Psychological Research: Crash Course Psychology #2

can we gold Pizza cause psychedelic hallucinations does coffee make you smarter or does it just make you do dumb stuff faster like bunch of psychology itself questions like these can seem pretty intuitive I mean people may not be the easiest organisms to understand but you're a person right so you must be qualified to draw like some conclusions about other people and what makes them tick but it's important to realize that your intuition isn't always right in fact sometimes it is exactly wrong and we tend to grossly underestimate the dangers of false intuition if you have some idea about a person in their behavior that turns out to be right that reinforces your trust in your intuition like if I warn my buddy Bob against eating that deep dish pizza that's been in the fridge for the past week but he eats it anyway and soon starts to wig out I'm going to say dude I told you so but if I'm wrong and he's totally fine I probably won't even think about it ever again this is known as hindsight bias or the I knew it all along phenomenon this doesn't mean that common sense is wrong it just means that our intuitive sense more easily describes what just happened than what will happen in the future another reason you can't blindly trust sometimes you just really really feel like you're right about people when actually you're really really wrong we've all been there we also tend to perceive order in random events which can lead to false assumptions for example if you flip a coin five times you have equal chances of getting all tals as you do getting alternating heads and tales but we see the series of five tales as something unusual as a streak and thus giving that results some kind of meaning that it very definitely does not have that is why we have the methods and safeguards of psychological research and experimentation and the Glorious process of scientific inquiry they help us to get around these problems and basically save the study of our minds from the stupidity of our minds so I hope that it won't be a spoiler if I tell you now that pizza won't make you trip and coffee doesn't make you smart sorry [Music] in most ways psychological research is no different than in the other scientific discipline like step one is always figuring out how to ask general questions about your subject and turn them into measurable testable propositions this is called operationalizing your questions so you know how the scientific method works it starts with a question and a theory and I don't mean theory