Thinking Like a Psychologist… and Ethics

 Roll call  Essay #2 (missing several)  Intuitions Test  Probability, Chance, and the Popular Image of Psychology  Ethics

 When events occur or change as a result of unpredictable forces or events.  Randomness plays a part in almost every single activity you do.  In psychological research and practice, there are always random factors at work  Psychological tests and measurements  Treatments / therapies  Therefore, psychologists make probabilistic statements…

 Statements of reality are probabilistic…  They are true most of the time ▪ Men tend to be taller than women ▪ Students who do better on the SATs tend to do better in college  They DO NOT have to be true all of the time  What works for most people most of the time.  When we observe something, we have to determine the probability that the observation was chance

 A single (or even multiple) cases of individuals that seem to go against a known theory does not invalidate the theory. Theories are probabilistic.  Smoking and lung cancer  Cholesterol and heart attacks  Abuse and depression  Others?

 Base-rate information  Sample size  Gambler’s fallacy

 Humans tend to explain chance events  Illusory Correlation: believing that a relationship exists between 2 variables that co-occur, but a relationship does not exist  Looking for signs…  Chance events and oddmatches  5 coins all heads =.03  5 coins, 10o flips, all heads =.96

Why psychology is the strong, silent kid who gets beat up all the time.

 Dr. Phil  Oprah  [Insert Talk Show Host here]  Second-class literature

 Self-help  Free your mind  Eat fruits and vegetables  You are your own best friend  How to meet new people and impress them and make them love you and pay you $$ with psychological techniques  The REAL psychological literature is usually in the science section

 ESP  Not a fruitful area of research  Studied for a long time (since start of psychology)  90 years of controlled studies ▪ Zero (0) have provided replicable evidence of ESP under controlled conditions.

 Psychology focuses on the reasons for X and Y to happen together (i.e., the causes) – i.e., Basic Research  Why you forget where you put your keys  Why friendly people are more successful  Why watching sexy TV causes teenage pregnancy (j/k)  This investigatory process is far less sexy than:  Win friends and become a CEO

 There is no Nobel Prize in psychology  Resistance to scientific psychology  Anything goes?  Not in psychology  Your beliefs about human behavior are testable and falsifiable by empirical means!!  Psychology is seen as so pervasive, it’s nowhere.  What is a psychologist?  Every person?  Or something more?

 “A tendency to invoke ad hoc hypotheses as a means of immunizing claims from falsification.  An emphasis on confirmation rather than refutation.  A tendency to place the burden of proof on skeptics, not proponents, of claims.  Excessive reliance on anecdotal and testimonial evidence…  Evasion of peer review…  Failure to build on existing scientific knowledge.” (p. 200/203)

 Empirical problems, many areas  Falsifiable theories  Definitions are operational  Systematic and public empiricism  Peer review  Control and manipulation  Multiple methods, multiple strengths, multiple weaknesses  Aggregation of data / observations  conclusions  Probabilistic statements about reality