PSY 1101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Hindsight Bias, Critical Thinking, Statistical Significance

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 1101
• Professor: Brenda Baird

Document Summary

Intuition: an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. Hindsight bias, overconfidence, and our tendency to perceive patterns in random events often lead us to overestimate our intuition. Hindsight bias: the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it. Common sense more easily describes what has happened than what will happen. It seems obvious only after they"ve learned about it. Humans tend to think we know more than we actually do. Even in random data we find order. In actual random sequences, patterns and streaks occur more often than people expect. Skeptical testing can reveal which ideas best match the facts. One also needs to be aware of our own vulnerability to error and an openness to surprises and new perspectives. Do not cling to your ideas, even if they are proven wrong. The rat (on which you"re testing/experimenting) is always right .