing to take a test. Anxiety can also impact the perspective a person takes when evaluating information. A group of researchers found that participants who were made to feel anxious tended to be more self-centered in the perspective they took when reasoning about other people's mental states compared with participants in an angry, disgusted, or neutral emotional state (Todd, Forstmann, Burgmer, Brooks, & Galinsky, 2015). Likewise, participants who were induced to feel surprise—a positive emotion related to experiencing uncertainty—took a more self-centered perspective; this finding suggests that uncertainty in these emotional states makes people more reliant on self-centered perspectives than they would be in other emotional states. Still other research indicates that emotions and moods can affect the judgment of risk. Johnson and Tversky (1983) found that participants whose mood changed after reading a tragic newspaper story increased their frequency estimates of the risk posed by various events, whereas those participants who read a positive story decreased their estimates of potential risk. In another study, participants who were induced to feel happy were willing to bet more on a "long shot" than were participants who were not made to feel happy, which suggests that sometimes happiness can lead to greater risk taking (Isen & Patrick, 1983). In a review of research on anger, Litvak, Lerner, Tiedens, and Shonk (2010) found many studies showing that people who were feeling angry were led to make more optimistic estimates of various kinds of risks than were people experiencing other emotions or neutral emotion. Specifically, Baumann and DeSteno (2012) found that participants who were made to feel angry were willing to take greater risks than were neutral-mood participants when tested under conditions that encouraged the use of affective information. Nevertheless, negative emotion can sometimes improve reasoning. Moons and Mackie (2007) found that participants who were induced to feel a little angry were better able to distinguish weak from strong arguments than were participants in a neutral mood. In another study on anger, Young, Tiedens, Jung, and Tsai (2011) found that participants who were made to feel angry were more likely to seek disconfirming information (i.e., they showed less confirmation bias) in a debate than were sad participants. In a follow-up study, angry participants again showed less confirmation bias, as they reported being more likely to oppose a person in the 2008 election than did sad participants. Moving against an object or person is thought to be an action tendency associated with anger.

DEALING WITH THINKING ERRORS ASSOCIATED WITH EMOTION

If we conclude that emotions can sometimes get in the way of reasoning effectively, while at other times they help us respond adaptively, then we need to understand how to regulate our emotions to reach our goals. Fortunately, people can learn how to regulate their emotions by increasing, decreasing, or maintaining their emotions (Koole, 2009). Part of regulation entails first becoming aware of thinking errors and problems related to emotion so that you can respond more adaptively and rationally. In this section, we consider different ways that emotion can contribute to thinking errors and strategies for dealing with these problems.

cognitive errors

Errors the mind makes as it processes information (e.g., perceptual, attentional, and memory errors). First, not paying enough attention to a stimulus, as when the train engineer was texting instead of attending to his driving, impedes our ability to sufficiently process or even see that stimulus. Missing the red light apparently led the engineer to the false conclusion that it was safe to enter the tunnel. Second, the red panda sightings demonstrate that background knowledge and expectation can affect both what we perceive and what we remember; thus, people who expected to see a red panda incorrectly interpreted the sighting of a cat or some other similar-looking animal as the red panda. Finally, the people who recalled alien abduction probably misinterpreted experiences associated with sleeping, such as sleep paralysis and dreaming. Exposure to stories of alien abduction and images of aliens in the media probably contributed to their memory of such unusual experiences. To think critically, we must avoid making not only logical errors, but also cognitive errors that can derail the reasoning process. Serious consequences can occur when we reason with inaccurate information obtained from perception or memory, as when an eyewitness inaccurately recalls what she saw at the scene of a crime. These errors can lead to wrongful convictions because jurors often find eyewitness testimony and identifications highly persuasive. As of June 2016, the Innocence Project had helped overturn 342 wrongful convictions; approximately 70% of those convictions were at least in part due to incorrect eyewitness testimony and identifications that resulted in innocent people spending years in prison (Innocence Project, 2017). In this chapter, we will examine cognitive errors associated with attention, perception, and memory in depth and then discuss how each can affect eyewitness memory.

In contrast to supporters of appraisal theory, proponents of basic or discrete emotions theories assume that we have a small set of basic emotions that fall into distinct categories. One commonly defined set of discrete emotions includes happiness, interest, anger, sadness, disgust, and fear (Izard, 2007). These discrete emotions are natural kinds, in that they have a biological or evolutionary basis. As such, each emotion is thought to have its own form of facial and bodily expression, its own pattern of physiological response, and its own action tendency.

