Here is my take/opinion on this (of course, I am committing the act
that I am just about to rip into).
One problem is that we can't "prove" things in psychology. Because of
the complexity of behavior we can't state that in all cases this will
be true - it just is impossible. So, as we discuss issues, there are
always going to be cases that students have in their mind of "well, my
aunt, mother, best friend's boyfriend, etc. went through this and a
different outcome occurred, so since this situation doesn't hold here,
then it doesn't hold in other places." So, then it seems more like
opinion than fact (yes, I get the irony that this is my opinion). In
the sciences, such as chemistry. math, and physics, there are certain
laws and those laws are pretty consistent (2+2=4). Not so in psych.
Students want nice, clean-cut answers (preferable 1) rather than messy
shades of gray (well, in this situation it is this, but in this other
it is something else).
I also think that students have been studying behavior informally all
of their life - not so much with physics, chemistry, math. I think the
attitude there is more "Let me just memorize this stuff since I don't
understand it."
Lilienfeld, Scott O wrote:
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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Deb
Dr. Deborah S. Briihl
Dept. of Psychology and Counseling
Valdosta State University
229-333-5994
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