RICC - lecture 1

Assessment:

• Weekly topics: not mandatory, but interesting
• Weekly quiz: mandatory!! 15-20 questions need to be done by Sunday. Can take these multiple times, final submission counts. To pass the course: > 80% overall score (1275 points)
• Two assignments at the end of the block (week 5 and exam week). These assignments will determine the grade, the weekly quizzes doesn’t count (just have to get the >80%). Individual, not in groups.

Chapter 1 and Chapter 2

Psychology: “The scientific study of human behaviour.” Sometimes the human mind.

The measuring of psychological is as difficult as measuring the weight of smoke. Most of the things are impossible to measure directly: love, loyalty, memory, etc.

Why do we even think that psychology is a science these days?

Mythofysical: explain how the world works, that isn’t in the physical logics that we know these days. So not about objects and spirits.

This person is brave, because ………. He grew up in a .... environment.

Philosophy:  “The study of knowledge, behaviour and the nature of reality by making use of logical, intuition, and empirical observations. “

Empiricism: the best way to understand the world is through observation. Systematically.

The first psychological labs were somewhere around Germany in the 19^th century. They all made use of the methods that were borrowed from the physical and physiology sciences. These are more empirical.

Psychology is a pretty young field. Wanting to understand human behaviour is not new, but seeing it as a science is. It has embraced the scientific field as much as they can. By using the scientific methods it has as much right to be a science than physics.

The four canons of science:

1. Determinism: there is order in the world. Causes can be observed. Theories are correlations of two of more variables.
2. Empiricism: knowledge through observation
3. Parsimony: simplicity is key. Good explanations are simple in their nature. If you have two explanation for two observations and there both good, you have to choose the one with the fewest assumptions. The world is as simple as it needs to be. Survival of the fittest.
4. Testability: theories should be confirmable and disconformable.

Riddles and Scientific Reasons

• Lateral thinking: good questioning from one angle doesn’t help. You have to look at it from a broad perspective.  
• Prior assumptions can be dangerous: it can contain things that are familiar to us.
• Alternative and null hypotheses paralleled in the Yes/No questions:
• Data that don’t fit expectations can be key: these findings are important cues.
• The value of persistence
• An expectation for complex answers
• Science can be frustrating! Having an idea you want to confirm and not having it confirmed. But it is rewarding at the end. With riddles there is always an answers, but at science you never know with great certainty if you’ve got the right answer.

Ways of knowing

• Authority: extremely effected (parents), later maybe a teacher of an cyclopaedia
• Intuition: try to reason about the event that lead to the behaviour
• Logic: formal manner; from observation to observations
• Observations: see for yourself what happens

Being a good consumer of psychological research

• Is there evidence? What is the observation that leads to this interpretation?
• What was the sample? Was the group of people representative? How many people were there? What was the constitution
• Who paid for all this?
• Who is reporting the research? Some people / newspapers are better quality than others.
• Does it make sensational claims? The more sensational the claim, the more evidence you need. They need to get attention because there isn’t that good evidence
• Correlation or causation?
• Look for the original source. Most of the time something get lost to make it more accurate, but if you want the original research, you have to look at the original source.

SUMMARY

• Psychology is a science because of its use of the scientific method
• Empirical evidence is central to all science
• Scientific theories have to be parsimonious and testable