PS270 Lecture Notes - Dependent And Independent Variables, Internal Validity, Demand Characteristics
Document Summary
September 12/2012: wrong more beautiful = perceived smarter, positive qualities grouped together. Larger rewards make people enjoy activities more: undermine enjoyment. People believe they"re more unique than they really are: biased to perceive to think they are more similar to others. Violent games release aggression, making people less aggressive. Day after day social scientists go into the world and discover that people"s behaviors is pretty much what you"d expect . Problems with the common-sense criticism: common wisdom is unclear, ambiguous, contradictory. E. g. common proverbs you can"t teach an old dog new tricks vs. you"re never too old to learn : common wisdom is often inaccurate, or incomplete. The tendency to overestimate personality as a cause of others" behavior and to underestimate the power of the situation: neglect situational factors if someone shows aggression they have an aggressive personality, hindsight bias (i-knew-it-all-along effect) Experiment demonstrating the hidsight bias (fischoff, 1975: participants were presented with factual questions such as:
