Rethinking Psychology

Preface

Chapter 1: Is psychology a science?

"Psychology is an inferior kind of science"

Reproducibility and the 'replication crisis'

Highly controlled experimental conditions

Clearly defined terminology

Predictability and testability: the 'theory crisis'

What should psychologists do?

Psychology is a different kind of science

Myths in psychology

Chapter 2: Visual perception

Myth: subliminal messages can motivate people's behaviour without their awareness

Myth: we generally detect changes in objects

Myth: visual perception provides us with very rich and accurate information about the environment at a glance

Myth: everyone agrees on the colour of a dress (or #theDress)

Myth: most people are 'face experts'

Why do we believe so many myths about visual perception?

Chapter 3: Mysteries of memory

Myth: "Memory is like a video camera"

Myth: memories do not change over time: they are permanent

Myth: repression and 'return of the repressed' are very common

Myth: amnesic patients have forgotten their pasts

Myth: the only function of (episodic) memory is to provide access to our past experiences

Myth: forgetting is a bad thing

Chapter 4: Thinking and cognition

Myth: 10,000 hours of practice produce outstanding performance

Myth: brain training improves your brain functioning and intelligence

Myth: we only use 10% of our brains

Myth: Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon be much more intelligent than humans

Myth: nudges are very effective at changing people's behaviour

Chapter 5: Intelligence

Myth: there are multiple intelligences in the human mind

Myth: it is important to match teaching methods to learning styles

Myth: emotional intelligence is helpful in life

Myth: IQ scores only measure how good someone is at taking intelligence tests

Myth: intelligence does not depend on genetic factors

Chapter 6: Personality

Myth: high self-esteem is highly desirable (and low self-esteem very undesirable)

Myth: situational factors overwhelm personality when predicting behaviour

Myth: personality measures do not predict consequential outcomes (like health, wealth and divorce) well enough to be useful

Myth: parenting practices are a major source of personality differences

Myth: men are from Mars, women are from Venus (men and women have dramatically different personalities)

Chapter 7: Social psychology

Myth: Milgram proved that most people will obey immoral orders

Myth: crowds typically panic in threatening situations

Myth: Zimbardo proved that the power structure in prisons makes guards aggressive and violent

Myth: individual differences in attitudes are mostly learned

Myth: happiness is influenced most strongly by what happens to us

Chapter 8: Mental disorders and their treatment

Myth: mental illnesses are due almost entirely to people's life experiences

Myth: psychiatric diagnoses or labels stigmatise people

Myth: The Rorschach Inkblot test is a very useful way of diagnosing most mental illnesses

Myth: people with multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder) have more than one distinct personality

Myth: most psychotherapy requires lying on a couch and recalling one's childhood

Myth: antidepressants are much more effective than psychotherapy for treating depression

Chapter 9: Psychology and the law

Myth: an eyewitness's confidence is never a good predictor of their identification accuracy

Myth: experts can nearly always identify the culprit from fingerprinting evidence

Myth: DNA tests are almost infallible for identifying culprits

Myth: the polygraph test is very good at detecting lying

Myth: hypnosis enhances eyewitnesses' memory

Myth: Offender profiling is (very) useful in identifying culprits

Chapter 10: How to become a mythbuster

Why do people subscribe to myths?

Distorted research: biased experimental design, reporting and interpretations of findings

Biased textbook coverage

Members of the public: confirmation bias or wishful thinking

Members of the public: deficient thinking about intrinsically improbable beliefs

Members of the public: mistaken extrapolation from limited personal experience

Members of the public: plausible beliefs based on general knowledge (kernel of truth)

Conclusions

Chapter 11: Brave new world

Experiments: the gold standard?

Developing new methods

Experimenter bias

The jingle-jangle fallacies

Granularity problem

Scientific analysis: meta-analysis

Scientific reporting

Psychology as a cumulative science

Conclusions

References