PSY 105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Pseudoscience, Apophenia, Pareidolia
27 Apr 2018
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Week 2B (pseudoscience)
This will be the bases for writing assignment
Warning science for pseudoscience
- Exaggerated claims
- “Will change (insert thing here) forever! permanently!”
- Over reliance on anecdotes
- “This one person did our thing and never had a symptom again”
- There was one very specific claim for the claim
- If you want to get someone to quit smoking get them to think of the little things
- Food doesn't taste as good, smell like smoke, yellow teeth
- Absence of link to other research
- “Punching yourself in the guts will increase your memory! My research shows it!”
- You must have additional research to back up your studies
- Lack of peer review
- “1000 studies all conducted by us showed the same result… no you can’t see
them”
- Peer review is a process of subjecting an authors scholarly work or ideas to the
scrutiny of others who are experts in the field
- Lack of self correction
- “Although some people say they’ve found this, we’re sticking to what we say!”
- Adapt to situations
- Psychobabble
- “Maximal intellectual front-loading of any textbook will make your alpha memory
waves sync during the first exam”
- “Proof” instead of evidence
- You cannot prove anything in science to a certainty, though you can disprove a
lot
- All scientific theories are tentative and subject to revision
Why are we drawn to pseudoscience?
- Meaning
- We are predisposed to make order out of disorder and find sense in nonsense
- We don’t like it when we cannot predict the future
- We are uncomfortable with the inability to predict the future
- We love taking the easy way out
Apophenia
- Tendency to perceive meaningful connections among unrelated phenomena
Pareidolia
- Seeing meaningful images in meaningless visual stimuli
- Seeing faces in random things
Dangers of pseudoscience
- Opportunity cost
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
This will be the bases for writing assignment. This one person did our thing and never had a symptom again . There was one very specific claim for the claim. If you want to get someone to quit smoking get them to think of the little things. Food doesn"t taste as good, smell like smoke, yellow teeth. Punching yourself in the guts will increase your memory! You must have additional research to back up your studies. 1000 studies all conducted by us showed the same result no you can"t see them . Peer review is a process of subjecting an authors scholarly work or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the field. Although some people say they"ve found this, we"re sticking to what we say! . Maximal intellectual front-loading of any textbook will make your alpha memory waves sync during the first exam .
