PSYC 135 Set 1

Science is both a body of knowledge and a process, with three key features

Uses systematic empiricism

Produces public knowledge

Examines solvable problems

Systematic empiricism

Observing and measuring (empiricism)

Testing a theory about the world (systematic)

Measuring the length of everyone's hair in one room is not systematic (no theory tested)

Public knowledge

Results get peer-reviewed after an experiment

Findings published in journals

Experiments are replicated to see if the results are the same

Solvable problems

Questions that are answerable with available resources/techniques

Discovery of the neuron was dependent on technological advances

Pseudoscience

Claims to be scientific but lacks one or more of the three features of science

Often has methodological limitations

Often lacks specific measurement (tests aren't validated)

Appeals to need for secrecy

Uses misleading scientific-sounding language

Reverses burden of proof

Fakes scientific credentials

Cites questionable or retracted studies

Cherry picks results

Phrenology

Measured bumps on the skull that supposedly reflected abilities and traits

Never agreed on how many bumps were important

Used to justify white supremacy

A testable theory

Can be falsified (falsifiability criterion)

Tells us not only what should happen but what should not happen

Set up a possibility for the theory to be disproven

Protoscience vs pseudoscience

Protoscience is a new and undeveloped science (the scientific method is used)

Violation of the falsifiability criterion

The rule is violated when supernatural explanations are invoked (you and I could not understand this)

making vague claims

using multiple 'outs' to dismiss disconfirming evidence

Valza virus

Participants read about a new virus that was created in a lab

non-scientific condition cited an activist group

scientific condition cited researchers

Participants indicated if they thought the article should be shared with other students and if they believed it

Researcher condition was generally more trusted

Participants completed a trust in science scale to indicate how much they trust it.

Participants who reported more trust in science were more prone to believing the research, regardless of content

More likely to believe the researchers in general

Misleading credentials

Use of unsupported titles (holistic expert, nutrition consultant)

referencing unaccredited institutions that people may not know

Appealing to degrees and training in unrelated fields (epistemic trespassing)

Ad hominem

Attacks the source rather than the argument

Argument from ignorance

Arguing that something is true because we don't know that it's not

Scientific gap

Not knowing what causes autism so it is attributed to vaccines

Appeal to nature

Natural things better than man-made things

Natural = good, man-made = bad

Common strategy in the 'wellness' industry and alternative medicine

"Covid can be beaten with natural remedies and nutrition"

"Covid is harmless for those with strong immunity"

Agreement with sentiments that delegitimized covid correlated with low vaccine rates

Appeal to emotion

Evoke feelings rather than provide evidence

A common strategy in advertising and political propaganda, but also in public health campaigns

Fear appeals

Example of a fear appeal: Stephen Miller saying birthright citizenship means children of illegal aliens can vote to steal your children's resources

Association

Very general relationship where one variable provides information about another

Correlation

Type of association

Knowing the value x gives information about y

Two variables moving together

Reasons for a correlation

X causes Y (direct causation)

Y causes X (reverse causation)

X causes Y and Y causes X (bidirectional causation)

X and Y caused by Z (third cause)

Third variable problem

a third factor may have produced the correlation

Spurious correlations

Two variables appear connected but not causally linked

Causation

Change in one variable produces a change in another: cause and effect

Time and order matter

Usually established through controlled experiments

Experiments isolate a variable

By manipulating a variable of interest (independent variable)

Measuring the effect (dependent variable)

Holding other variables constant and limiting confounds

Control group

Group that receives either no treatment at all or some established intervention (comparison group)

Removes third variable problem

Randomization

Avoids selection bias which occurs when participants choose their own group or researchers assign them using some subjective reason

Not letting people choose the group they're in and introduce biases

With a large enough sample, two or more groups will be similar

Special conditions

Experiments often create artificial conditions to increase control

Reduces ecological validity, or how well results generalize to the real world

Catharsis theory

Ruminating can diffuse negative emotions

Venting study

Bushman et al study compared rumination, distraction, and control after participants received mean feedback on an essay

Found that anger was highest among the rumination group (those who used a punching bag and thought of the person criticizing them)

What if we can't run controlled experiments

Random assignment can be unethical (assigning a person to a smoking condition vs a non-smoking)

In that case, one must replicate a large effect many times and rule out alternative explanations. Bradford Hill criteria for determining causation using correlational studies

Bradford Hill criteria

What is needed from correlational findings to prove a causal relationship

Sender-receiver model

One person sharing the content (sender/liar)

