PSYC 2301 Midterm: Exam 1 Notes

• School: University of Houston
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2301
• Professor: Foss Donald

Document Summary

The limitation of intuition and authority: intuition. When you rely on intuition you accept unquestioningly what your own personal judgment or a single story about a person"s experience tells you. Often involves finding an explanation for our own behaviors or the behaviors of others. A problem with intuition is that numerous cognitive and motivational biases affect our perceptions, and so we may draw erroneous conclusions about cause and effect. Illusory correlation occurs when we focus on two events that stand out and occur together. Likely to occur when we are highly motivated to believe in the casual relationship: authority. Persuasion is achieved by the speakers personal character when the speech is spoken as to make us think he is credible . The scientific approach rejects the notion that one can accept on faith the statements of any authority; again, more evidence is needed before we can draw conclusions. Things can be supported or they can be falsified by data.