Scientific Thinking and Psychology

1. Scientific Thinking and Psychology Chapter 1 Tuesday January 14

2. Are we naturally good social scientists? Isn’t psychology really obvious?

3. Birds of a feather flock together BUT Opposites attract Look before you leap BUT He who hesitates is lost

4. Researchers have found that people with high/low self-confidence are more susceptible to flattery than those with low/high self-confidence.

5. Are we naturally good social scientists? In fact, no – empirical research is especially needed because people think they know everything in advance, and because alternative explanations seem plausible

6. Science… • Finds general rules • Collects objective evidence • Makes verifiable statements • Is skeptical • Is open-minded • Is creative • Is public • Is productive

7. Science… • Is defined by its way of thinking • Is a process of asking questions • You can ask questions about almost anything • Scientists must be able to tolerate uncertainty because some questions cannot be easily or quickly answered

8. Pseudoscience • Popular distortions of scientific knowledge and procedures that appear on the surface to be scientific

9. Skepticism in science • To protect against pseudoscience • Refuse to accept any claim without knowing the evidence • Look for alternative explanations even when evidence is presented • Use critical thinking

10. Critical Thinking • Ask questions; be willing to wonder • Define the problem • Examine the (empirical) evidence • Analyze assumptions and biases • Avoid emotional reasoning • Don’t oversimplify • Consider other interpretations • Tolerate uncertainty

11. Ways to Acquire Knowledge • Tenacity: “it has always been that way” • Intuition: “it feels true” • Authority: “the boss says it is true” • Rationalism: “it makes sense logically” • Empiricism: “I observed it to be true” Science: a combination of rationalism and empiricism

12. Rationalism • Relies on systematic logic and a set of premises from which logical inferences are made • Using logic to derive hypotheses

13. Empiricism • System of knowing about the world that is based solely on observation of the events around us • The final arbiter of disputes is an appeal to the data

14. So, rationalism or empiricism? • Neither alone is sufficient • Theory, no matter how intuitively appealing, is empty without empirical support • Data, no matter how free of subjective bias, are uninterpretable without a rational framework • Science = interplay of both

15. The Science of Psychology • Defined as the systematic, objective study of human behavior • What does “objective” mean? • Science can never be free from the influence of the scientist’s beliefs • Rigorous empiricism needs to be tempered with careful rationalist analysis