The receiver judges the information

Prosocial lies

White lies

protecting others

Self-serving lies

People lying to benefit themselves

Vindictive lies

To harm others

Diary studies on lying

Show Americans tell an average of two lies per day

8% of people tell more than 6 lies a day

5% of subjects account for more than 50% of lies told

Costs of lying

Lying is cognitively effortful

Can harm your reputation

Produce negative emotional reactions

People with 'dark' personality traits like sadism (enjoyment of inflicting suffering on others)

Tell more vindictive lies, but they are not necessarily more convincing liars

People struggle to spot lies

People only detect lies 47% of the time

61% of truths

Putting their overall accuracy at 54%, which barely exceeds chance

Truth bias

Participants show a general bias to accept information as true more often than rejecting as false

Reflects base rates, or the low incidence of lies in our environment

A statement is more likely to be true than false, so it makes sense that we assume most are true

People differ more as liars than as lie detectors

People's ability to detect lies is pretty much the same (everyone is pretty bad)

People's ability to tell convincing lies varies significantly (some are bad liars. Some are good liars)

People believe that nonverbal cues separate liars from truth-tellers

Gaze aversion, blushing, fidgeting

But judgments based on body language are less accurate

Liars provide less detail and are less consistent with each retelling of a story

Law enforcement

Also not very good at detecting lies despite higher confidence

TSA behavior detection program not very effective (plainclothes officers looking for signs of dishonesty)

Judging lies in groups vs individually

People who get to deliberate and have to arrive at a joint decision are better at spotting lies but similarly good at detecting truths compared to those who watched clips individually

China dry rice experiment

Suspects fill their mouths with dry rice and if the mouth remains dry they are guilty

Polygraphs

Record autonomic arousal in response to relevant and control questions (heart rate/blood pressure, respiration, skin conductivity)

Comparing arousal during control questions to crime-related questions. Obviously, you'd be more nervous for crime-related questions.

Brain scans

Put people in scanner and show series of objects (some old, some novel, some you would only have seen if at the crime scene)

If brain responds to items at the crime scene similarly to old items, guilty

Not effective due to countermeasures (way to game the system). Thinking of things you've seen before

Chameleons changing color

Movies and TV depict chameleons changing colors for camouflage

Light, temperature, emotions are the real reason

Fortune cookies

Associated with Chinese culture

Brought by Japanese immigrants

Body heat

Body heat lost at same speed regardless of body part

Depends on what skin is exposed

Army survival guide claimed that 40-45% of body heat is lost from the head (from an experiment where everything was covered but people's heads)

Explicit memories

Memories that we are aware of

Episodic - specific experiences (remember)

Semantic - facts (know)

Semantic vs episodic

Episodic associated with recollection, mental time travel

Semantic associated with familiarity

Features of semantic memory

No known capacity limit

interconnected and organized, activation spreads to related concepts

Surprisingly durable (permastore)

Stored in the medial temporal lobe

False beliefs as side effects

False content gets incorporated into our semantic memory

Reliance on heuristics (cognitive shortcuts)

Using existing knowledge to support new learning (can be flawed)

We sometimes accept partial matches with what we already know. Don't do a good job spotting contradictions.

Heuristics

Cognitive shortcuts to decide what's true and false

Rules of thumb

Helpful most of the time, given that it's fast and frugal, adaptive

Can be misleading, especially when we're in high misinformation environments (when base rate of falsehoods is high)

Example: picking the tennis player you're familiar with to win the match

Cognitive fluency

Ideas that are easy to process are more likely to be interpreted as true

Perirhinal cortex is involved in fluent processing. Increases in activity as items seem truer

Ease of processing is misinterpreted as evidence of truth

Illusory truth

Repeating information makes it seem more truthful

Happens even months after exposure

Smart people also experience this bias

Bias is experienced even when it comes from an unreliable source

Bias is experienced even with information that already exists in their semantic memory

Illusory truth study

Participants gave repeated information a higher truth rating than new information, even if they had previous knowledge that this information was false

False repeated information was rated as more true than new information, even when there was a monetary incentive to get the answer right

Schemas

Context facilitates learning, but only if it is provided early

Help us pick up new information quickly. Content is easy to learn with context.

Schemas can be harmful when they themselves are inaccurate.

