week 1 dq1

Topic 1 DQ 1 (Common sense & Social psychological theories)

We’re constantly complicating common sense understandings with social psychology or social psychological theories. Researchers believe it’s because both common sense and social psychology mention “collective knowledge which is utilized when a large number of individuals contribute their knowledge and skills to a group which has a positive effect on the knowledge of the entire group” (Wikipedia.org, n.d.) concerning social interactions like; “one or two individuals or a larger group in the simplest form of exchange, competitions, conflict, cooperation, and/or accommodation within their environment” (flexbooks, 2015). For the outcome, “the decision and assessments made by a large group of people achieve results that can compare with those of experts” (clickworkers,n.d. & dictionary, n.d.).

An example of how common sense knowledge can be complicated comes from contradictory short and simple, concrete, traditional saying that is generally utilized to express a perceived truth or familiarity based on common sense or experience critical thinking taught us “you can’t draw a conclusion only on your own experience” like; “Practice makes perfect” (wikipdeia, n.d.).

The danger in relying on common sense or intuition in retrospect to “social psychology is that common sense has many inaccurate/faults and is subject to bias, prejudice, stereotyping, and life experiences which can result in diver conclusions because of the inability to support proven facts or support the claims” (Gilovich, T., Keltner, D., Chen, S., & Nisbett, R. E., 2019). “One bias in particular that common sense has against psychology is the problem of hindsight bias. This is a tendency to be wise after the event and can be very complicated to eliminate” (masteressay, 2015).

Class,

Theories and research ca be a very helpful tool compared to common sense. You may think that people think a certain way but be completely wrong and misunderstand them. "Nisbett and Cohen (1996) used surveys to try to find out why U.S. Southerners were more likely to commit homicide. One possibility was that Southerners were simply more accepting of violence. But when the investigators looked at published national surveys of attitudes toward violence, they found few regional differences." In fact they found they were likely to commit homicide for things like insulting their spouses or family. Another example would be correlation research. In this research they compared sex and mental health. common sense you would think more sex happier however that is not always the case. "The article reported that students who have more casual sex encounters tend to have poorer mental health than those who have fewer. But casual sex might be associated with loneliness, and we know that lonelier people have poorer mental health than people who don’t report that they’re lonely." I find that very interesting but it actually makes a lot of sense.

Amanda Coughlin