WSRt, critical thinking, a list of terms used in the articles of block 2

This is a list of the important terms used in the articles of block 2 of WSRt at the uva.

Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability

Accuracy motives: to learn and publish true things about human nature

Professional motives: to succeed and thrive professionally.

Neyman, Pearson and hypothesis testing

Statistical inference: the logic underlying all the statistics you see in the professional journals of psychology and most other disciplines that regularly use statistics.

The subjective interpretation of probability: a probability is a degree of conviction of a belief

The objective interpretation of probability: locate probability in the world.

Alpha: the long-term error rate for one type of error: saying the null is false when it is true.

Type I error: when the null is true and we reject it.

Type II error: accepting the null when it is false.

Meta-analysis: the process of combining groups of studies together to obtain overall tests of significance.

Evaluating Theories

Descriptive adequacy: does the theory accord with the available data?

Precision and interpretability: Is the theory described in a sufficiently precise fashion that other theorists can interpret it easily and unambiguously?

Coherence and consistency: Are there logical flaws in the theory? Does each component of the theory seem to fit with the others in to a coherent whole? Is it consistent with theory in other domains?

Prediction and falsifiability: Is the theory formulated in such a way that critical tests can be conducted that could reasonably lead to the rejection of the theory?

Postdiction and explanation: Does the theory provide a genuine explanation of existing results?

Parsimony: Is the theory as simple as possible?

Originality: Is the theory new or is it essentially a restatement of an existing theory?

Breadth: does the theory apply to a broad range of phenomena or is it restricted to a limited domain?

Usability: does the theory have applied implications?

Rationality: does the theory make claims about the architecture of mind that seem reasonable in the light of the environmental contingencies that have shaped or evolutionary theory?

Degrees of falsifiability

A potential falsifier of a theory: any potential observation that would contradict the theory.

Causal Inference and Developmental Psychology

Confounders: variables associated with both treatment and outcome

Stability: the robustness of a set of relationships across a range of possible magnitudes.

Confounding and deconfounding: or, slaying the lurking variable

Provisional causality: causality contingent upon the set of assumptions that our causal diagram advertises.

Counfounding: anything that makes P(Y|do(X)) differ from P(Y|X).

A back-door path: any path from X to Y that starts with an arrow pointing into X.

Critical thinking in Quasi-Experimentation

A Quasi-experiment: an experiment that does not use random assignment conditions.

An inus condition: an insufficient cause by itself. It effectiveness required it to be embedded in a larger set of conditions.

Beyond the null ritual, formal modeling of psychological processes

Generalizability: the ability of a model to predict new data. The degree to which it is capable of predicting all potential samples generated by the same process, rather dan to fit only a particular sample of existing data.

Simpson's paradox in psychological science: a practical guide

Simpson’s paradox: the direction of an association at the population-level may be reversed within the subgroups comprising that population.

Fearing the future of empirical psychology

The interpretation bias: a bias toward interpretations of data that favour a researcher’s theory, both when the null hypothesis is statistically rejected and when not.

Conservatism: choosing the theoretical explanation consistent with the data that requires the least amount of restructuring of the existing knowledge system.

The 10 commandments of helping students distinguish science from pseudoscience in psychology

Methodological (scientific) scepticism: an approach that subjects all knowledge claims to scrutiny with the goal of sorting out true from false claims

Philosophical scepticism: an approach that denies the possibility of knowledge.