1. Cognitive Mod 6 .
Cognitive Mod 6 . Write at least one main response to the question below Systematic Data
Collection about Judgment and Reasoning In your daily life, you frequently rely on judgment
heuristics—shortcuts that usually lead to the correct conclusion but that sometimes
produce error. As a direct result, you sometimes draw inappropriate conclusions, but one
might argue that the errors are simply the price you pay for the heuristics’ efficiency. To
avoid the errors, you’d need to use reasoning strategies that would require much more time
and effort than the heuristics do. For scientists, though, efficiency is less of a priority; it’s
okay if we need months or even years to test a hypothesis. And, of course, accuracy is
crucial for scientists: We want to make certain our claims are correct and our conclusions
fully warranted. Cognitive Mod 6 .ORDER NOW.For these reasons, scientists need to step
away from the reasoning strategies we all use in our daily lives and to rely instead on more
laborious, but more accurate, forms of reasoning. How exactly does scientific reasoning
differ from ordinary day-to-day reasoning? The answer has many parts, but one part is
directly relevant to the following points: In ordinary reasoning, people are heavily
influenced by whatever data are easily available to them—the observations that they can
think of first when they consider an issue, or the experiences that happen to be prominent
in their memory when they try to think of cases pertinent to some question. This is any easy
way to proceed, but risky, because the evidence that’s easily available to someone may not
be representative of the broader patterns in the world. Sometimes, evidence is easily
available simply because it’s easier to remember than other (perhaps more common)
observations. Sometimes, evidence is more available because it’s been showcased by the
media.Cognitive Mod 6 . Yet another problem is that evidence is sometimes more available
to someone because of the pattern known as confirmation bias. This term refers to the fact
that when people search for evidence they often look only for evidence that might support
their views; they do little to collect evidence that might challenge those views. This can lead
to a lopsided collection of facts—and an inaccurate judgment. Scientists avoid these
problems by insisting on systematic data collection: either recording all the evidence or at
least collecting evidence in a fashion carefully designed to be independent of the hypothesis
being considered (and hence neither biased toward the hypothesis nor against it).
Systematic data collection surely rules out consideration of anecdotal evidence—evidence
that has been informally collected and reported—because an anecdote may represent a
highly atypical case, or may provide only one person’s description of the data, with no way
for us to know if the description is accurate or not. Anecdotal evidence is also easily swayed
2. by confirmation bias: The anecdote describes just one observation, raising questions about
how this observation was selected. The obvious worry is that the anecdotal case was
noticed, remembered, and then reported merely because it fits well with prejudices the
reporter had at the outset! These points seem straightforward, but they have many
implications, including implications for how we choose our participants (we can’t just
gather data from people likely to support our views) and for how we design our procedures.
The requirement of systematic data collection also shapes how the data will be recorded.
For example, we cannot rely on our memory for the data, because it’s possible that we might
remember just those cases that fit with our interpretation. Likewise, we cannot treat the
facts we like differently from the facts we don’t like, so that, perhaps, we’re more alert to
flaws in the observations that conflict with our hypotheses or less likely to report these
observations to others. Clearly, then, many elements are involved in systematic data
collection. But all of these elements are crucial if we are to make certain our hypotheses
have been fully and fairly tested. In this regard, scientific conclusions are on a firmer footing
than the judgments we offer as part of our daily experience. Discussion Question: What is
anecdotal evidence? How are “man who” stories a form of anecdotal evidence?Cognitive
Mod 6 .
