PSYCH 2010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Naturalistic Observation, Descriptive Statistics, Statistical Inference
Document Summary
Review: psychology is the science that seeks to understand behavior and mental processes, many approaches with a common goal, psychology attempts to, describe, understand/explain, predict, control. Why do psychology: how can we differentiate between uniformed opinions and examined conclusions, the science of psychology helps make fact-based conclusions. What about intuition and common sense: many people believe that intuition and common sense are enough to bring forth answers regarding human nature. Intuition and common sense may aid queries but they are not free of error . I-knew-it-all-along : after learning the outcome of an event, many people believe they could have predicted that very outcome, leads to overconfidence in intuition, ex- 9/11, natural disasters (knew it was going to happen before it actually did) Overconfidence: sometimes we think we know more than we actually know. Low-self esteem: less than the average self-esteem score for college students. Depressed: greater than the average on a depression survey, how to measure, theory.
