Psychology, by David G. Myers, 7th Edition Textbook
Chapter 01 - Thinking Critically with Psychological Science
The Scientific Attitude
• Scientific approach that is skeptical and open-minded
• To shift away from illusions to reality, one must use Smart thinking or critical thinking:
thinking that does not blindly accept things, but approaches with skepticism and examines
the evidence carefully; Ask how did they know, on guts and instinct? Are the evidence
biased?
• However, must remember to have humility as too extreme would be stubbornness
The Limits of Intuition and Common Sense
• Intuition often ends up nowhere
• Tend to use a lot hindsight bias: tendency to believe that one would have known it after the
results are shown;
• Seems like common sense; The answer was right there and look how obvious it was
• Experience it usually when looking back on history; eg. Glen Clark and the fast ferries
• Humans tend to be overconfident, think we know more than we actually do (probably result
of self-serving bias)
• Hindsight causes us to be overconfident as we believe we would have picked the answer
when the results are in front of us
The Scientific Method
• Scientific theory: explanation using set of principles to organise/predict observations
• No matter how good theory sounds, must put it to test
• Must imply testable prediction = hypothesis
• Beware of bias when testing
• Good experiment can be replicated: the experiment can be repeated and would yield
constant results; done with a different group of people or by a different person ending with
constant results
Chapter 01 - Thinking Critically with Psychological Science
The Scientific Attitude
• Scientific approach that is skeptical and open-minded
• To shift away from illusions to reality, one must use Smart thinking or critical thinking:
thinking that does not blindly accept things, but approaches with skepticism and examines
the evidence carefully; Ask how did they know, on guts and instinct? Are the evidence
biased?
• However, must remember to have humility as too extreme would be stubbornness
The Limits of Intuition and Common Sense
• Intuition often ends up nowhere
• Tend to use a lot hindsight bias: tendency to believe that one would have known it after the
results are shown;
• Seems like common sense; The answer was right there and look how obvious it was
• Experience it usually when looking back on history; eg. Glen Clark and the fast ferries
• Humans tend to be overconfident, think we know more than we actually do (probably result
of self-serving bias)
• Hindsight causes us to be overconfident as we believe we would have picked the answer
when the results are in front of us
The Scientific Method
• Scientific theory: explanation using set of principles to organise/predict observations
• No matter how good theory sounds, must put it to test
• Must imply testable prediction = hypothesis
• Beware of bias when testing
• Good experiment can be replicated: the experiment can be repeated and would yield
constant results; done with a different group of people or by a different person ending with
constant results
