Читать книгу Philosophy of Psychology - Lisa Bortolotti - Страница 20

Many psychological studies are undertaken in some artificial situations that are not representative of everyday settings, and the tasks proposed in the laboratory may not have the same relevant features as everyday tasks. This raises a methodological problem. In psychology, we are not just interested in understanding how people think and behave in artificial tasks and settings; rather we are interested in understanding how people think and behave in everyday tasks and settings. Can we learn about how people think and behave in everyday tasks and settings from the psychological studies involving only artificial tasks and settings?

Bloom warns us against the tendency to conclude that human agents are irrational on the basis of the experimental findings of irrational biases and errors in artificial tasks and settings. Perhaps biases and errors are exaggerated in artificial settings; they might not be very significant in real-life cases.

Statistically significant doesn’t mean actually significant. Just because something has an effect in a controlled situation doesn’t mean that it’s important in real life. Your impression of a résumé might be subtly affected by its being presented to you on a heavy clipboard, and this tells us something about how we draw inferences from physical experience when making social evaluations. Very interesting stuff. But this doesn’t imply that your real-world judgments of job candidates have much to do with what you’re holding when you make those judgments. What will actually matter much more are such boringly relevant considerations as the candidate’s experience and qualification. (Bloom 2017, 224–225)

This is something we should keep in mind, especially when we explore the limitations of human cognition; it is conceivable that the limitation that is found in a controlled experiment does not have much impact in real life.