Topic intro: a rounded theory of addiction; exploring individual differences, levels, and whether addiction is a single thing or multifaceted
Questions researchers ask: Are there different amounts or degrees of addiction? Do some people have stronger or weaker addictions?
Is addiction just one thing or multifaceted? What constitutes an addiction (external substances like drugs, gambling, alcohol; behaviors; moral judgments about whether it’s bad for you)?
Do everyone have the potential for addiction? Is there a personality trait that increases or decreases susceptibility?
Anecdotal aside used to illustrate addiction: joking example of an addiction to shoes (Birkenstocks, Blundstones, Doc Martens) with varying quantities (e.g., 20 pairs of Birkenstock sandals, 7 clogs, 4 Birkenstock sneakers).
Note: research aims to determine what constitutes an addiction and under what conditions people may be predisposed.
Biological basis of addiction
Acknowledgment that there are questions about the biological underpinnings, though the main focus is psychology across subfields.
Why study psychology? Three practical reasons
Practical applicability: psychology surrounds daily life and is relevant to every job and decision you make; observations show students encounter concepts in class in real life.
Empirical foundation: psychology uses the scientific method to observe, explain, predict, and potentially control behavior; the speaker’s personal journey (chemistry and materials science background) emphasizes psychology as a science akin to other disciplines.
Diversity of psychology: mainstream view often narrows psychology to diagnosis, but in reality it spans many domains (e.g., sensation and perception; economic psychology; industrial/organizational psychology; memory as a cognitive process). There is a niche for almost any interest.
Domain-specific views on memory (cognition)
Memory is a cognitive process; cognition includes any conscious or unconscious thought; emotions are tied into cognition as brain processes.
Different psychology domains study memory from different angles:
Clinical psychology: memory as it relates to diagnoses (e.g., PTSD) and symptom expression; questions about differences in memory for diagnosed vs non-diagnosed individuals; retention lengths and accuracy.
Evolutionary psychology: questions about the purpose and evolutionary advantage of memory; why three types of memory exist and what benefits they confer.
Social psychology: memory in social contexts; how presence of others affects memory; differences between individual memory and group memory.
Key definitions: cognition
Cognition: any conscious or unconscious thought process; emotions are included as part of cognition because they are brain processes.
Critical thinking in psychology
Psychologists must think critically and empirically; the brain is a lazy processor and uses mental shortcuts (noncritical thinking) to save effort.
Noncritical thinking involves:
Accepting information at face value without evidence
Decisions based on emotion or biases
Demonstration: a face-value rule-detection exercise to illustrate confirmation bias and quickness of the brain to settle on a rule
Setup: observer is shown a set of numbers and asked to infer the rule or to judge whether a given set follows the rule
Typical misperception: people assume simple progressive rules (e.g., increasing by a fixed amount or multiples of a number) and overlook the actual rule
Outcome: the actual rule was that the next number had to be greater than the previous one (ascending order with a purposely crafted setup to mislead intuition)
Confirmation bias: tendency for the brain to make a decision and then seek/fit subsequent information to that decision, shutting down alternative evidence
Confirmation bias in real life and science
If the brain forms an initial hypothesis, it often ignores contradictory evidence; scientists are not immune to this bias
The brain’s reliance on credibility judgments: people often trust what others say without rigorous verification; this is compounded when evidence is hard work to obtain
The brain’s default to statistics and probabilities: decisions often rely on statistical intuition, but humans poorly understand statistics, contributing to noncritical thinking
Media literacy and statistics in practice
Example: headline claiming “a diet of fish can prevent teen violence” illustrates misinterpretation of correlational data as causal, and neglect of confounding variables
True interpretation: an enriched environment (books, social support, tutoring) correlated with lower teen violence over ten years; the study was correlational, so causation cannot be inferred; multiple variables likely contributed
Important concepts:
Correlation does not imply causation:
Let r = rac{\text{cov}(X,Y)}{\sigmaX \sigmaY} is the correlation coefficient between variables X and Y
Correlation shows association, not cause
Confounding variables: other factors (e.g., enriched environment, access to resources) may drive the observed outcome
Hindsight bias and creeping determinism
Hindsight bias: “I knew it all along” after an outcome is known
Creeping determinism: a specific form of hindsight bias where one believes they could have predicted an outcome after it occurred
Opposites attract example: people often claim they knew opposites attract, but social psychology shows similarity is more predictive of relationships; later, they claim they knew it all along when told the truth
Patriotic football example (02/05/2017 Patriots vs. Falcons): At halftime, Patriots fans predicted a loss, Falcons fans predicted a win; after the comeback, both sides claimed they knew the outcome all along, illustrating creeping determinism
Self-serving biases (protecting self-esteem)
Dunning-Kruger effect (illusion of knowledge): people with lower performance overestimate their understanding; measured via three variables across exam performance and self-assessment
Variables:
A = actual exam performance
M = perceived mastery of material (self-assessed understanding)
P = perceived exam performance (self-assessed predicted score or performance)
Experimental setup (college students): compare actual performance (A) with perceived mastery (M) and perceived test performance (P) across quartiles of actual performance
Findings: top performers tend to accurately assess their understanding (A aligns with M and P); bottom performers tend to overestimate mastery (high M) despite low A; this is the illusion of knowledge protecting self-esteem
Illusory superiority / Lake Wobegon effect / better-than-average effect: people tend to rate themselves above average on various traits, despite statistics showing that by definition only 50% can be above average
Example: in a BU student population, most people report being above average on driving ability or academic performance, which is statistically impossible
Practical implications and summaries
Psychology as a broad discipline offers diverse applications across domains (business/economics, industry, memory, perception, social dynamics)
Critical thinking is essential to avoid simply accepting information from sources or media; awareness of biases helps in evaluating evidence
Understanding memory, cognition, and biases is relevant to education, health, workplace training, and everyday decisions
Note on memory and cognition terminology used in lectures
Three types of memory will be discussed in cognition; the speaker does not name them here, but references that memory is a cognitive process explored from multiple perspectives (clinical, evolutionary, social)
Cognition encompasses conscious and unconscious processes; emotions are integrated into cognitive processes
Final takeaway
Psychology is practical, empirical, and diverse; memory and cognition are central to understanding human behavior; critical thinking and awareness of biases are essential for scientists and everyday reasoning