When your best friend hears that you are taking a psychology course, she asserts that psychology is simply common sense and requires no real science. Explain why your awareness of both the limits of intuition and the methods of psychological research wou

Limits of Intuition and the Methods of Psychological Research

How can we separate uninformed opinions from examined conclusions How can we best use psychology to understand why people think , feel and act as they do ? Some people think psychology merely documents what people already know and dresses it in jargon . The writer Madeleine L 'Engle notes that intellect alone is inaccurate and can be misleading Common sense is equally as misleading . Even though in hindsight it seems obvious that the advent some past events would have been obvious ahead of time , the

fact that they are about to occur when they are actually approaching is not necessarily so obvious . In effect , when observing events in hindsight we gain information that was not available before the fact even though after the fact the nature of the events and the signs indicating their approach may make it appear that their approach was obvious . This is referred to as hindsight bias ' or the I-knew-it-all-along ' phenomenon

If you were to divide a group of people and give half of them a conclusion from a situational problem of psychology and give the other half the opposite information , each group will find the information given to them to be obvious even though they were given opposing information for the same problem . This is why research is needed in to form conclusions about psychological phenomena . Essentially forming judgments based on how people feel or act is often misleading not so much because people are generally wrong in drawing conclusions but because conclusions drawn after the fact are more accurate since they already have real data . In effect , common sense describe (s ) what (will happen ) more easily than it predicts what will happen ' Humans are overconfident about what they feel that they know . In general , we have a tendency to feel that we know more than we do . Our confidence surpasses our actual knowledge of the facts . The research suggests that it is better to have a critical attitude that produces humility as a sign of awareness of our susceptibility to make mistakes . Critical inquiry has overturned many popular presumptions . Research has demonstrated the limitations and mistakes of intuition and shown that intuition and research go hand in hand to reinforce each other

We must form theories and refine them through observations and data . New data from our observations must replace old when new observations have been made . Theories cannot be accepted based on how good they sound , but rather must be accepted based on how well they explain the observed data or how well the observed data supports the theory . We can have biases , and obviously we will , but in psychology and in science in general , it is crucial to check our biases through research that is /can be replicated by others . Ultimately , a theory will be useful if it (1 ) effectively organizes a range of observations and reports and (2 ) if it implies clear predictions that can be used by anyone to check theory or...