Chapter 1: Psychology and Scientific Thinking

In Chapter 1, I read about the basic concepts and history of psychology that we will be referencing through out the whole semester. The six principles of scientific thinking come up in our lives daily; ruling out rival hypotheses, correlation vs. causation, falsifiability, replicability, extraordinary claims, and occam's razor.  I wonder how they decided to name occam's razor?? Out of all of the fallacies I realized that I commit the "Not Me Fallacy" quite often. I think that if it does not have to do with me, it won't effect me..which I learned to be not true. I still am a little confused about the concepts behind the 5 major theoretical perspectives; structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, cognitivism, and psychoanalysis. How do they relate to each other and how do they differ?? I'm excited for the rest of the semester because I think I will learn alot of things that I can apply to real life situations, like detecting pseudoscientific claims!  I didn't realize before how often pseudoscientific claims were right in front of us; newspapers, magazines, internet, TV, billboards, etc. Now that I know I can be a more informed consumer!