How to Think Straight About Psychology

by Stanovich, Keith E.

• ISBN13: 9780205485130
• ISBN10: 0205485138
• Edition: 8th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-01
• Publisher: Prentice Hall

Summary

Keith Stanovich's widely used and highly acclaimed book helps instructors teach critical-thinking skills within the rich context of psychology. It can be used as a stand-alone text or as a supplement in introductory psychology, critical-thinking, as well as research methods and statistics courses. It is the premier text of its kind. Stanovich helps students become more discriminating consumers of psychological information by helping them recognize pseudoscience and be able to distinguish it from true psychological research. Psychological topics such as falsifiability, operationalism, experimental control, converging evidence, correlational vs. experimental studies, and statistics are presented as tools for critical evaluation, giving students a set of practical consumer skills to independently evaluate psychological claims. Students also are given a set of "consumer rules" for dealing with psychology in the media. How to Think Straight About Psychology says what many instructors would like to say about the discipline of psychology but haven't found a way to. That is one reason adopters have called it "an instructor's dream text" and often comment "I wish I had written it. It tells my students just what I want them to hear about psychology." New to the eighth edition are expanded discussions of reliability and validity, meta-analysis, and the differences between random sampling versus random assignment.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
1 Psychology Is Alive and Well (and Doing Fine Among the Sciences)	1	(18)
The Freud Problem	1	(1)
The Diversity of Modern Psychology	2	(4)
Implications of Diversity	3	(3)
Unity in Science	6	(2)
What, Then, Is Science?	8	(5)
Systematic Empiricism	9	(1)
Publicly Verifiable Knowledge: Replication and Peer Review	10	(2)
Empirically Solvable Problems: Scientists' Search for Testable Theories	12	(1)
Psychology and Folk Wisdom: The Problem with "Common Sense"	13	(4)
Psychology as a Young Science	17	(1)
Summary	18	(1)
2 Falsifiability: How to Foil Little Green Men in the Head	19	(16)
Theories and the Falsifiability Criterion	20	(11)
The Theory of Knocking Rhythms	21	(1)
Freud and Falsifiability	22	(2)
The Little Green Men	24	(2)
Not All Confirmations Are Equal	26	(1)
Falsifiability and Folk Wisdom	27	(1)
The Freedom to Admit a Mistake	27	(3)
Thoughts Are Cheap	30	(1)
Errors in Science: Getting Closer to the Truth	31	(2)
Summary	33	(2)
3 Operationism and Essentialism: "But, Doctor, What Does It Really Mean?"	35	(18)
Why Scientists Are Not Essentialists	35	(7)
Essentialists Like to Argue About the Meaning of Words	36	(1)
Operationists Link Concepts to Observable Events	37	(1)
Reliability and Validity	38	(2)
Direct and Indirect Operational Definitions	40	(1)
Scientific Concepts Evolve	40	(2)
Operational Definitions in Psychology	42	(9)
Operationism as a Humanizing Force	45	(1)
Essentialist Questions and the Misunderstanding of Psychology	46	(2)
Operationism and the Phrasing of Psychological Questions	48	(3)
Summary	51	(2)
4 Testimonials and Case Study Evidence: Placebo Effects and the Amazing Randi	53	(20)
The Place of the Case Study	55	(1)
Why Testimonials Are Worthless: Placebo Effects	56	(4)
The "Vividness" Problem	60	(7)
The Overwhelming Impact of the Single Case	63	(2)
The Amazing Randi: Fighting Fire with Fire	65	(2)
Testimonials Open the Door to Pseudoscience	67	(4)
Summary	71	(2)
5 Correlation and Causation: Birth Control by the Toaster Method	73	(12)
The Third-Variable Problem: Goldberger and Pellagra	74	(4)
Why Goldberger's Evidence Was Better	75	(3)
The Directionality Problem	78	(2)
Selection Bias	80	(3)
Summary	83	(2)
6 Getting Things Under Control: The Case of Clever Hans	85	(18)
Snow and Cholera	86	(1)
Comparison, Control, and Manipulation	87	(15)
Random Assignment in Conjunction with Manipulation Defines the True Experiment	88	(3)
The Importance of Control Groups	91	(1)
The Case of Clever Hans, the Wonder Horse	92	(2)
Clever Hans in the 1990's	94	(3)
Prying Variables Apart: Special Conditions	97	(2)
Intuitive Physics	99	(2)
Intuitive Psychology	101	(1)
Summary	102	(1)
7 "But It's Not Real Life!": The "Artificiality" Criticism and Psychology	103	(16)
Why Natural Isn't Always Necessary	103	(7)
The "Random Sample" Confusion	105	(1)
The Random Assignment Versus Random Sample Distinction	105	(1)
Theory-Driven Research Versus Direct Applications	106	(4)
Applications of Psychological Theory	110	(7)
The "College Sophomore" Problem	112	(4)
The Real-Life and College Sophomore Problems in Perspective	116	(1)
Summary	117	(2)
8 Avoiding the Einstein Syndrome: The Importance of Converging Evidence	119	(22)
The Connectivity Principle	120	(4)
A Consumer's Rule: Beware of Violations of Connectivity	121	(2)
The "Great-Leap" Model Versus the Gradual-Synthesis Model	123	(1)
Converging Evidence: Progress Despite Flaws	124	(6)
Converging Evidence in Psychology	126	(4)
Scientific Consensus	130	(5)
Methods and the Convergence Principle	131	(2)
The Progression to More Powerful Methods	133	(2)
A Counsel Against Despair	135	(3)
Summary	138	(3)
9 The Misguided Search for the "Magic Bullet": The Issue of Multiple Causation	141	(8)
The Concept of Interaction	142	(2)
The Temptation of the Single-Cause Explanation	144	(3)
Summary	147	(2)
10 The Achilles' Heel of Human Cognition: Probabilistic Reasoning	149	(56)
"Person-Who" Statistics	150	(2)
Probabilistic Reasoning and the Misunderstanding of Psychology	152	(1)
Psychological Research on Probabilistic Reasoning	153	(10)
Insufficient Use of Probabilistic Information	154	(2)
Failure to Use Sample Size Information	156	(1)
The Gambler's Fallacy	157	(4)
A Further Word About Statistics and Probability	161	(2)
Summary	163	(2)
11 The Role of Chance in Psychology	165	(18)
The Tendency to Try to Explain Chance Events	165	(10)
Explaining Chance: Illusory Correlation and the Illusion of Control	168	(2)
Chance and Psychology	170	(1)
Coincidence	171	(3)
Personal Coincidences	174	(1)
Accepting Error in Order to Reduce Error: Clinical Versus Actuarial Prediction	175	(6)
Summary	181	(2)
12 The Rodney Dangerfield of the Sciences	183	(22)
Psychology's Image Problem	183	(6)
Psychology and Parapsychology	184	(2)
The Self-Help Literature	186	(1)
Recipe Knowledge	187	(2)
Psychology and Other Disciplines	189	(2)
Our Own Worst Enemies	191	(6)
Isn't Everyone a Psychologist? Implicit Theories of Behavior	197	(1)
The Source of Resistance to Scientific Psychology	198	(4)
The Final Word	202	(3)
References	205	(26)
Author Index	231	(7)
Subject Index	238