PSY 304 Study Guide - Mantra, Thought Field Therapy, Natural Disaster
Document Summary
Example: human energy field: absence of skeptical peer review: no colleague peer review to agree or disagree with findings, reliance on personal experience: personal experience can suggest hypotheses but are inadequate for testing them; they are not considered reliable sources of evidence, evasion of risky tests: an experiment should provide a risky test, one that a false hypothesis will not pass. Consider three points when evaluating the sufficiency of available evidence: the burden of proof is on the claimant: someone making a claim to knowledge is in the position of a prosecutor, who is responsible for mustering sufficient evidence for that claim, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: this fairly commonsensical principle means that the more fantastic the claim the more persuasive the evidence must be to muster believe in that claim, evidence based on authority is inadequate: no matter how reputable this individual may be, history teaches us that anyone can be wrong.