Knowledge neglect

Failure to retrieve and apply previously stored knowledge in a current situation

May give a high truth rating to the statement "Venus is the closest planet to the sun," even with previous knowledge that it's Mercury

Availability vs accessability

Information that is stored in memory (availability) may be difficult to locate (accessibility)

Accepting partial matches

Missing contradictions embedded in stories

Reading Russia's capital as St. Petersburg when it is Moscow

Ironically more likely if the errors are highlighted in red

Moses Illusion

Asking college students how many types of animals Moses brought onto the ark will lead many to respond "2"

Expertise reduces the Moses illusion but does not wipe it out

False beliefs vs true beliefs

False beliefs are learned through the same mechanism as true beliefs

Added to our semantic memory store and influences our behavior

Learning by testimony

Can help us avoid harmful situations

Wisdom of the crowd

Guess the weight of the ox competition had a surprisingly accurate average judgment

Collective judgment can be as good as the judgment of an expert

Social influence

Learning about the judgments of others makes crowds less wise

Metacognition

thinking about thinking

thinking about your attention, learning, problem solving, etc

Metamemory

How you think about your own memory and its accuracy

Applies to both episodic and semantic memory

Cryptomnesia

Metacognitive error of accidental plagiarism

After generating examples of a category in a group, individuals plagiarize 3-9% of the time, either by remembering others' ideas as their own or providing them as a new idea

Illusions of explanatory depth

Overestimating our understanding of complex topics

Opposite of intellectual humility, or recognition of the limits of our own knowledge

Illusions of explanatory depth phases

People think they can do a decent job explaining the subject initially

Confidence drops after trying to explain for the first time

Drops even lower after they are asked a specific mechanistic question

Rises after they hear an expert explanation

People are still initially overconfident, even if they know they're going to be tested

Illusions of explanatory depth given formal expertise (college major)

People underestimate how many details of previously learned topics they have forgotten

College majors are overconfident

Asking people to explain how policies work

Makes their attitudes less extreme

Community-of-knowledge hypothesis

People do not enforce a sharp separation between their own understanding and that of others

Rare that we have to entirely rely on what's in our own heads with no additional tools

Community of knowledge hypothesis study

People are more likely to claim they understand a concept when they are told that it has been thoroughly explained by scientists

Even though they didn't receive an actual explanation

People who claim they are super knowledgeable about a subject

Are likely to claim they know a lot about a made-up term in that subject

Overclaiming

Claiming knowledge about nonexistent things

People who are most prone to metacognitive errors

Are people who are already not excelling

The lowest performers are the least aware of where they stand (twice cursed)

The best performers of a task

Are also the best at understanding where they stand

Hypercorrection

Errors made with high confidence were more likely to be corrected, but eventually be reverted to, even after the correction is made

Astrology

Belief that the position of the stars and planets influences people's lives

Originated in Mesopotamia in 3rd millennium BC

Ancient astrology

Initially inseperable from astronomy

Astronomers now strongly oppose astrology

Two dimensional view that is crucial to astrology

Inaccurate. Constellations are three-dimensional

Zodiac constellations have diverse widths along the ecliptic

Yet signs all have a fixed 30 degree width

Astrologers disregard asteroids and comets

Another criticism by astronomers

Astrologers and Pluto

Astrologers keep treating Pluto like a planet

Precession

Wobble in Earth's axis leads to change in distance between Earth and stars

Astrologers continue to use distances 2000 years ago

Astrologer study

Astrology experts matched over 100 natal charts with psych profiles

Performed no better than chance

No more likely to be correct even when they expressed high confidence

Study on month of birth

Unrelated to personality traits

There is some evidence that birth season could matter

Being born in winter

Increases odds of gestational viral exposure, vitamin D deficiency, and maternal seasonal affective disorder

Big 5 scores

High predictor of traits

Active astrology

Assumes that you can intervene in your fate

Sun signs not correlated with life events

Astrology influencing dating

25% of Gen Z says they would choose not to date somebody based on their sign

Barnum effect

People are impressed by the accuracy of vague descriptions of themselves

Astrology barnum effect study

Both believers and skeptics more likely to agree with positve descriptions about themselves

Even skeptics were more convinced by descriptions that came from an astrological expert than nonastrological descriptions

Believers generally more open to descriptions regardless of condition

grandiose narcissism

excessive self-regard and overconfidence

Dark triad

narcissism, machiavellianism (strategic focus on self-interest), psychopathy

Astrology and narcissism

Scores on the belief in astrology inventory increase with grandiose narcissism

No relationship with big 5 traits

Not causation. Hard to prove what influences what.

Expectancy effect

Self-fulfilling prophecies

High expectations lead to high results and vice versa

Participants who read a positive horoscope about their own sign

Performed better on cognitive tests and creative problem solving than those who read a negative one

Astrology does not predict life outcomes

But still relied on for decision-making