Summary for Psychology of Consciousness, 5/9
Another great neuroscience session with your kids! Enjoy the summary!
This week we continued exploring different cognitive biases. We covered biases like the self-serving bias (e.g., people’s tendency to attribute positive events to their character but negative events to external factors). For instance, if I pass my driving test, I attribute my success to the fact that I’m a good driver, but if I fail the driving test, it’s because the experimenter was being overly harsh or the weather was bad (and not because I’m not prepared). We also covered conformity bias, which is people’s tendency to take cues for proper behavior from the actions of others rather than exercise our own independent judgment.
Here are some videos showing conformity bias
Here’s another video that we didn’t get to watch but I think the boys would find it interesting (maybe I’ll show it next time). It’s from a very famous experiment in the 1960s:
We ended by talking about effective arguments and brought up both sides of the argument on currently relevant issues like the use of fidget toys in schools.