1 Running head: THE UNCOMMON SENSE OF PSYCHOLOGY THE UNCOMMON SENSE OF PSYCHOLOGY Aaron Yurowitz Ocean County College Psychology 172-4 Professor Demalek 2 THE UNCOMMON SENSE OF PSYCHOLOGY Many people tend to challenge the science of Psychology and wave it off by saying “it’s all common sense” or “psychology creates problems that did not exist”. This may come from the fact that psychological treatment may not produce the same rapid results as we are used to seeing in other fields of medicine. Treatment plans may take significant time to produce desired results, causing patients and outsiders alike to recognize that psychology has played a role in the treatment. Furthermore, people are often biased by what is know as ‘hindsight bias. Hindsight bias also known as the ‘I-knew-it-all-along’ phenomenon may stem from the fact that situations usually tend to turn out with an explainable outcome. Hindsight biasness can be proven by telling lay persons a seemingly obvious fact such as: Separation weakens romantic attraction. This should make sense to most people who do not have any formal, studied information on this subject. You can go ahead to other people and state: Absence makes the heart grow fonder. This has been proven not to be true (Ainsworth & Bowlby 1991), however, because it makes sense, people can believe this fact. This seemingly factual contradiction can prove that hindsight can be biased, or common sense can better describe what has happened better that what will happen (Exploring psychology 10th, Meyers, DeWall 2016). In addition to hindsight biasness, people also tend to be overconfident in the knowledge they possess. Like hindsight biasness, people think they know more than they do. For example: when people were asked if Boston is more north of south of Paris, people were confident in their answer even though they were wrong (Exploring psychology, Meyes, DeWall 2016). Psychologist Philip Tetlock analyzed over 20,000 ‘expert’ predictions of great events and found that even though the predictions were made with over 80% confidence, they were only right less than 40% of the time. (Expert Political Judgement, Tetlock 1995) 3 THE UNCOMMON SENSE OF PSYCHOLOGY Because of these issues, psychological science is needed to assist us in understanding the human mind and behavior. The understanding of psychology has been and continues to be developed using the scientific method. First, scientists have constructed theories based on observations of many different behaviors. These theories are an organization of isolated facts that seem to come together and point to a specific reason for a behavior. A good theory is one that: effectively organizes, can lead to clear predictions, will stimulate research and can be replicated. Scientists then create a hypothesis based on their theory. A hypothesis is a testable prediction prepared based on the information collected from their theories. The result of the testing will either support or reject the theory leading the theory to be accepted, rejected or revised. Psychological hypotheses are generally tested using 3 methods: Descriptive methods, correlational methods and experimental methods. Descriptive method uses case studies to observe an individual or groups of people to hopefully reveal something true by us all. As reveling as the descriptive method can be, it does not prove the theory as fact due to some disadvantages in this method. One disadvantage is that the data collected may not always be true by the general population. Another disadvantage is, that there is usually a limit in the people collecting the data, leading to biasness. This leads us to the method of correlation. Correlation refers to the relationship between two variables. Positive correlation would be when the two variables increases together like as in taller people tend to be heavier. A negative correlation would be when the increase on one variable decreases the other such as less sleep will increase tiredness. Lastly, zero correlation will exist when there is no found relationship between the variables. Correlation method is very useful in predictions and theory testing in psychology. Using correlation in the scientific method psychologists can determine the cause and effect of 4 THE UNCOMMON SENSE OF PSYCHOLOGY different behaviors. An example of this is the study of how sleep deprivation will affect function. It has been clearly proven through the scientific method that lack of sleep will affect school study and work performance. Upon studying students who had lower sleep hours, their classroom performance had been shown to be significantly poorer than students who have had adequate sleep. Using this technique much information on human behavior and mind function was leaned. The third method, experimental method is the manipulation of a variable to test a proposed outcome. Scientists have proven many psychological explanations with experiments. Much applied cognitive behavior therapy stem from results of trial and error in experimenting different treatments. As we can clearly see, as much as psychology can be comprehensible and even logical, the necessity of much scientific research and observation is needed. This research has been very beneficial and has greatly advanced our understanding the human mind and the treatment of many psychological disorders. As psychology keeps evolving, we clearly see that as much as psychology may be perceived by some as common sense, it is quite far common. 5 THE UNCOMMON SENSE OF PSYCHOLOGY References Meyers, David, DeWall Nathan (2016) Exploring Psychology 10th edition. Tetlock Philip, (1995) Expert Political Judgement.
