AP Psychology

kawaiigurl
Thu, 08 May 2008 05:18:10 +0000

Multiple hypothesis is when people have more than one hypothesis in their mind because they usually begin solving problem with only a vague notion. but since our llimited short memory capacity can only form 7 chunks and we can’t think of 2 or 3 hypothesis at the same time, sometimes we fail to think of the more reasonable hypothesis. And we may also be influenced by availability heuristic so we think of the first hypothesis first instead of being reasonable and think through which one can be more possible.

Another obstacle is Mental set, the tendency the people focus or think in their original thought or past experience, even when better alternatives come up.

Another one is functional fixedness, the tendency to think about familiar objects in familiar ways that may prevent using them in other ways. they are too not creative and therefore it’s easy to get stucekd on a problem.

Also ignoring negative evidence can influence us because once we have hypothesis we tend to believe in our own original thought and may ignore the “true” evidence to confrim ourself.

correct me if i need to add sth (: