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Preface | p. xi |
Psychology Is Alive and Well (and Doing Fine Among the Sciences) | p. 1 |
The Freud Problem | p. 1 |
The Diversity of Modern Psychology | p. 2 |
Implications of Diversity | p. 3 |
Unity in Science | p. 6 |
What, Then, Is Science? | p. 8 |
Systematic Empiricism | p. 9 |
Publicly Verifiable Knowledge: Replication and Peer Review | p. 10 |
Empirically Solvable Problems: Scientists' Search for Testable Theories | p. 12 |
Psychology and Folk Wisdom: The Problem with "Common Sense" | p. 13 |
Psychology as a Young Science | p. 16 |
Summary | p. 18 |
Falsifiability: How to Foil Little Green Men in the Head | p. 19 |
Theories and the Falsifiability Criterion | p. 20 |
The Theory of Knocking Rhythms | p. 22 |
Freud and Falsifiability | p. 23 |
The Little Green Men | p. 25 |
Not All Confirmations Are Equal | p. 26 |
Falsifiability and Folk Wisdom | p. 27 |
The Freedom to Admit a Mistake | p. 28 |
Thoughts Are Cheap | p. 30 |
Errors in Science: Getting Closer to the Truth | p. 31 |
Summary | p. 34 |
Operationism and Essentialism: "But, Doctor, What Does It Really Mean?" | p. 35 |
Why Scientists Are Not Essentialists | p. 35 |
Essentialists Like to Argue About the Meaning of Words | p. 36 |
Operationists Link Concepts to Observable Events | p. 37 |
Reliability and Validity | p. 38 |
Direct and Indirect Operational Definitions | p. 40 |
Scientific Concepts Evolve | p. 40 |
Operational Definitions in Psychology | p. 42 |
Operationism as a Humanizing Force | p. 45 |
Essentialist Questions and the Misunderstanding of Psychology | p. 47 |
Operationism and the Phrasing of Psychological Questions | p. 48 |
Summary | p. 51 |
Testimonials and Case Study Evidence: Placebo Effects and the Amazing Randi | p. 53 |
The Place of the Case Study | p. 54 |
Why Testimonials Are Worthless: Placebo Effects | p. 56 |
The "Vividness" Problem | p. 59 |
The Overwhelming Impact of the Single Case | p. 63 |
The Amazing Randi: Fighting Fire with Fire | p. 65 |
Testimonials Open the Door to Pseudoscience | p. 67 |
Summary | p. 71 |
Correlation and Causation: Birth Control by the Toaster Method | p. 73 |
The Third-Variable Problem: Goldberger and Pellagra | p. 74 |
Why Goldberger's Evidence Was Better | p. 75 |
The Directionality Problem | p. 78 |
Selection Bias | p. 80 |
Summary | p. 83 |
Getting Things Under Control: The Case of Clever Hans | p. 85 |
Snow and Cholera | p. 86 |
Comparison, Control, and Manipulation | p. 87 |
Random Assignment in Conjunction with Manipulation Defines the True Experiment | p. 88 |
The Importance of Control Groups | p. 91 |
The Case of Clever Hans, the Wonder Horse | p. 94 |
Clever Hans in the 1990s | p. 96 |
Prying Variables Apart: Special Conditions | p. 99 |
Intuitive Physics | p. 101 |
Intuitive Psychology | p. 103 |
Summary | p. 104 |
"But It's Not Real Life!": The "Artificiality" Criticism and Psychology | p. 105 |
Why Natural Isn't Always Necessary | p. 105 |
The "Random Sample" Confusion | p. 107 |
The Random Assignment Versus Random Sample Distinction | p. 107 |
Theory-Driven Research Versus Direct Applications | p. 108 |
Applications of Psychological Theory | p. 113 |
The "College Sophomore" Problem | p. 115 |
The Real-Life and College Sophomore Problems in Perspective | p. 119 |
Summary | p. 120 |
Avoiding the Einstein Syndrome: The Importance of Converging Evidence | p. 121 |
The Connectivity Principle | p. 122 |
A Consumer's Rule: Beware of Violations of Connectivity | p. 123 |
The "Great-Leap" Model Versus the Gradual-Synthesis Model | p. 125 |
Converging Evidence: Progress Despite Flaws | p. 126 |
Converging Evidence in Psychology | p. 129 |
Scientific Consensus | p. 133 |
Methods and the Convergence Principle | p. 135 |
The Progression to More Powerful Methods | p. 136 |
A Counsel Against Despair | p. 139 |
Summary | p. 142 |
The Misguided Search for the "Magic Bullet": The Issue of Multiple Causation | p. 145 |
The Concept of Interaction | p. 146 |
The Temptation of the Single-Cause Explanation | p. 149 |
Summary | p. 152 |
The Achilles' Heel of Human Cognition: Probabilistic Reasoning | p. 153 |
"Person-Who" Statistics | p. 155 |
Probabilistic Reasoning and the Misunderstanding of Psychology | p. 156 |
Psychological Research on Probabilistic Reasoning | p. 158 |
Insufficient Use of Probabilistic Information | p. 159 |
Failure to Use Sample Size Information | p. 161 |
The Gambler's Fallacy | p. 162 |
A Further Word About Statistics and Probability | p. 164 |
Summary | p. 166 |
The Role of Chance in Psychology | p. 167 |
The Tendency to Try to Explain Chance Events | p. 167 |
Explaining Chance: Illusory Correlation and the Illusion of Control | p. 170 |
Chance and Psychology | p. 172 |
Coincidence | p. 173 |
Personal Coincidences | p. 176 |
Accepting Error in Order to Reduce Error: Clinical versus Actuarial Prediction | p. 177 |
Summary | p. 184 |
The Rodney Dangerfield of the Sciences | p. 185 |
Psychology's Image Problem | p. 185 |
Psychology and Parapsychology | p. 186 |
The Self-Help Literature | p. 188 |
Recipe Knowledge | p. 190 |
Psychology and Other Disciplines | p. 192 |
Our Own Worst Enemies | p. 194 |
Isn't Everyone a Psychologist? Implicit Theories of Behavior | p. 200 |
The Source of Resistance to Scientific Psychology | p. 201 |
The Final Word | p. 206 |
References | p. 207 |
Name Index | p. 231 |
Subject Index | p. 238 |
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