Blog for Chapter one

Without research we wouldn't be progressing each day the way we are now. If we never understood the concept of research, we would still have the intellect of a caveman. Psychology pushes the envelope each day with new ideas of research from many different perspectives, and, for this reason, there is a constant stream of research in progress.

There are numerous examples of research apply to my life, and the one that comes to my mind the first is in the field of medicine relating to the cardio vascular system. My sister has a condition that is typically called a heart murmur, which means that she has an irregular heartbeat. One of the mitral valves in her heart isn’t as strong as it should be, and consequently her heart has to work extra hard to pump a sufficient amount of blood to the body. Without doctors, who have researched the topic intensely we would never have realized my sister has this condition. Research has saved my sister’s life in turn because without it we wouldn’t know what therapies or possible surgeries to give her. Research, therefore, has kept society running and functioning properly for a long time.


The first interesting things I learned in chapter one was the hindsight bias theory. This caught my attention because I could directly relate to what was being explained by the book. The "I K=knew it all along" theory is something I think we all have gone through, errors in recollection of events or facts. Common sense describes what has happened rather than what will happen. I catch myself thinking sometimes “I should’ve seen that coming.”
I also found the scientific attitude interesting. It is a curious, eager attitude that I can carry into everyday thinking.
Lastly, it was interesting that psychologists can conduct so many various types of research in order to observe behavior correctly. This research includes individual case studies, random samples of a population, naturalistic observations, and much more. I thought the book provided great examples of the three I named, which I think will be able to help me in the time to come.