SPED 1020 Lecture Notes PDF

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SPED 1020

Introduction Introduction

Reasons we are sometimes misled  Pattern seeking  Poor understanding of probability  Memory is inherently flawed/ unreliable/ vulnerable to suggestion  Power of belief and motivated reasoning Regardless of education/ intelligence/ background  all can be fooled/ have irrational beliefs  General knowledge does not protect from acceptance of misinformation  Hard to distinguish pseudoscience from fact Questionable educational practices  Facilitated communication: allow profoundly disabled to communicate through assisted typing  Learning styles e.g. auditory, visual, kinesthetic ‘Digital natives’: younger gen have new technological capacities, developed fundamentally diff cognitive skills/ styles (e.g. multitasking)  perceptual motor-programs (e.g. brain gym) claim that specific physical activity can improve a wide range of learning and related skills in children. Neuromyths in education (Dekker et al. (2012))  looked at prevalence and predictors of misconceptions amoung teachers  on average, teachers believed 49% of the neuromyths despite general knowledge of the brain. Paranormal beliefs  can people talk to the dead, connect to spirits? Health related  homeopathy  acupuncture  natural remedies Reading: Hoggart, S., & Hutchinson, M. (1995) What types of pseudoscientific practices and beliefs are common to the areas of education, health and the paranormal? - In the 1970’s women were advocated to smoke to elevate morning sickness.

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Sun beds were actively used and promoted in 1970’s.

How far can we rely on our cognitive abilities? - Not far as regardless of education, intelligence, or background – can all be fooled. What are some of the commonly held false beliefs held by the general population? - digital natives. Younger people have deep integration with internet technologies and develop fundamentally different cognitive skills. - power balance bands.

Cognitive basis 1 Example of weird beliefs Beliefs that if true would overturn current scientific worldview:  Mediumship- the dead talking back  Homeopathy  Auras, graphology, rumpology (Bumps and lumps on buttock) Who believes weird things?  All cultures, all societies  Susceptibility traits – fantasy proneness ( unable to disassociate reality to not), hypnotic-suggestibility, dissociation The role of Cognition  Our cognitive abilities consistently let us down  We often see what we have not seen, hear what we have not heard and even recall events that never took place Pareidolia  The tendency for incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning to the observer, thus perceive meaning in random stimuli  Notably: Seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns or hearing hidden messages in music.  Often human being find meaning in paranormal context in random stimuli where none exists Preconceptions  Perception is also influenced by context, environment and culture  We see or hear what we expect (or are primed) to see or hear

The illusion of control  The false belief that we have control over a random events

Poor understanding of probability  Most people have a poor understanding of probability  Doctors understand example (Gigerenzer, 2002) The concept of randomness  Humans find the concept of randomness very hard to understand  We find it difficult to recognise random patterns of coin tosses  Randomness does not look random Coincidence – chance or evidence of the paranormal  What are the chances of you having a prophetic (pre-cognitive) dream? Personal validation  Subjective validation, sometimes called personal validation effect, is a cognitive bias by which a person will consider a statement or another piece of information to be correct if it has any personal meaning or significance to them. Barnum effect  The Barnum effect in psychology refers to the gullibility of people when reading descriptions of themselves. Notably: You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a great deal of unused capacity, which you have not turned to your advantage.

Summary  Everybody is below average estimating probability  Poor understanding of probabilities may contribute to belief in telepathy, precognition and psychic phenomena

Cognitive Bias 2 Anchoring Effects: Tendency of arbitrary baseline values to affect decisions Framing Effects  We usually don’t have an inherent idea of value - it is “framed” by comparisons

 Value attached to an item is influenced by irrelevant alternative choices  We usually don’t have an inherent idea of value – it is “framed” by comparisons  These can be and are manipulated to our choices  Dunning-Kruger Effect (Kruger & Dunning, 2009)  Those who are most incompetent tend to overestimate their social and intellectual ability.  They misinterpret and their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to recognise their errors.  Celebrity “expert” phenomena = Jenny McCarthy – stating vaccines cause autism. How does memory work?  Not the reliable data store that we assume  Vulnerable to all kinds of misleading information, social influence, and individual differences  No correlation between confidence and accuracy Misinformation effect  Researchers have shown ways in which misinformation can manipulate a person’s memory  Elizabeth Loftus – eye witness unreliability  Our memory is more mailable than we realise  Shopping mall effect  Chasing memories- create false memories of seeing non-existent film footage of public events  Doctored photographs – putting face on photo on hot air balloon ride Social influence and memory  The Oklahoma Bombing  Research shows that suggestion from a cowitness can influence memory of a witnessed event  For example, Gabbert et al. (2011): – Videos of crime from unique perspectives – 71% of witnesses then reported they had seen events that were actually seen by other witnesses False Memory Syndrome  In the late 1980s interest exploded in “repressed memory”  Misguided therapists led patients to believe they had been abused creating false memories using suggestive techniques  False Memory Societies were set up to offer “help”  Many families ruined by accusations and innocent relatives sent to jail Confirmation Bias

 Tendency to favour information that conforms with existing beliefs (or even an initial hypothesis)  May involve  Seeing what you are looking for  Accepting information that is consistent with beliefs and dismissing information that is inconsistent  Belief persistence How did we survive?  Cognitive bias and oversensitive to patterns has survival value  Cognitive biases are often heuristics (mental short cuts) that help us make quick decisions  Two cognitive systems – fast and slow Summary:  Cognitive biases don’t just affect us in the laboratory they affect everyday life  Memory is not the reliable data bank that we assume and is susceptible to all kinds of misinformation and bias  False memories of fictitious events can be created in the lab and everyday setting  Confirmation bias may represent the most important of human cognitive biases  There are MANY cognitive biases and logical fallacies that affect your perception, interpretation, reasoning and decisions....