I Will Keep In Mind at Least One Thing: We Need to Have Critical Thinking!

To answer the question what kind of concepts in psychology I think I will remember five years from now, I find myself encountering another question: what is the most important concept I have learned from the Psy 1001 course? Out of numerous concepts that have been taught during the semester, I pick the one - naive realism. This is because psychology has changed some of my fundamental views about how to look at our world. Naïve realism is the belief that we see the world precisely as it is. This concept actually can relate to a number of other psychological concepts that together point out our tendency to misinterpret reality: confirmation bias, belief perseverance, pseudoscience, apophenia, pareidolia, representativeness heuristic and so forth. I now feel like that many of us are too confident with what we know about our world while in fact we are not. No matter how objective our findings tend to be, they are still the products of our mind and thus are more or less subjective. In this sense, naïve realism is indeed pretty naïve. Hundreds of years ago, a prestigious philosopher, Descartes, pointed out that we cannot trust out senses because they are not reliable. This philosophical idea now has shown more of a practical meaning and significance to me after I have taken the Psy 1001 course. If we hope to gain some real knowledge about the world we live in, we have to rely on critical thinking; not only need we constantly evaluate others' claims about our world but constantly question our own understanding as well. I think I will remember the concept for not just 5 years but the rest of my life.