Write 200 words or so about the concept in psychology that you think you will remember five years from now and why.
It's hard to pinpoint just one topic that's resonated with me because I have found so many topics discussed in this class to be extremely interesting. A recurring theme in our textbook that I found to be applicable to daily life are the six principles of scientific thinking (Ruling out rival hypothesis, correlation vs. causation, falsifiability, replicability, extraordinary claims, and occam's razor). For example, when some friends and I were out to dinner the other night, we saw a large amount of unidentified floating objects in the sky. Of course, we all assumed we were about to encounter an alien invasion, but thinking back to psychology, it dawned on me that there may a simpler explanation that could explain what we saw (occam's razor). After a moment of thinking, I realized it was a dozen balloons someone had left go off. As silly as it sounds, I literally thought back to psychology and the six scientific principles! Moreover, this class has allowed me to re-access my studying habits; in high school, it seemed that the more work one puts in to schoolwork, the better their outcome or grade was (displaying correlation vs. causation), which is not the case I have found to be true in college. College requires putting forth more effort than just 'doing the work', which is useful information I will carry on throughout my schooling.
(http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/did-they-learn-correlation-and-causation-in-college/ article on how earning a college degree doesn't equate to a six figure salary!).
Additionally, when it comes to solving problems everybody faces, I have also used the idea of ruling out rival hypothesis: my friends and family tell me tons of anecdotal proof about curing their common cold. They tell me things like Emergen-C, eating lots of bananas or coming Tums antacids are among the things I've heard. Instead of simply accepting anecdotes as truth, one can come to more logical conclusions about problems people encounter in their daily life like the common cold.
(http://www.marksdailyapple.com/do-cold-busters-like-emergen-c-and-airborne-actually-work/ article on popular OTC products like Emergen-C and Airborne).
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