First Impressions Matter! Or do they? How Do You Already Think about Psychology?

Psychology teachers and professors, like me, like to understand how our students’ thinking about Psychology changes as they go through our classes. Since Psychology is a science, we’re drawn to quantify what’s happening. That is, we make the qualitative things we see like your puzzled looks and ah ha moments, and turn them into numbers.

It might feel disappointing how we 'flatten' all the rich complexity of the world into numbers. Good point! And I feel like most people in psychology appreciate the intricacies of being human. So why still quantify? The reason we use numbers is we know how easy it is to see what we want to see, instead of what actually is. Many Psychology studies demonstrate this! Quantifying is a way we reduce our biased inclinations.

You completed a pre-test. “Pre” means before and we’re getting a sense of where you are before our class. At the end of the course, you’ll have a post-test to see where you are afterward. There really was no correct or incorrect way to respond. We're just seeing how you think about Psychology. When you do the post-test, you’ll get a guide to help you interpret your results and reflect on how (if at all) you’ve changed.

So keep track of your pre-test numbers so you can compare!

There really was no correct or incorrect way to respond. It’s just seeing how you think about Psychology.

The Folk to Scientific Psychology Knowledge score measures how much you answer psychology questions with folk psychology - intuitive ideas about how people work - and scientific psychology - what research finds. Oftentimes scientific and folk psychology are the same, but this measure is about when they’re opposites. Some items are surprising-but-true and other items are myths. A score of 0 means you’re very drawn to folk psychology and a score of 100 means you’re very drawn to scientific psychology.

The Effect Size Estimate Complexity is a score of how you weigh many different factors that might matter for success versus failure. How to weigh all these variables “correctly” is debatable primarily because there’s a fuzzy boundary between them and they’re correlated with each other. Nevertheless, with statistics we can calculate an effect size to measure how much a variable matters. Your score estimates how close your estimates are to what effect sizes I found reviewing Psychology studies - 0 is a complete mismatch and 100 is a perfect match. If you think everything matters equally, you’d score about 50.  If you hold tightly to far right-wing or far left-wing ideology, your score would be about 25. That’s because there’s certainly an element of truth (as understood through science) in what people with strong political orientations believe, but they tend to very much over-estimate the impact of variables they focus on and very much under-estimate the variables the opposite “side” focuses on. In case you wondered why the demographics included your political identity this time, it’s because I’m trying to understand how much political lenses nudge people’s thinking.

What do you think? How did your think your understanding of humanity changes through your experience in a Psychology class?

Please remember your results with any activity are not who you are. Your results are a 'snapshot' of a moment when you did an activity. It's just one measure, a single thread, of the many strands of who you are. Any result is a guess with statistical error. And it's possible the measure is flawed in a way so it doesn't work for you. Please do not think of your results as definitive dogma. Instead they're a starting point for our self reflection. Please keep in mind too, self-reflection can feel uncomfortable. "Bad" feelings are not actually bad. They're information. So, even if your activity result is inaccurate and flawed, you might ask yourself what your feeling is trying to tell you? Trusted teachers, friends, and therapists can be helpful. I wrote an essay elaborating with concrete examples how we can appreciate uneasy feelings about our activity results.