SPED102 Study Guide - Final Guide: Motor Planning, Meta-Analysis, Extraversion And Introversion
2 Jun 2018
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TOPIC 1: COGNITIVE BIASES
Examples of Weird Beliefs:
• Beliefs that if true, would overturn current scientific worldview
o Mediumship → talking to the dead
o Telepathy, precognition, psychic healing
o Homeopathy (alternative medical substance which is diluted)
o Auras, graphology (infers a person’s character and disposition from their
handwriting), rumpology (bumps and lumps of your butt)
• Who believes these weird things?
o All cultures and societies
o Regardless of gender, socioeconomic status or education
o Susceptibility traits → fantasy proneness (failure to distinguish reality
from fiction), hypnotic-suggestibility, dissociation (people tend to measure
higher on detachment from reality)
o A pattern emerges, yet few conclusive findings
The Role of Cognition:
• Our cognitive abilities consistently let us down
• We often see what we have not seen, hear what we have not heard and even recall
events that never took place
• Cognitive biases → picture of pizza or Marilyn Monroe, a face or a rock etc.
o All of these are examples of pareidolia
Pareidolia:
• Psychological phenomena whereby we perceive meaning in random stimuli
• All humans feel the need to find meaning but believers will often find paranormal
context in random stimuli where none exists
• Similarly for conspiracy theorists – if you are looking for evidence based on
certain beliefs, then you will almost certainly find it
• Evolutionary advantage of being sensitive to patterns → false positives present
less risk than false negatives
Preconceptions:
• Strong influence for what we can see or hear
• Perception is influenced by context, environment and culture
• We see or hear what we expect to see or hear (making up lyrics or reading them
whilst listening)
The Illusion of Control:
• False belief that we have control over random events
o Who plays Lotto? Who used quick pick? Who chooses their own numbers?
o E.g. blowing on your dice before rolling it
Misunderstanding Relative and Absolute Risk:
• Relative risk increase can be large when absolute risk is very small (e.g. only
1.5/10 million if you continue your medication – much less than being attacked by
a shark and over 500 times less than dying from flu)
The Concept of Randomness:
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• Humans find this concept of randomness very hard to understand – it is more
lumpy than we think
• We find it almost impossible to fake randomness, we find it very difficult to
recognize random patterns of coin tosses → runs occur randomly, we do not
recognize them as random
• “Hot streaks” or “runs” in sport (when they get multiple shots in a row) →
generally consistent with random distributions
Coincidence
→
chance or evidence of the paranormal?
• Law or large numbers – highly probable events (one in a million events can
happen to a large population)
• Confirmation bias → selective memory, you remember those striking events, but
on many other occasions we are not thinking about events where nothing happens
Probability – Believers and Non-believers?
• Believers do appear to be more likely to attribute random events as paranormal
• Blakemore and Troscianko carried out a coin flipping test – believers in the
paranormal significantly underestimated the number of heads or tails that would
occur due to chance alone
→
Poor understanding of probabilities may contribute to belief in telepathy, precognition
and psychic phenomena
WE CANNOT RELY ON OUR COGNITIVE ABILITIES – THEY LET US DOWN
• Barnum effect → the tendency to accept true types of information such as
character assessments or horoscopes, even when the information is so vague as to
be worthless (generalisations accepted as truth)
o The Barnum effect is the name given to a type of subjective validation in
which a person finds personal meaning in statements that could apply to
many people.
• Personal validation effect → cognitive bias by which a person will consider a
statement or another piece of information to be correct if it has any personal
meaning/significant to them
• A lot of the success has to do with how it is ‘set up’ (Hyman)
• Universal themes and issues (generalisations) shared by all of us → general
statements that cover a range of information
• Humans consistently looking for meaning
• Forer effect → fake and real personality profiles, how this affected by prior
belief/locus of control
• Why are we convinced by such predictions?
o Only the successful are reported
o Many predict events that happen every year
o Predictions are very vague and consistent with multiple interpretations
o General predictions
o Non-falsifiable predictions
o Psychics might occasionally fluke a very specific prediction
o Psychics may cheat e.g. retrospectively changing predictions
o Believers remember the hits and forget the misses
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• Anchoring Effects (cognitive bias):
o The tendency of arbitrary baseline values to affect decisions
o The common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of
information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions
o For example, Ariely et al. (2006) → offered to charge $2 or pay students
$2 to attend a poetry recital
▪ Would you be willing to attend the recital for free? Paid – 8%,
charged – 35% yes
• Framing Effects:
o People react to a particular choice in different ways depending on how it is
presented e.g. is this a loss or a gain
o Value attached to an item is influenced by irrelevant alternative choices
o We usually do not have an inherent idea of value – it is ‘framed’ by
comparisons
o These can be and are manipulated to affect our choices
• Dunning-Kruger Effect
o Those that are most incompetent tend to overestimate their social and
intellectual ability
o They misinterpret and their incompetence robs them of their metacognitive
ability to recognize their errors
o Celebrity ‘expert’ phenomena → celebrities often illustrate this (they
demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge) – celebrities think they
become experts e.g. Jenny McCarthy, American model, claims that
vaccines cause autism – this is not the case but she claims information and
thinks that opposing evidence and scientific knowledge is all wrong
• How does memory work?
o Not the reliable data store that we assume
o Vulnerable to all kinds of misleading information, social influence and
individual differences
o Memory is malleable
o No correlation between confidence and accuracy – people can be confident
about their memory of events, yet not be quite as accurate
• The Misinformation Effect
o Researchers have shown ways in which misinformation can manipulate a
person’s memory
o Elizabeth Loftus experiment in the late 1970s showed how susceptible and
changeable memory can be
• False Memories
o Loftus and colleagues went on to show that even memories of a completely
fictitious event can be created under the right circumstances → this
changed our view of memory
o The ‘Shopping Mall’ experiment → false memory given to a child who
then proceeded onto telling his story about getting lost at the shops
• False memory creation in the lab – ‘crashing memories’ paradigm → creates false
memories of seeing non-existent film footage of public events e.g. Bali bombings,
aircraft crashes
o Vague questions elicit more memories than specific questions
• Doctored photographs – cut out pictures into other ones (e.g. a picture
photoshopped into a hot air balloon ride – false memories were elicited from
people)
• Memory can also be influenced socially
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Document Summary
Preconceptions: strong influence for what we can see or hear, perception is influenced by context, environment and culture, we see or hear what we expect to see or hear (making up lyrics or reading them whilst listening) Who chooses their own numbers: e. g. blowing on your dice before rolling it. Misunderstanding relative and absolute risk: relative risk increase can be large when absolute risk is very small (e. g. only. 1. 5/10 million if you continue your medication much less than being attacked by a shark and over 500 times less than dying from flu) Poor understanding of probabilities may contribute to belief in telepathy, precognition and psychic phenomena. How many cognitive biases are there: many!!!, loads of different ways that we can misunderstand the world around us. What is science: from the latin scientia" meaning knowledge, refers to the process of obtaining an organised body of knowledge about natural phenomena through systematic, objective, replicable and rigorous observation or experimentation.
