RETRIEVAL PRACTICE Take a moment to answer each of these Learning Objective Questions (repeated here from within this section). Then click the 'show answer' button to check your answers. Research suggests that trying to answer these questions on your own will improve your long-term retention (McDaniel et al., 2009).

Our everyday thinking can be perilous because of three phenomena: hindsight bias, overconfidence, and a tendency to perceive patterns in random events. Hindsight bias (also called the “I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon”) is the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that we would have foreseen it. Overconfidence in our judgments results partly from our bias to seek information that confirms them. These tendencies, plus our eagerness to perceive patterns in random events, lead us to overestimate our intuition. Although limited by the testable questions it can address, scientific inquiry can help us overcome our intuition’s biases and shortcomings.

The scientific attitude equips us to be curious, skeptical, and humble in scrutinizing competing ideas or our own observations. This attitude carries into everyday life as critical thinking, which puts ideas to the test by examining assumptions, appraising the source, discerning hidden values, evaluating evidence, and assessing conclusions.