Psychology Chapter Concepts Quiz

Psychology and Scientific Thinking

• Psychology is the scientific study of the mind, brain, and behavior.
• The study of the brain from a social perspective is important.
• Common sense ideas are not always correct. A lie detector is not 90-95% accurate.
• Levels of analysis in psychology include social/cultural, psychological (mental/neurological), and biological (molecular/neurochemical).
• Naive realism is the belief that the world is as we see it. Humans have a representation of the world, but it might be flawed.
• Five main challenges in psychology include the difficulty of predicting human behavior.

Thinking Scientifically

• Not all common sense is wrong.
• Science involves generating hypotheses and testing them with evidence.
• Science is a way of approaching knowledge, not a body of existing knowledge.
• Scientific theories explain events in the natural world; they lead to testable predictions, called hypotheses.
• Some misconceptions about theories include that they explain a single event. or that they are just educated guesses.
• Confirmation bias refers to the tendency to favor evidence that supports your hypothesis and disregard contradictory evidence.
• People often stick to their initial beliefs even when confronted with contradictory evidence.
• Metaphysical claims are assertions about the world that are not testable.

Pseudoscience

• Pseudoscience is a set of claims that seem scientific but lack the actual defences from bias.
• Warning signs include exaggerated claims, over-reliance on anecdotes, lack of connectivity to other research, lack of peer review, and talk of proof instead of evidence.
• People tend to perceive connections among unrelated phenomena (apophenia), or see meaningful images in meaningless stimuli (pareidolia).
• Cognitive biases, such as emotional reasoning, the bandwagon fallacy, and the not-me fallacy, can contribute to people accepting pseudoscience.
• Pseudoscientific claims can cause opportunity costs, direct harm, and impede critical thinking.

History of Psychology

• Psychology emerged from philosophy.
• William Wundt established the first psychology laboratory in 1879.
• William James is considered the first North American psychologist.
• Early psychologists tried to study the mind, but often failed to find evidence of psychic abilities.
• Major perspectives in psychology include structuralism, functionalism, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and cognitivism.

Research Methods

• Naturalistic observation involves watching behavior in natural settings.
• Case studies involve studying one or a few individuals.
• Self-report measures, such as surveys, assess characteristics by asking participants about themselves.
• Correlation designs look for associations between variables.
• Experimental designs allow researchers to infer cause and effect.
• Reliability is the consistency of measurement.
• Validity is the extent to which a measure assesses what it claims to measure.

Two Modes of Thinking

• System 1 thinking is fast, intuitive, and emotional.
• System 2 thinking is slow, analytical, and logical.
• Common heuristics, such as the representative heuristic and the availability heuristic, can lead to cognitive biases.

Language, Thinking, and Reasoning

• Language is a system of communication using arbitrary symbols.
• Several functions of language include communication, expression, and learning.
• Studies of language acquisition look at the four levels of analysis: phonemes, morphemes, syntax, and pragmatics.
• Language is a complex cognitive process.
• Language development can be seen as a coordination between a number of developmental stages.
• Language is influenced by social and biological factors; brain areas play a key role in language production and understanding.