PSYC 100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Hindsight Bias, Confirmation Bias, Observer-Expectancy Effect

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jens C Pruessner

Document Summary

Chapter one psychology, research, and you (lecture 3) Psychology- the science of behavior and mental processes. Folk wisdom- when trying to understand the world around us, folk wisdom is used to explain any conceivable event but provides no explanation. The law of parsimony- tells us to adopt the simplest explanation for things- the one that requires the fewest assumptions. Statistically significant- findings that exceed chance occurrence (something simply happening by chance) Correlation- a meaningful association between two variables (e. g. behaviors or events) The fact that two events are correlated doesn"t prove that one caused the other it just helps us to make predictions about when the events will occur in time. Heuristics are simple, efficient rules, learned or hard-coded by evolutionary processes, that have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. Bias- systematic errors in observation that occur because of an observers expectation.