Can you identify which rule of science was violated in each of the following cases?
1. For nine months after being diagnosed with a treatable form of pancreatic cancer, Steve Jobs refused to have surgery and instead tried to cure himself with carrot juice, fruit, and psychics.
2. Sigmund Freud theorized that all men unconsciously experience "castration anxiety." When his fellow analysts questioned this notion and asked for his evidence, he was amused. He wrote: "One hears of analysts who boast that, though they have worked for dozens of years, they have never found a sign of the existence of the castration complex. We must bow our heads in recognition of … [this] piece of virtuosity in the art of overlooking and mistaking."
Answer Key
1. Jobs did not gather empirical evidence from scientific studies of similarly sick people who were not helped by unusual diets or psychics, nor of those who were helped by the surgery he avoided.
2. Freud violated the principle of falsifiability. If analysts saw castration anxiety in their patients, Freud was right; but if they failed to see it, they were "overlooking" and "mistaking" it, and Freud was still right. Thus, no possible counterevidence could refute the theory.
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In a __________ research design, each participant is used as his or her own control, perhaps by having his or her behaviors compared before and after receiving a treatment
FIll in the blank with correct word.
Mort is going to the supermarket to pick up seven items – a toilet brush, shampoo, apples, toothpicks, baby diapers, a birthday card, and pasta. He has them written down in this order on his shopping list,
but he gets to the store and finds that he's left the list at home. He finds the first few things and the last few things on his list, but for all of his effort he cannot remember that he needed toothpicks. This tendency to forget things that came in the middle of a list of items is called the __________ effect. a. recency b. primacy c. serial position d. pseudoforgetting