PSYC 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Descriptive Statistics, Intelligence Quotient, Standard Deviation

• School: UConn
• Department: Psychological Sciences
• Course: PSYC 1100
• Professor: Topher Logan

Document Summary

Overcome human tendencies: hindsight bias, misinterpret randomness, & overconfidence error. Critical thinking: system/intuition we rely on to make quick decisions. Hannigan & reinitz: misremember the causes of behavior. Overconfidence: performance (tendency to overestim. our performance & abil. , accuracy (tendency 2 b more certain than accurate) Perceiving order in random events (coincidence error: we think we know what randomness looks like. Scientific observ. begin w a question/hypothesis: hypothesis must b testable, calls 4 an operational definition of key terms 2 specify the study"s dependent variable. Data must also b systematically collected: researchers ignore anecdotal evid. Start w a theory: set of principles tht explains some behavior & makes specific predications. Create testable hypothesis: falsifiable predic. (based on theory tht can hold) Observational (systematic, objective obser. : case study, naturalistic obser, surveys & interviews, crucial, but uninformative about causation. Cant b sure which observ is the cause & which is effect. Some other variable is influencing both vari observed in study.