One type of evidence for discrete emotions comes from research suggesting that people from different cultures share the same discrete, facial expressions for the six basic emotions shown in Figure 9.2. Can you recognize the emotion displayed in each? Not only can people from one culture typically recognize the facial expressions of people from other cultures but each discrete emotion is also associated with a specific pattern of facial expression (Ekman, 1994). Other evidence supporting discrete emotions comes from research on the action tendencies that people report as part of specific emotions (Roseman, Wiest, & Swartz, 1994). If emotions evolved through natural selection, then we would expect them to serve adaptive functions. Roseman and colleagues found that the dominant action tendency for fear was the urge to run away and that the motivational goal was to get to a safe place. The distinction between positive and negative emotions also helps us understand their adaptive functions. For example, the two positive emotions of interest and joy function early in life to help the infant learn and explore the environment (Izard, 2007). In contrast, negative emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, which occur less frequently, function to interrupt some behavior or to signal that action is needed in response to an aversive or threatening event. Attempts to differentiate emotions using physiological changes have met with limited success. Lench, Flores, and Bench (2011) conducted a meta-analysis of 687 studies in which the discrete emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and anxiety were thought to have been elicited. Although Lench and colleagues did find some evidence that behavioral changes, experiences, and physiological responses were correlated within emotions and that patterns of discrete emotions differed, their results did not convince all researchers (Lindquist, Siegel, Quigley, & Barrett, 2013). In another study, Fernandez and colleagues (2012) found that a fearful mood was induced after participants viewed either a fear-inducing film or an anger-inducing film, and both film types significantly increased heart rate compared with viewing a neutral film. By comparison, only skin conductance level increased after watching the fear film. Given the difficulties in distinguishing one emotion from another based on physiological measures, it is not surprising that polygraphs (lie detector machines) that use physiological responses to distinguish liars from truth-tellers do not produce very good results. Figure 9.3a shows a man hooked up to a polygraph that measures physiological changes. You can see in the graph shown in Figure 9.3b that the man's galvanic skin response (GSR) rose sharply from baseline control types of questions after being asked, "Have you ever taken money from the bank?" The elevation in this physiological marker suggests that the man is sweating more—a sign of stress and anxiety, which indicates that the man is lying. Increased blood pressure, skin conductance, and more irregularities in breathing from baseline measures are also thought to indicate lying.

Psychological and Neuroscientific Research on OBE

Psychologists and brain scientists look for natural, alternative explanations of the experience of being outside the body that are more plausible than the claim that the spirit is actually leaving the body. For instance, they explain the OBE as the "mind" experiencing itself as outside the body while not really leaving it. They argue that the OBE may be the result of an illusion or hallucination stemming from a mistake the mind/brain makes in constructing its usual representation of the experiencing self as in the body. Following this line of thinking, Susan Blackmore (1982) applied the cognitive psychological approach to try to explain OBEs. Cognitive scientists view the brain as a kind of complex information-processing system somewhat like a computer. The human information-processing system inputs data through the senses, holds the information in memory, and transforms it into various intermediate states before outputting it in the form of behavior. Information processing occurs in the brain as nerve cells send and receive messages using special chemical substances called neurotransmitters. Many of these nerve cells are organized into processing units and circuits dedicated to processing specific kinds of information. Research with brain scanning has found specific areas of the brain that "light up," or become active, when individuals engage in specific mental processes, such as perceiving, attending, remembering, forming mental images, and using language (Posner & Raichle, 1994). The brain uses the activity of these specific neural processors to form mental representations—representations that construct an elaborate and usually accurate model of the physical world. This sort of running simulation of parts of the world faithfully captures some, but certainly not all, aspects in its model. As discussed earlier, the brain has map-like representations of various parts of the body such as the face, arm, and hand. These maps in the brain represent the body in visual and somatic form; that is, they carry detailed information of both how the body looks and how it feels (Ladavas, Zelon, & Farne, 1998). Sometimes, however, the brain makes a mistake in constructing its model, and we misperceive part or all of the body.

cognitive load

The amount of information that is held or manipulated in working memory as a task is completed.

2 + 4 = ________ If a bat and ball cost $1.10 and the bat costs $1 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost? What is 27 × 43? Do people who have been abused often repress their memory of that abuse?

You likely had no trouble answering the first question. Type 1 thinking, which is intuitive-experiential, helped you rapidly answer "6." However, if you rapidly answered the second question "10 cents" (as people often do), then using Type 1 thinking led you to the wrong answer (Fredericks, cited in Kahneman, 2011). The answer is 5 cents (the bat must cost $1.05 for it to cost $1.00 more). Slowing down your thinking and engaging the rational-analytic system would have helped you answer correctly. Clearly, the third problem requires more complex calculations and the deliberate, effortful processing of Type 2 thinking. If you answered the fourth question rapidly on the basis of what you have heard, as many people do, you likely answered, "Yes" (Bensley & Lilienfeld, 2015). Here again, when Type 1 thinking is deployed, it leads to an incorrect answer. Answering this question correctly requires Type 2 thinking. Careful analysis and reasoning about the scientific evidence relevant to this question will show in later chapters that repressed memory is very rare, if it occurs at all. For many questions, the intuitive-experiential system works just fine, as when we need to access facts rapidly or make judgments of preferences; but most of the questions we examine in this book require more rational-analytic thinking. Critical thinkers take the time to analyze, evaluate, and question the information they are provided, engaging Type 2 thinking. Critical thinkers do not accept pseudoscientific theories for which there is no good evidence. They remain skeptical of such claims until they are given good reason to believe them. They carefully evaluate the evidence relevant to such claims so that they can draw well-reasoned conclusions about them. Because they seek to reason well and avoid thinking errors, they are less likely to hold misconceptions (Bensley, Lilienfeld, & Powell, 2014; Mc

