Lecture: Cognitive Myths

• We use all of our brains. • If any part of your brain gets damaged, you will suffer deficits. • Evolution would not “waste” energy building vast parts of your brain you don’t use. • Brains use 20% of our energy! (2% body mass)

• Availability Cascade • Wishful Thinking (people like to believe in the paranormal/untapped potential) • People want to make money from you

-People can lose whole hemispheres and still function relatively normally -The brain has redundancy -If we removed 70% of your neurons randomly, we’re not sure how badly off you’d be.

• Unfortunately, its not • Recommended: Susan Blackmores book adventures of a parapsychologist • There are several cognitive biases that make us believe that its real: • Confirmation bias (noticing things that support what they already believe in) • Neglect of negative results • Wishful thinking

• We believe it because we hope its true • The effect is small, short term, and only based on arousal. • You can get the same effect from hearing a scary passage from a Stephen King book.

• If they were biased, they would unpredict later success for certain groups and over-predict for others. This does not happen. • Huge panels of scientists with widely varying viewpoints concluded that they are not biased • Item analysis is used to identify bad test questions

-Money correlates with happiness until you’re making about 105k per year (in western society) then it levels off. People who are financially unstable do get more happiness from money.

• Life events don’t affect happiness much • Winners of lotteries and people who became paraplegic have happiness changes that only last months. When measured a year later their happiness levels are the same • Things that do affect us: divorce, getting fired

-Much of your happiness (roughly 60%) is genetic

• Pleasure day to day (hedonistic, e.g., sex and food) • life satisfaction (may not be happy every moment of the journey but youre proud, working out and seeing results ). • Last one is controversial: Meaning (children don’t make people happier but they do make their life more meaningful)

• Single instances of abuse are very weakly correlated (.09) - A conflict ridden home is much more likely to cause anxiety, depression, eating disorder etc.

• Moving goal posts (try to kick football through goal post but when you kick the goalpost moves, e.g., when computers could do chess, chess was no longer associated with being a genius); mysterians • “Almost implemented” • Our economy would probably collapse without the findings of AI researchers

• Confirmation bias • The bankrupt gravity explanation: A mosquito on your arm has more gravitational effect on you. The fact that you’re mostly water has nothing to do with it

• Generation of a theory: A theory is an explanation that typically suggests the existence of theoretical entities that cannot be measured directly • Theories make predictions about the real world • These predictions become hypotheses that can be tested with experiments and quasi experiments • Experiments have control over participants and conditions. They manipulate something (gold standard) • Quasi experiments are observations in the real world. Most political science lessons are learned from quasi experiments

• Hypotheses and falsifiability. • Sig. means probably not due to chance < .05 is the typical threshold or alpha level. This means that 1 out of 20 experiments will turn out finding significance just by chance • We cant look at a huge list of numbers and know if they are different that’s why we need statistics

• Replicability • Sciences self correcting nature: Publishing makes it public. Other scientists will attempt to disprove your theory. This is good. • Science as an epistemology: No other knowledge generating enterprise (e.g., religion) has a rigorous, self correcting mechanism.