Psychological research - Part 1 by @amitvegada

_{Source: Pexels}

Can week-old pizza cause psychedelic hallucinations? Can your coffee make you smarter? Or does it just make you do dumb stuff quicker? Questions like this can seem intuitive, just like a lot of psychology itself. Obviously, people aren't the easiest organism to understand. But at the end of the day, you're a person, right?

That means you must have some understanding of how other people think and what motivates them. But it is very important to realize that your intuition is not always right. In fact, sometimes it is exactly wrong, and we tend to underestimate the dangers of false intuition grossly.

If your intuition strengthens when you have an idea about a person and their behavior that turns out to be right, then you can believe in it more fully. In a situation where my friend Bob starts eating deep-dish pizza that's been in the fridge for a week, but he eats it anyway and soon starts screaming, I will tell him, "Dude, I warned you so.". On the other hand, if he is fine with it, I probably won't even think twice. This is known as the "I-Knew-It-All-Along" phenomenon or the "Hindsight Bias".

_{Source: Pexels}

Having intuitive sense does not mean common sense is wrong, it basically just means intuitive sense describes what just happened, not what will happen in the future. In addition to your natural tendency toward overconfidence, you cannot blindly trust your intuition.

Sometimes, you feel like you're right about people when actually you're really, really wrong. We've all been there many times. Random events are also viewed as having order, which can lead to incorrect assumptions. Suppose you flip a coin five times and get alternating heads and tails, then each time you have equal chances of getting a tail.

Our perception is that the series of five tails is distinct, like a streak, thus giving that result the meaning it very certainly does not have. For this reason, we have psychological research and experimentation methods and safeguards, and the glorious scientific method.

These programs are helpful to get around such obstacles and should be used to keep the study of our minds away from the stupidity of our minds. Hopefully, you won't consider it a spoiler if I tell you that pizza and coffee will not make you trippy or smart. Sorry.

We will be talking more about this in our next lesson, until then. Take care and see you all later.