How To Think Straight About Psychology: International Edition

Keith Stanovich's widely used and highly acclaimed book helps students become more discriminating consumers of psychological information, helping them recognize pseudoscience and be able to distinguish it from true psychological research.   Stanovich helps instructors teach critical thinking skills within the rich context of psychology.  It is the leading text of its kind.     How to Think Straight About Psychology says about the discipline of psychology what many instructors would like to say 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”.    

Table of Contents:
Preface       1. Psychology Is Alive and Well (and Doing Fine among the Sciences)     The Freud Problem     The Diversity of Modern Psychology                 Implications of Diversity     Unity in Science     What, Then, Is Science?                 Systematic Empiricism                 Publicly Verifiable Knowledge: Replication and Peer Review                 Empirically Solvable Problems: Scientists’ Search for Testable Theories     Psychology and Folk Wisdom: The Problem with “Common Sense”     Psychology as a Young Science     Summary     2. Falsifiability: How to Foil Little Green Men in the Head     Theories and the Falsifiability Criterion                 The Theory of Knocking Rhythms                 Freud and Falsifiability                 The Little Green Men                 Not All Confirmations Are Equal                 Falsifiability and Folk Wisdom                 The Freedom to Admit a Mistake                 Thoughts Are Cheap     Errors in Science: Getting Closer to the Truth     Summary     3. Operationism and Essentialism: “But, Doctor, What Does It Really Mean?”     Why Scientists Are Not Essentialists                 Essentialists Like to Argue About the Meaning of Words                 Operationists Link Concepts to Observable Events                 Reliability and Validity             Direct and Indirect Operational Definitions             Scientific Concepts Evolve     Operational Definitions in Psychology                 Operationism as a Humanizing Force                 Essentialist Questions and the Misunderstanding of Psychology                 Operationism and the Phrasing of Psychological Questions     Summary     4. Testimonials and Case Study Evidence: Placebo Effects and the Amazing Randi The Place of the Case Study     Why Testimonials Are Worthless: Placebo Effects     The “Vividness” Problem                 The Overwhelming Impact of the Single Case                 The Amazing Randi: Fighting Fire with Fire     Testimonials Open the Door to Pseudoscience     Summary     5. Correlation and Causation: Birth Control by the Toaster Method     The Third-Variable Problem: Goldberger and Pellagra                 Why Goldberger’s Evidence Was Better     The Directionality Problem     Selection Bias     Summary     6. Getting Things under Control: The Case of Clever Hans     Snow and Cholera     Comparison, Control, and Manipulation                 Random Assignment in Conjunction             With Manipulation Defines the True Experiment             The Importance of Control Groups             The Case of Clever Hans, the Wonder Horse                 Clever Hans in the 1990s                 Prying Variables Apart: Special Conditions                 Intuitive Physics                 Intuitive Psychology     Summary     7. “But It’s Not Real Life!”: The “Artificiality” Criticism and Psychology     Why Natural Isn’t Always Necessary                 The “Random Sample” Confusion                 The Random Assignment Versus Random Sample Distinction             Theory-Driven Research Versus Direct Applications     Applications of Psychological Theory                 The “College Sophomore” Problem                 The Real-Life and College Sophomore Problems in Perspective     Summary     8. Avoiding the Einstein Syndrome: The Importance of Converging Evidence     The Connectivity Principle                 A Consumer’s Rule: Beware of Violations of Connectivity                 The “Great-Leap” Model Versus the Gradual-Synthesis Model     Converging Evidence: Progress Despite Flaws                 Converging Evidence in Psychology     Scientific Consensus                 Methods and the Convergence Principle                 The Progression to More Powerful Methods     A Counsel against Despair     Summary     9. The Misguided Search for the “Magic Bullet”: The Issue of Multiple Causation The Concept of Interaction     The Temptation of the Single-Cause Explanation     Summary     10. The Achilles’ Heel of Human Cognition: Probabilistic Reasoning     “Person-Who” Statistics     Probabilistic Reasoning and the Misunderstanding of Psychology     Psychological Research on Probabilistic Reasoning                 Insufficient Use of Probabilistic Information                 Failure to Use Sample Size Information                 The Gambler’s Fallacy                 A Further Word about Statistics and Probability     Summary     11. The Role of Chance in Psychology The Tendency to Try to Explain Chance Events                 Explaining Chance: Illusory Correlation and the Illusion of Control                 Chance and Psychology                 Coincidence                 Personal Coincidences     Accepting Error in Order to Reduce Error: Clinical Versus Actuarial Prediction     Summary     12. The Rodney Dangerfield of the Sciences     Psychology’s Image Problem                 Psychology and Parapsychology                 The Self-Help Literature                 Recipe Knowledge     Psychology and Other Disciplines     Our Own Worst Enemies     Isn’t Everyone a Psychologist? Implicit Theories of Behavior     The Source of Resistance to Scientific Psychology     The Final Word     References       Index