I think Jon's examples are closer to fundamental ways people naturally conceptualize aspects of experience relevant to psychology. Misconceptions of memory or refuted assumptions about early childhood, hypnosis, or the polygraph are somewhat removed from, and may or may not derive from what phenomenologists would term the natural attitude. It is here I think that psychology might find some fundamental ways of conceptualizing that underlie the presumed subject matter of psychology. Perhaps the idea of memory as an imprint? The natural and magical way in which people reify movement, form, and abstractions such as the mind? It is always interesting to me when the conceptual foundations of our subject matter are discussed. I don't know however, that other sciences or scientists dwell so much on such topics, or really examine their conceptual foundations that well. I am not sure how this relates to Hake's original point, or but then I am writing on the fly as usual...Gary
Gerald L. (Gary) Peterson, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Psychology Saginaw Valley State University University Center, MI 48710 989-964-4491 [email protected] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Scott O Lilienfeld" <[email protected]> To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, March 3, 2010 9:22:50 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: RE: [tips] fundamental psych concepts (was assessment) 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] 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] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] . 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