I think that Annette's question, and John's follow-up, are extremely
interesting and important. I've struggled with the same issue myself, without
much success. In a recent chapter written in honor of the late Albert Ellis, a
few of us took a crack at this issue by conducting an informal "eyeball factor
analysis" of psychological misconceptions. We came up with a few broad,
cross-cutting higher-order misconceptions (e.g., the myth of unrealized
intellectual potential, the myth of fragility, the myth of the primary of early
experience, the myth of self-esteem) that may subsume many of the lower-order
misconceptions to which Annette refers. But I don't think we were especially
successful, in part because many other psychological myths don't fall neatly or
cleanly into any of our categories. Of course, it's possible that the
higher-order domains that cut across psychological myths are more
methodological (e.g., confusing correlation with causation, post hoc ergo
propter hoc errors, illusory correlation) than substantive.
Is anyone aware of published factor analyses of extant psychological
myth/misconception scales? Such factor analyses might at least hint at
underlying dimensions that in turn point to deeper conceptual
misunderstandings. Of course, it's also possible that the factors that emerge
could merely correspond to surface domains (e.g., myths about memory, myths
about the brain, myths about psychopathology), but I'd be curious to know if
anyone is aware of such data - as I've never seen any.
Scott O. Lilienfeld, Ph.D.
Professor
Editor, Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice
Department of Psychology, Room 473 Psychology and Interdisciplinary Sciences
(PAIS)
Emory University
36 Eagle Row
Atlanta, Georgia 30322
[email protected]
(404) 727-1125
Psychology Today Blog:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-skeptical-psychologist
50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology:
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-140513111X.html
Scientific American Mind: Facts and Fictions in Mental Health Column:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciammind/
The Master in the Art of Living makes little distinction between his work and
his play,
his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his
recreation,
his love and his intellectual passions. He hardly knows which is which.
He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does,
leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing.
To him - he is always doing both.
- Zen Buddhist text
(slightly modified)
From: Jonathan Mueller [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 9:13 AM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Subject: Re: [tips] fundamental psych concepts (was assessment)
Annette,
That's an interesting thought. How are misconceptions different in psychology
than in other sciences? In general, I think you are right about there being
more core misconceptions in something like physics. But some of those are more
readily apparent because they deal more with the physical world. I suspect if
we give it more thought, and I'm sure others have that I just don't know of, we
could identify some core misconceptions that affect psychological understanding
as well. It would be interesting to try to identify some of those.
For example, people have a great deal of trouble with the concept of
randomness. That leads to all kinds of specific errors. But underlying those
specific errors is a more fundamental misunderstanding of the probabilistic
nature of the way the world works.
Another one might be that people generally understand that "seeing is
believing." But many of us commit errors in judgment because we have
difficulty understanding "believing is seeing" as well.
Other core concepts in psychology?
Jon
===============
Jon Mueller
Professor of Psychology
North Central College
30 N. Brainard St.
Naperville, IL 60540
voice: (630)-637-5329
fax: (630)-637-5121
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu
>>> <[email protected]> 3/2/2010 5:01 PM >>>
This is a good discussion for us to have on tips--the whole idea of teaching
for conceptual coherence.
I've been working on changing misconceptions and have read the education
literature on conceptual development and more importantly on conceptual change
extensively.
What I have come to conclude is that there is a serious disconnect between the
sciences like physics, chemistry and biology, and psychology. And here is where
my problem arose and why I say this:
Conceptual change when examined from a "science" perspective generally is
discussed in terms of students getting a more global, or holistic gist of a
conceptual premise. For example, when students have misconceptions about
physics they are generally just not undestanding an underlying "concept" such
as force, gravity, or mass; or in chemistry, concepts such as the mole.
But I don't think we have these global overarching concepts in understanding
the fundamental principles of psychology. For example, if students have
misconceptions in psychology they tend to be things like believing that Sugar
Causes Hyperactivity in Children; Or Listening to Mozart Will Make you Smarter;
or Subliminal advertising can get you to buy things you would not have
otherwise purchased.
These are more disjointed factoids that come from places like folk knowledge,
rather than from some conceptual misunderstanding of a critical psychological
construct that udnerlie a paradigm. These are not large paradigmatic concepts
that underlie student's misunderstanding of how things work in the mind, per se.
Let me quote from the wiki page referred to below:
>As a result the most important role for concept inventories
>is to provide instructors with clues as to the ideas,
>scientific misconceptions, didaskalogenic, i.e. instruction
>induced confusions, and/or conceptual lacunae, with which
>students are working, and which may be actively interfering
>with learning.
So I'm not sure a concept inventory would help us much. There are no
demonstrable "conceptual lacunae" that are interfering with learning.
Rather there are frequently encountered bits of misinformation based on faulty
evidence or faulty interpretation of evidence that become part of the cultural
knowledge about behavior. It's not like when you finally come to understand
force or motion or gravity or moles, that things will fall into place with
other misconceptions.
That is why I believe psychology has been notably excluded from these
conversations. See the wiki as an example of where there is nothing from
psychology.
I think we are in a different domain and have to come up with a different set
criteria for the discipline. And there are good people struggling with this;
but it is not coming across in the same way as it would in other disciplines;
it cannot be assessed in the same way.
So one thought I had was that a type of critical evaluation of evidence is a
unifying construct of what leads people to have many of the misconceptions they
have in psychology. But it's hard to make a case for "conceptual change" in
that sense.
Other than that, psychology is really about learning tons and tons of facts and
factoids. The large overarching constructs are few and far between. Maybe that
is part of what makes psychology so hard?
Anyway, I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this idea of overarching
conceptual themes in psychology and how misconceptions could be construed in
terms of those conceptual themes.
Annette
Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
University of San Diego
5998 Alcala Park
San Diego, CA 92110
619-260-4006
[email protected]
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