PSYC 1030H Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Quackery, Pseudoscience, Critical Thinking

• School: Trent University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1030H
• Professor: Brenda Smith- Chant

Document Summary

Discipline concerned with behaviour and mental processes and how they are affected by an organism"s physical state, mental state, and external environment. >psychobabble< pseudoscience and quackery covered by a veneer of psychological and scientific sounding-language. ( pop-psych ) Differentiate between popular opinion and research evidence. Critical thinking: to look for flaws in arguments, resist unsupported claims. Think alternate explanations, implications of research findings, apply new knowledge to problems and emotions. If opinions ignore reality, it is not equal to others. Psyc crosses over to all aspects of western world. To social surveys, suicide hot lines, work, biology, etc. Eight critical thinking guidelines : the why"s lead to identification of problems, define your terms. Clarifies the goal to the answer: examine evidence. Check reliability of stories, claims, etc: analyze assumptions and biases. When it hinders researching the evidence fairy, it becomes bias: avoid emotional reasoning. Consider why you may disagree, maybe emotions: don"t oversimplify.