PSYC 100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Hindsight Bias, Fraternities And Sororities, Participant Observation

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

Document Summary

Hindsight bias the tendency to believe that you could have predicted some outcome which in fact you couldn"t have predicted. Theory a body of related propositions indented to describe some aspect of the world. In speaking casually, people may say just a theory , meaning it"s a notion of largely unsupported facts, but in science, (and social science), theories generally have support in the form of empirical data. Many theories have led to a greater understanding of natural phenomena or to important real-life consequences. Merely looking at a phenomenon in some reasonably systematic way, with a view to understanding what"s going on and coming up with hypotheses about why things are happening as they are e. g. ) Participant observation- involves observing some phenomenon at close range. Typically, psychologists design additional formal studies to verify the impressions they get from participant observation because observations are often misleading, so any tentative conclusions gleaned from observation should ideally be tested using other methods.