PSYCH253 Lecture Notes - Statistical Hypothesis Testing, Confirmation Bias, Base Rate Fallacy

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH253
• Professor: Hilary B Bergsieker

Document Summary

Conspiracy theories (houses can be haunted, extraterrestrial beings, communications with the dead) Ideal scientific vs. intuitive thinking: expends effort, caution to reach correct conclusions, seeks out evidence that could falsify a hypothesis, attends to evidence that violates own hypothesis, does not act to alter the observed phenomenon. Vs. intuitive thinking: rushes to judgment by relying on heuristics, does not seek out/ignores falsifying information, is biased to see patterns matching own expectations, acts in ways that alter the observed phenomenon. Our reliance on the feelings that we experience as we think about a topic to judge importance, risk, or satisfaction. Less attuned to abstract than concrete stimuli. Substitution effect: we are likely to colour judgment with mood when we are not reminded of our feelings: representativeness heuristics. Our tendency to classify something according to how similar it seems to a typical case. Leads to conjunction fallacy (people think that two conditions are more likely than a single condition: availability heuristic.