Throughout the course of Psychology 1001, we have learned about the 6 Principles of Psychology: Ruling out Rival Hypotheses, Correlation v. Causation, Falsifiability, Replicability, Occam's Razor, and Extraordinary Claims. The principle that I have used the most in my everyday life is the Extraordinary Claims rule. For a long time I have been fascinated by television shows like Paranormal State on A&E and A Haunting on The Discovery Channell. In fact, these types of shows used to keep me up at night because they seemed so real! However, after learning about the principles of psychology, I have come to realize that many of these shows are staged and their "evidence" of paranormal activity usually goes unsupported. For example, in the show A Haunting they have people narrating their terrifying experiences and have real actors and actresses portray the scene for the episodes. This seems highly unreliable because many times TV producers exaggerate information in order to attract viewers. What one needs to think about is if these extraordinary claims have extraordinary evidence to back them up. In most cases, the evidence is not strong enough.
I think this is a great point in how what we are learning in class correlates to the real world. It's odd to see how a single class can change are beliefs so much and how over one semester we can go from completely believing in some of these things to not being able to question it all and start to believe otherwise.