Assignment: Critical Thinking 1

Write full and complete responses to the following questions and upload your response as a Word, RTF, or Google Doc.

You may also download these questions as a Word document for offline work: assignment 1 - introducing psychology.doc Download assignment 1 - introducing psychology.doc

1. Can you think of a time when you used your intuition to analyze an outcome, only to be surprised later to find that your explanation was completely incorrect? Did this surprise help you understand how intuition may sometimes lead us astray?
2. Describe the scientific method in a way that someone who knows nothing about science could understand it.
3. Consider a behavior that you find to be important and think about its potential causes at different levels of explanation. How do you think psychologists would study this behavior?
4. What type of questions can psychologists answer that philosophers might not be able to answer as completely or as accurately? Explain why you think psychologists can answer these questions better than philosophers can.
5. Choose one of the major questions of psychology and provide some evidence from your own experience that supports one side or the other.
6. Choose two of the fields of psychology discussed in this section and explain how they differ in their approaches to understanding behavior and the level of explanation at which they are focused.

Be sure to check the rubric below, which details how your answers will be assessed, and how this activity relates to our lesson objectives.