Critical Thinking in Psychology Final Exam

Aggregate

Aggregate planning has certain prerequisite inputs which are inevitable. They include: Information about the resources and the facilities available. Demand forecast for the period for which the planning has to be done. Cost of various alternatives and resources.

Psych and other disciplines

besides psych, many other allied disciplines, using a variety of different techniques/theoretical perspectives, also contribute to our knowledge -many problems concerning behavior call for interdisciplinary approach -when work on interdisciplinary problem is publicized, the contributions pf psych are often assumed by other fields -> 1st major survey of the evidence on TVs effects on children's behavior was conducted under support of US surgeon general- the AMA reaffirmed the surveys findings suggested causal link and to share the conclusions with the public (nothing wrong with this but the repeated association of the findings with the AMA create the impression that the medical profession conducted the research) word "psychologist" has become ambiguous over the years - why work of psychs ascribed to others

Actuarial

foretelling rooted in quantified life experience and information instead of upon even more unbiased encounters.

Fact

holds true in every single instance ex. "men are taller than women" vs. "all men are taller than all women"

Chance and randomness

integral parts of our environments when something is due to chance, it's indeterminable ex. coin toss

Using sample size information

larger sample sizes always more accurately estimate a true population value (sizes important)

Probability

likelihood of an event to occur

Medical vs. psychological findings

most people have more understanding of the probabilistic nature of medical findings (ex. that certain drug treatment will work for some but not others) in psychological findings, people often expect findings/treatments to apply to every case knowledge doesn't have to be certain to be useful even though individual cases can't be predicted, the ability to forecast group trends accurately is extremely informative prediction of outcomes based on group characteristics is often called aggregate or actuarial prediction can only provide information about the larger statistical patterns of events, not the exact time/location psychology suffers most from public's inability to think statistically, yet psychs have done the most research into the nature of probabilistic reasoning abilities

Dictionary definitions of coincidence...

mostly interpret it to refer to an accidental remarkable occurrence of related events -simply an occurrence of related events due to chance -this isn't how some people interpret what is meant by coincidence if people truly understood what coincidence meant, they wouldn't fall victim to the fallacy of trying to develop systematic, non-chance explanations for these events

Implicit theories on behavior

much of our personal psychological knowledge is recipe knowledge-we do certain things because we think they will lead to others behaving in a certain way -think behaving in a certain way will help us achieve our goals main difference is science of psych seeks to validate its recipe knowledge empirically if we wanted to evaluate personal recipe knowledge on an individual basis, built-in biases that make us less than adequate observes of behavioral phenomenon would make it extremely difficult -scientific method avoids biases

Empirical support for one consequence of the just-world belief

people tend to criticize the victims of chance misfortune

Psychological vs medical

psychological research is grounded in probabilistic trends and relationships medical knowledge is probabilistic, but more understood by the average layperson

Gamblers fallacy

tendency for people to see links between past and future events, when the two are actually independent -2 outcomes independent when the occurrence of one doesn't affect the probability of the other

Illusory correlation

tendency to explain chance events when people believe 2 types of events should commonly occur together they tend to think they are seeing co-occurrences with great frequency, even when the 2 critical events are occurring randomly and, thus, don't co-occur more frequently than any other combination of events -people tend to see their expected correlation even in random events -see structure even when there is none controlled studies have shown that when people have a prior belief that 2 variables are connected, they tend to see that connection even in data where the 2 variables aren't connected -this finding generalizes to some real-world events that adversely effect the lives of people ex. inkblot test: no evidence it works but some still use it

Illusion of control

tendency to try to explain chance probably derives from a deep desire to believe we an control such events psychologists study this illusion of control, tendency to believe one has personal skills that can effect outcomes that are actually determine by chance ex. state lottery drawings

Just-world hypothesis

the fact that people tend to believe that they live in a world in which people get what they deserve tendency to seek explanations for chance events contributes to this phenomenon people find it hard to believe that a perfectly innocent person can suffer misfortune purely because of chance "good things happen to good people" -but chances is completely unbiased

Accepting error in order to reduce error

the reluctance to acknowledge the role of chance when trying to explain outcomes in the world can actually decrease our ability to predict real-world events acknowledging the role of chance in determine outcomes in a domain means that we must accept the fact that our predictions will never be 100% accurate, will always make some errors -by accepting this, helps to increase overall predictive accuracy

Understanding probabilistic reasoning

the tendency to give insufficient weight to probabilistic information is not limited to the scientifically unsophisticated layperson people often tricked by cognitive illusions: even when people know the correct answer, may be drawn to an incorrect conclusion by the structure of the problem

Coincidence

the tendency to seek explanations for essentially chance occurrences leads to much misunderstanding regarding the nature of coincidental events many people think coincidences need special explanation; they don't understand that coincidences are bound to happen, even if nothing other than chance is operating the tendency to seek patterns/meanings in events, combined with aspects of coincidences, lead people to overlook chance as an explanation -seek elaborate theories instead, to understand

The "person-who" statistic

thinking that a single example can invalidate a low situations in which well-established statistical trends are questioned because someone who knows a "person who" went against a trend under the assumption that the relationship should hold true in every case. results as a failure to understand the probabilistic nature of trends ex. lung cancer and smoking there will always be a few people who go against even the strongest of trends

Psychology and probabilistic reasoning

virtually all facts/relationships that have been uncovered by psychology are stated in terms of probabilities probabilistic trends uncovered in psychology are typically weak, but interpreted int he same way as other sciences probabilistic reasoning considering the Achilles heel of human cognition

Probabilistic trend

when event is more likely to occur than not, but doesn't hold true in all cases

When is the "person-who" statistic usually used

when people confronted with hard statistical evidence evidence that contradicts a previously held belief -technique to invalidate facts that go against people's opinions