| Term | Definition |
|---|
| popular psychology industry | sprawling network of everyday sources of information about human behavior |
| naive realism | belief that we see the world precisely as it is |
| communalism | willingness to share findings with others |
| disinterestedness | attempt to be objective when evaluating the evidence |
| confirmation bias | tendency to seek out evidence that supports our hypothesis and neglect or distort evidence that contradicts them |
| belief perseverance | tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them |
| scientific skepticism | approach of evaluating all claims with an open mind, but insisting on persuasive evidence before accepting them |
| pathological skepticism | tendency to dismiss any claims that contradict our beliefs |
| Oberg's dictum | premise that we should keep our minds open, but not so open that we believe virtually everything |
| astrology | pseudoscience that claims to predict people's personalities and futures from the precise date and time of their birth |
| critical thinking | set of skills for evaluating all claims in an open-minded and careful fashion |
| falsifiable | capable of being disproved |
| risky prediction | forecast that stands a good chance of being wrong |
| replicability | demand that a study's findings be duplicated, ideally by independent investigators |
| correlation-causation fallacy | error of assuming that because one thing is associated with another, it must cause the other |
| variable | anything that can vary |
| third variable problem | case in which a third variable causes the correlation between two other variables |
| pseudoscience | set of claims that seems scientific but isn't |
| metaphysical claims | assertions about the world that are unfalsifiable |
| ad hoc immunizing hypothesis | escape hatch or loophole that defenders of a theory use to protect their theory from falsification |
| peer review | mechanism whereby experts in a field carefully screen the work of their colleagues |
| connectivity | extent to which a researcher's findings build on previous findings |
| rational thinking | thinking that relies on careful reasoning and objective analysis |
| experiential thinking | thinking that depends on intuitive judgments and emotional reactions |
| transcendental temptation | desire to alleviate our anxiety by embracing the supernatural |
| terror management theory | theory proposing that our awareness of our death leaves us with an underlying sense of terror with which we cope by adopting reassuring cultural worldviews |
| pareidolia | tendency to perceive meaningful images in meaningless visual stimuli |
| apophenia | tendency to perceive meaningful connections among unrelated phenomena |
| logical fallacies | traps in thinking that can lead to mistaken conclusions |
| emotional reasoning fallacy | error of using emotions as guides for evaluating the validity of a claim |
| bandwagon fallacy | error of assuming that a claim is correct just because many people believe it |
| either-or fallacy | error of framing a question as though we can answer it in only one of two extreme ways |
| not me fallacy | error of believing we're immune from thinking errors that afflict others |
| bias blind spot | lack of awareness of our biases, couple with an awareness of others' biases |
| opportunity cost | investment of time, energy, and effort in a questionable treatment that can lead people to forfeit the chance to obtain an effective treatment |
Combine with other sets
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