Chapter 2 - Sources of Information Flashcards
Availability heuristic
things that pop easily into our mind tend to guide our thinking.
Experience has no comparison group
enables us to compare what would happen both with and without the thing we are interested in. ○ Basing conclusions on experience is problematic because daily life usually doesn’t include comparison experiences.
Experience is confounded (alternative explanations).
Research is better than experience
○ Confederate (actor playing a specific role for the experimenter)
○ Researchers control for potential confounds.
○ Power of systematic comparison, can see all groups whereas experience just has insight into their own experience.
○ Research is probabilistic (it’s findings are not expected to explain all cases all the time). Instead, research is meant to explain a certain proportion of the possible cases. Conclusions are based on patterns that emerge only when researchers set up comparison groups and test many people.
Research vs. your Intuition
We accept a conclusion just because it makes sense or feels natural.
○ Availability heuristic-things that pop easily into our mind tend to guide our thinking.
○ Present/present bias-name for our failure to consider appropriate comparison groups.
○ Confirmation bias-focusing on information that agrees with what we already believe.
Bias blind spot-belief that we are unlikely to fall prey to the other biases.
Empirical Journal articles
contain details about the studies method, the statistical tests used, and the results of the study.
Review Journal articles
summary of all the published studies that have been done in one research area. Sometimes a review article uses a quantitative technique called meta-analysis, which combines the results of many studies and gives a number that summarizes the magnitude or the effect size of a relationship.
Chapters in Edited books
§ Each chapter written by a different contributor
Full-length books are common way for scholars to publish their work. However, psychologists do not write many full-length scientific books for an audience of other psychologists
PsycInfo
Search engine and database, maintained and updated weekly. Like using Google but it only searches sources in psychology, plus a few sources from related disciplines.
Google Scholar
Free search tool, search results are only in the form of empirical journal articles and scholarly books. By visiting the user profile for a particular scientist you can see all their publications.
How to Read Empirical Journal articles
1-what is the argument? 2-what is the evidence to support the argument? □ Read the abstract
- Skip to end of Introduction to find primary goals
- Method and Results section for the evidence
