"Thinking Critically"

Research is very important to everything I think. Research leads us to new discoveries all the time. It is used as a way for people to find more information on a subject. It allows us to go deeper into our studies to learn new things about something and can answer who, what, when, where, and why. Without research what would are world be like today? Research helped lead many scientists like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin to huge discoveries.

From psyblog, I choose the article; “Why Groups Fail to Share Information Effectively.” In this article I found a few things interesting. Researchers Stasser and Titus found that when people are asked to make a group decision, they tend to repeat information that everybody already knows instead of sharing vital information known only to themselves. There are three points the show why it’s likely that people fail to share information that they only know. The three points are: memory, pre-judgments, and anxiety. How do these three things support their research? Well, it says for memory that shared information is likely to be brought up by someone, which gives a greater possibility that it will be brought up. For pre-judgments, it says that people usually only bring up information that supports their pre-judgments, and anxiety shows that people prefer to stick to repeating things that everybody already knows, because it seems easier and less stressful. As weird as it may be, other people tend to like them better. How is this relevant to my life? Well, after reading this article and highlighting the main points, I would have to say that I somewhat agree. For example; in school when we are doing projects that are suppose to teach the class new things, most of the things they say are already known. It may be that the things they are teaching us were taught from over the years so they said it because they heard it before. So, I think it goes along with this article because one may not want to tell someone new information, fearing that what they read or learned may have been interpreted wrong.

After reading chapter two, one of the things that caught my interest were the paragraphs pertaining to the question; “Is psychology free of value judgments?” I found out that psychology is not value-free. I’m not really sure what free of value judgment is, but I think its how people can view things differently and how the things we do differ from the way someone else would do the same task. I liked how the explanation gave a word for an example and how it’s positive and negative. An easy one to understand and the one I thought was pretty clever was the word Knowledge. The phrase was, “Knowledge, like all power, can be used for good or evil.” I agree, and believe that it is so true.

The second thing I learned or found interesting was the statistical reasoning in everyday life and how they talked about descriptive, correlation, and experimental research. I learned that a person doesn’t have to memorize complicated formulas to think more clear. I think this is important because people can learn from a simple way of learning thing just as well as a complicated way. I was a little confused though on the “point to remember” under that section. Is it saying that by applying more simple principles to life, it makes us smarter?

The last thing I learned in this chapter was that there are a lot of different ways to do experiments. There is the random assignment, the double-blind procedure, the placebo, the experimental group and the control group. I think it is very important to have different experiment groups because each one looks at different things and stuff in different ways.

In this chapter I took an interest in Illusory Correlations but was a little confused. Is it saying that when we vision something, but then it doesn’t end up how we like, we then make ourselves forget about it?