DANCEST 805 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Yellow Fever, Availability Heuristic, Review Article
Document Summary
This chapter discusses three sources of evidence for people"s beliefs- experience, intuition and authority. It compares them to a superior sources of evidence such as empirical research. We often base our beliefs on our own experience or that of friends and family. The problem is that experience has no comparison group. Research constantly used a comparison group which enables us to compare what would happen both with and without the thing we are interested in. Example of why comparison groups are important, back in the day bloodletting was considered a cure for an illness ( eg yellow fever) some would recover and some would die. Conclusion: when you rely on personal experience to decide what is true you usually do not have a systematic comparison group. The problem is that daily life doesn"t include comparison experiences. So systematic comparison groups are crucial to drawing conclusions.
