I am teaching an undergraduate course in research methodoloy (social sciences) for aspiring teachers and I usually start with explaining, why scientific methods are important to deal with cognitive bias, when judging, if a supposed fact is actually true.
In the last year I almost exclusively focussed on hindsight bias as an example, but I would like to expand the list.
Until now I came up with the following list of biases which I consider the most "useful" for "justifying", to use and rely on scientific methods (and a basic knowledge of statistics) rather than one's own judgement:
- confirmation bias
- anchoring bias
- hindsight bias
- availability heuristic
and maybe (mainly for statistics)
- clustering illusion
- illusory correlation
I would love to hear the opinion of others if
a) those seem appropriate
b) I'm missing out on more/equally important biases?
Best regards
Michael
I would consider the most important social cognition biases that reveal why we need scientific research methodologies, rather than relying on “common sense,” are the confirmation bias and the illusory correlation. A bias you might add to your list is the negativity bias, which when you combine it with the ways schema influence memory, we have the illusory correlation. To be more specifically relevant to teachers, you might go beyond how the biases impact scientific thinking to how it could impact their students' learning - the self-fulfilling prophecy in general and the Pygmalion Effect in particular. When I teach Social Psychology, I actually begin class with an activity that specifically connects the confirmation bias with scientific thinking (link to chapter & web page below). Best wishes with your classes, Michael. ~ Kevin
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324150467_Confirmation_bias_and_the_2-4-6_game_How_do_we_test_our_perspectives
http://devpsy.org/teaching/method/confirmation_bias.html
Good question and great approach to the teaching of methodology in the social science. I am keenly following
justifying Your Study
- One way in which research differs from other forms of inquiry is that you need to justify virtually everything that you do. Your critics can challenge the validity or relevance of your findings if they believe there was something non-typical about the people you selected for study, something biased in the way you selected people for study, something unfair about the groups you compared, something wrong with the way you phrased your questions, and so forth. Every aspect of your study design has an influence on what you will learn from the study.
- Therefore, you need to have a rationale for every aspect of your study. To see how this rationale makes a differences, imagine that you are reading two different studies with similar designs and research methods, but with different rationales. Which would you find more persuasive?
- The point of this little contrast is to show you how others will read your study. They will be looking to see how serious you are about really examining this issue closely, and really trying to learn something.
Kevin Grobman : It went very good, thank You very much for the material.
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