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Need for Psychological Science

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The Need For Psychological Science: The Limits of Intuition & Common Sense: Some people scorn a scientific approach because of their faith in human intuition. Intuition can lead you astray. We presume that we could have foreseen what we know happened. Finding out something has happened makes it seem inevitable. Psychologists call this 20/20 hindsight vision the hindsight bias (the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it) also know as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. Our everyday thinking is not limited to out after-the-fact common sense, but also by our human tendency to be overly confident. The Scientific Attitude: Underlying all science is a hard-headed curiosity, a passion to explore …show more content…

Although limited by the testable questions it can address, a scientific approach helps us to sift reality from illusion, taking us beyond the limits of our intuition and common sense. The Scientific Attitude: Scientific inquiry begins with an attitude - a curious eagerness to skeptically scrutinize competing ideas and open-minded humility before nature. Putting ideas, even crazy-sounding ideas, to the test helps us winnow sense form non sense. The curiosity that drives us to test ideas and to expose their underlying assumptions carries into everyday life as critical thinking. The Scientific Method: Research stimulates the construction of theories, which organize observations and imply predictive hypotheses. These hypotheses (predictions) are then tested to validate and refine the theory and to suggest practical applications. *Check Yourself: What is the scientific attitude and why is it important for critical thinking? *Ask Yourself: How might the scientific method help us understand the roots of terrorism? Description: The Case Study: Among the oldest research methods is the case study (an observation technique in which one person is studied in depth in the hope of revealing universal principles.). Most of our early knowledge about the brain came from case studies of individuals who suffered a particular impairment after damage to a certain brain region. Although case studies can also suggest hypotheses

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