Why Scientific Thinking Is Hard

I was inspired to write this blog post after looking at the lecture slides for a lecture in my psychology course at uni.

So thanks goes to the lecturer! I think these are important things to understand when it comes to the pitfalls everyone experiences a lot more than we'd like to think. Gotta know what we're getting wrong before we can sort it out I guess. . .

The Hindsight Bias

• A tendency to believe that when an outcome occurs we "knew-all-along," that it was going to happen, that we would have foreseen it
• The "I-Knew-It-All-Along," phenomenon

Overconfidence

• Thinking that we know more than we actually do

Over-generalisation/Illusory Correlation

• Seeing one particular instance as much more likely to occur than it actually is

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

• We always try to confirm our own beliefs instead of disprove them (typical of men and women making claims about the other- "All men are smart arses!" "All women are so demanding!" and so seeking out such individuals to fulfill the claims)

False Consensus Effect

• Tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs and behaviors (perhaps you can think of one of those people who whinges all the time at you about lots of little things you just don't care about but they seem to think you're just as bothered? Or maybe a bad therapist who projects his own experiences onto you?)

Availablitiy Heuristic

• More vivid and easily recalled examples bias us to believe these instances are more likely to occur- a mental shortcut (i.e. lazy thinking- not necessarily a bad thing) in which judgments are based on information most easily brought to mind (ever avoided going in the sea out of fear of a shark attack after reading that upsetting news article one time yet made it to the beach by crossing roads and being driven in a car? Despite shark attacks tending to be very rare and road accidents being much more common)
  

Post Hoc Fallacy

• Believing that if one event precedes the other it is causally related- (Post hoc ergo propter hoc- after this therefore because of this) Ah, I'm sure we can all think of some media hype correlating certain events and then frightening everyone into thinking one is causing the other

Scientific thinking is hard because it does not often come to us naturally (and is very likely much worse an issue if you were raised with irrationality) and we often get by quite comfortably with out really having to think about anything!