PSYC 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Operational Definition, Descriptive Statistics, Standard Deviation
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PSYC 102 Full Course Notes
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Why care about statistics: two reasons. We can use stats to deal with and quantify uncertainty. People are terrible at thinking and communicating about uncertainty. Example: 49% vs. 51% chance of rain. Worlds like improbable and uncertain mean diferent things to scientists vs. non-scientists. How do we know anything: three sources of knowledge: Problems with observation: problem 1: observation is not always possible ie how do we experience the thoughts and feelings of others, problem 2: observation is not always reliable ie horse galloping problem. And if that wasn"t bad enough: understanding human minds introduces even more problems with pure observation. Problem of complexity: our brains and behaviour are by far the most complex system we"ve ever observed in nature. Problem of variability: we act diferent from one another and even if we give them the same basic task we will not ind that they do the exact same thing.
