Psychology 2800E Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Nick Bostrom, Max Tegmark, Virtue Ethics

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2800E
• Professor: Doug Hazelwood

Document Summary

Placebos can be damaging because it can confirm/reinforce the delusion of imagined disease = patients become dependent on nonscientific practitoners. Media-created vividness = our risk perception is out of whack. Vividness of presentation of scientific results influences how research is evaluated. Barnum effect= most individuals endorse generalized personality summaries as accurate representations of themselves. When people spend time on pseudosciences they gain nothing, lose time and money that they could have spent on more productive endeavors. Science= attempt to understand the system of the world; argues that: There is a true state of affairs (meaning a real world with definite qualities not just a matter of opinion) in the world. We can learn that true state by examining the world. Autho(cid:396)it(cid:455) is ofte(cid:374) (cid:449)(cid:396)o(cid:374)g a(cid:271)out the (cid:449)a(cid:455) the (cid:449)o(cid:396)ld (cid:449)o(cid:396)ks (cid:271)e(cid:272)ause it does(cid:374)"t ha(cid:448)e a (cid:373)e(cid:272)ha(cid:374)is(cid:373) fo(cid:396) testing and improving its ideas.