The strength of an inductive conclusion depends on the relative quality and quantity of the evidence. The strongest conclusion we can draw is one in which all of the high-quality evidence supports one side of the argument and no good evidence supports the other side. This special case in inductive reasoning whereby all of the evidence supports one side (i.e., all the premises are true and support a true conclusion) is called a cogent argument, but this "strongest of strong" arguments is a rare occurrence in psychology. Often, the best we can do is to draw a strong conclusion, or one that is very likely true, based on the evidence provided. In the preceding discussion, we tentatively concluded that the bulk of the good evidence gathered so far supports the conclusion that CT skills can be taught and that little evidence fails to support it. To say that a conclusion is "tentative" means that we cautiously accept the conclusion for now. More good evidence might later accumulate to support the conclusion that instruction does not improve CT, but for now we accept that instruction can improve CT. Note that even when all of the evidence supports an inductive conclusion, it still might be overturned by better evidence that comes to light later on. A strong inductive conclusion depends not only on evaluating the quality and quantity of the evidence but also on the relevance of the evidence. One issue is whether all of the relevant evidence has been evaluated. For example, because CT involves dispositions and metacognition, perhaps the review should have discussed whether instruction can improve those aspects, too. In practice, it can be quite challenging to know whether all the relevant evidence has been included in a review and/or whether certain evidence being presented is indeed relevant at all. To deal with this difficulty, reviews, including those in this textbook, often are selective in the studies they incorporate in order to fairly represent the different sides of a question. Your primary job is to evaluate the evidence presented, but you should be aware that some evidence may be more relevant than other evidence. Sometimes, relevant evidence may even be missing. Another issue with the relevance of evidence concerns how relevant the evidence is. Sometimes an arguer includes irrelevant evidence and information to divert attention from the question at hand, hoping to win the argument by creating a smoke screen—mainly to escape refutation from better evidence that might be offered. This thinking error is called the red herring fallacy, named after the technique used to train English foxhounds by dragging a bag of red herring (smelly fish) across the fox's trail to cover its scent (Bassham, Irwin, Nardone, & Wallace, 2005). Like the hounds, the critical thinker needs to learn how to follow the relevant evidence and line of reasoning in an argument and not be distracted by information that does not pertain to the discussion.

red herring fallacy The thinking error in which one's attention is diverted from the question at hand by irrelevant evidence and information from an arguer hoping to win by creating a smoke screen. The red herring fallacy is a favorite of politicians. For example, Senator Swensen says, "Humans are not contributing to global warming—it is a made-up crisis." Senator Olsen counters, "Lots of good scientific research has found that in the last 50 years the earth has shown very rapid, unprecedented increases in both CO2 levels and global temperatures. And experiments have shown that CO2 can increase atmospheric temperature." Swensen replies with a red herring: "The earth periodically goes through cycles of cooling and warming." Swensen's last statement is not relevant because the natural cycles of the earth's cooling and warming are more gradual than the rapid change recently observed. Swensen's comment is just an effort to prevent refutation of his claim by Olsen's scientific evidence. Just because most of the good, relevant evidence supports a tentative conclusion does not mean we can just forget about the negative evidence that does not support the conclusion. As critical thinkers, we should try to find a plausible explanation for nonsupporting evidence, that is, a reasonable explanation for why it did not support the conclusion. For instance, a couple of the failures to support the conclusion that CT can be taught can be explained by the idea that improving CT may take very specific and extensive training. For example, Tomlinson-Keasey and Eisert (1977) failed to show any effect of their training program after one year; but Tomlinson-Keasey, Williams, and Eisert (1977) showed a significant effect after two years of training. Although we may have found plausible explanations for why the studies failed to support the conclusion, this does not mean that these studies now support the conclusion. Sometimes, when the evidence is mixed, we cannot even draw a tentative conclusion supporting one side versus another. A conclusion receives mixed support when some evidence supports one side, whereas other evidence supports the other side(s) without enough good evidence to favor one conclusion over another. In these cases, the best conclusion is that no firm conclusion can be drawn until more research is conducted that could resolve the controversy. The pattern of the evidence in an inductive argument may also be complex, leading us to qualify or refine our conclusion to be consistent with what most of the good evidence suggests. A qualified conclusion is one that is true under certain conditions, that is, when the appropriate qualifications to the general conclusion have been made. Although scientists try to develop theories that are as general as possible, the evidence often indicates that a theory or hypothesis is true only under certain conditions. This indicates the need to qualify a more general conclusion (Garnham & Oakhill, 1994). For instance, our conclusion that instruction can improve CT is best supported by the research showing that explicit instruction is most effective. Stating our conclusion in this specific form, and in a way that is most consistent with the evidence, can help us make more accurate predictions from our theory, as well as guide us in the practical application of our knowledge.

When scientists conduct a study that supports a theory or hypothesis, they often try to replicate the study, attempting to repeat the observations under similar conditions.

replication Repeating methods and observations under similar or identical conditions to see if previously obtained findings will be duplicated.