PSYC 107 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Belief Perseverance, Apophenia, Confirmation Bias
30 Aug 2016
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Five factors that make it rewarding: human behavior difficult to predict, psychological influences rarely independent, differences in thinking, emotion, and personality, people influence each other. Belief that we see world as it actually is in truth seeing is believing: earth seems flat. Confirmation bias: seek out evidence that supports our hypothesis and neglect or distort contradicting evidence. Scientists need to design studies that may disprove their theories. Believe perseverance: to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them. The don"t confuse me with the facts bias. What is pseudoscience: set of claims that seem scientific but aren"t, lacks safeguard against confirmation bias and belief perseverance, testable beliefs not supported by evidence. Ad hoc immunizing hypotheses: escape hatches to protect against falsification, loophole or exception. Brains are predisposed to make order out of disorder: apophenia/patternicity- tendency to find connections among unrelated or random phenomena.
