Читать книгу The Research Experience - Ann Sloan Devlin - Страница 25

The last category Shermer offered is “Psychological Problems in Thinking.” Among the problems identified is the idea that we exhibit “problem-solving inadequacy” (1997, p. 59) when we don’t seek evidence to disprove, only to prove. We discussed this issue earlier in the context of the Wason Selection Task, where people rarely thought that turning over the 7 was necessary. We invariably turn over the E (that is, look for evidence to confirm the hypothesis).

Problem-solving inadequacy: When we do not seek to disprove hypotheses, only to confirm them.

Consider the sobering evidence that “most doctors quickly come up with two or three possible diagnoses from the outset of meeting a patient…. All develop their hypotheses from a very incomplete body of information. To do this, doctors use shortcuts. These are called heuristics” (Groopman, 2007, p. 35). The word heuristics is familiar from material covered earlier in this chapter and, unfortunately, in the current context! Once we develop our hypotheses, we tend to stick with them; relinquishing them is difficult.