{"id":17258,"date":"2022-08-22T06:14:47","date_gmt":"2022-08-22T06:14:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/tw\/?post_type=product&p=17258"},"modified":"2022-08-22T06:14:47","modified_gmt":"2022-08-22T06:14:47","slug":"answering-questions-with-data-introductory-statistics-for-psychology-students-crump","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/tw\/answering-questions-with-data-introductory-statistics-for-psychology-students-crump\/","title":{"rendered":"Answering Questions with Data – Introductory Statistics for Psychology Students (Crump)"},"content":{"rendered":"

To the surprise of many students, statistics is a fairly significant part of a psychological education. To the surprise of no-one, statistics is very rarely the favorite part of one\u2019s psychological education<\/a>. After all, if you really loved the idea of doing statistics, you\u2019d probably be enrolled in a statistics class right now, not a psychology class. So, not surprisingly, there\u2019s a pretty large proportion of the student base that isn\u2019t happy about the fact that psychology<\/a> has so much statistics in it. In view of this, I thought that the right place to start might be to answer some of the more common questions that people have about stats\u2026<\/p>\n

A big part of this issue at hand relates to the very idea of statistics. What is it? What\u2019s it there for? And why are scientists so bloody obsessed with it? These are all good questions, when you think about it. So let\u2019s start with the last one. As a group, scientists seem to be bizarrely fixated on running statistical tests on everything. In fact, we use statistics so often that we sometimes forget to explain to people why we do. It\u2019s a kind of article of faith among scientists \u2013 and especially social scientists \u2013 that your findings can\u2019t be trusted until you\u2019ve done some stats. Undergraduate students might be forgiven for thinking that we\u2019re all completely mad, because no-one takes the time to answer one very simple question:<\/p>\n

Why do you do statistics? Why don\u2019t scientists just use common sense?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a naive question in some ways, but most good questions are. There\u2019s a lot of good answers to it, but for my money, the best answer is a really simple one: we don\u2019t trust ourselves enough. We worry that we\u2019re human, and susceptible to all of the biases, temptations and frailties that humans suffer from. Much of statistics is basically a safeguard. Using \u201ccommon sense\u201d to evaluate evidence means trusting gut instincts, relying on verbal arguments and on using the raw power of human reason to come up with the right answer. Most scientists<\/a> don\u2019t think this approach is likely to work.<\/p>\n

In fact, come to think of it, this sounds a lot like a psychological question to me, and since I do work in a psychology department, it seems like a good idea to dig a little deeper here. Is it really plausible to think that this \u201ccommon sense\u201d approach is very trustworthy? Verbal arguments have to be constructed in language, and all languages have biases \u2013 some things are harder to say than others, and not necessarily because they\u2019re false (e.g., quantum electrodynamics is a good theory, but hard to explain in words). The instincts of our \u201cgut\u201d aren\u2019t designed to solve scientific problems, they\u2019re designed to handle day to day inferences \u2013 and given that biological evolution<\/a> is slower than cultural change, we should say that they\u2019re designed to solve the day to day problems for a different world than the one we live in. Most fundamentally, reasoning sensibly requires people to engage in \u201cinduction\u201d, making wise guesses and going beyond the immediate evidence of the senses to make generalisations about the world. If you think that you can do that without being influenced by various distractors, well, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I\u2019d like to sell you. Heck, as the next section shows, we can\u2019t even solve \u201cdeductive\u201d problems (ones where no guessing is required) without being influenced by our pre-existing biases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"