拨除迷雾，去伪存真，教你如何使用批判性思维，在“伪心理学”横行的时代分辨出什么才是真正的心理学；
清华大学心理学系系主任彭凯平教授特别推荐给普通读者的心理学入门读物；
科学松鼠会推荐的心理学书籍；
全球300多所心理学院校采用的心理学入门教材；
*第10版，英文原版，原汁原味。
【内容简介】
在今天的大众媒体和图书市场上，到处充斥着关于潜能提升、心理操控、色彩星座、催眠读心等伪装成心理学的主题，更有一些伪心理学家、所谓的心理治疗师打着心理学的旗号欺世盗名，从中渔利。在浩如烟海、良莠不齐的心理学信息面前，如何拨除迷雾，去伪存真，成为一个明智的心理学信息的消费者？这本书将教给你科学实用的批判性思维技能，将真正的心理学研究从伪心理学中区分出来，告诉你什么才是真正的心理学。
《这才是心理学》第1版出版于1983年，30多年来一直被奉为心理学入门经典，在全球*大学中享有盛誉，现在呈现在读者面前的是英文第10版。这本书并不同于一般的心理学导论类教材，很多内容是心理学课堂上不曾讲授的，也是许多心理学教师在教学中感到只可意会而不可言传的。作者正是从此初衷出发，以幽默生动的语言，结合一些妙趣横生、贴近生活的实例，深入浅出地介绍了可证伪性、操作主义、实证主义、安慰剂效应、相关和因果、概率推理等心理学中的基本原则。与上一版相比，第10版更新了*的研究资料和实例以及172篇参考文献。
本书不仅适合于心理学专业的学生，有助于建立心理学研究中必要的批判性思维技能与意识，而其通俗易读性也非常适合所有对心理学感兴趣的读者，它将帮助你纠正对心理学的种种误解，学会独立地评估心理学信息，用科学的精神和方法理解自己和他人的行为。此外，由于心理学与其他学科的共通性，本书也不失为一本精彩有趣的科学哲学类读物。
【作者简介】
基思·斯坦诺维奇（Keith E. Stanovich），目前担任加拿大多伦多大学人类发展与应用心理学的国家首席教授，他的研究领域是推理和阅读的心理学机制。他于2010年获得格威尔美尔教育奖（Grawemeyer Award in Education）。他至今已发表了200多篇科学论文。在一项对于论文引用率的调查中，斯坦诺维奇位列引用率的50位发展心理学家之一，也是25位产的教育心理学家之一。他所撰写的《这才是心理学》（How to Think Straight about Psychology）一书被全球300多所心理学高等教育机构采用。
【媒体评论】
这本“与众不同的心理学”教科书，总结了心理学家的职业特质，让每一位读者都有机会去理解我们心理学家是如何去思考、分析和解读人类的行为和心理的。每一章都将一个常识的、朴素的、直觉的有关人类心理的分析和思考与一个科学的、严谨的、心理学的分析和思考相对比，以帮助读者理解心理学家的分析逻辑和研究思路。
彭凯平教授 清华大学心理学系系主任
美国加州大学伯克利分校心理学系终身教授
这本书在第1版时，我已经开始把它推荐给我的学生，那是三十多年前的事了。现在它已经出到第10版了，可见它深受几代老师及学生的喜爱。这本书之所以能如此有生命力，我想主要是因为作者能把一个非常枯燥及严肃的题材讲得那么生动易懂，引起老师和学生们在课堂上热烈的讨论及哈哈的笑声。阅读本书，可以让人们认识到及分辨出什么样的研究及数据才是真正科学的及可信的。为此，我不单只把它推荐给大专院校心理学系的学生作为研究方法课的教材，也强烈推荐给一般读者。
杨中芳教授
中国社会科学院社会学研究所社会心理研究中心客座研究员
心理学本身已经离弗洛伊德那个年代很远很远了。如果你是一个心理学爱好者，或者心理学初学者，又或者是高考填志愿想选择心理学为专业的学生，都强烈建议你们看一下这本书，这也许与你想象中的心理学有巨大的差别，但是这才是目前心理学发展的真正方向！
读者
【目录】
Preface xi
1 Psychology Is Alive and Well (and Doing Fine Among the Sciences) 1
The Freud Problem 1
The Diversity of Modern Psychology 3
Implications of Diversity 4
Unity in Science 6
What, Then, Is Science? 8
Systematic Empiricism 9
Publicly Verifiable Knowledge: Replication and Peer Review 10
Empirically Solvable Problems: Scientists’ Search for Testable Theories 12
Psychology and Folk Wisdom: The Problem with “Common Sense” 13
Psychology as a Young Science 17
Summary 18
2 Falsifiability: How to Foil Little Green Men in the Head 21
Theories and the Falsifiability Criterion 22
The Theory of Knocking Rhythms 23
Freud and Falsifiability 24
The Little Green Men 26
Not All Confirmations Are Equal 28
Falsifiability and Folk Wisdom 29
The Freedom to Admit a Mistake 29
Thoughts Are Cheap 32
Errors in Science: Getting Closer to the Truth 33
Summary 36
3 Operationism and Essentialism: “But, Doctor,What Does It Really Mean?” 37
Why Scientists Are Not Essentialists 37
Essentialists Like to Argue About the Meaning of Words 38
Operationists Link Concepts to Observable Events 39
Reliability and Validity 40
Direct and Indirect Operational Definitions 42
Scientific Concepts Evolve 43
Operational Definitions in Psychology 45
Operationism as a Humanizing Force 47
Essentialist Questions and the Misunderstanding of Psychology 49
Summary 51
4 Testimonials and Case Study Evidence: Placebo Effects and the Amazing Randi 53
The Place of the Case Study 54
Why Testimonials Are Worthless: Placebo Effects 56
The “Vividness” Problem 59
The Overwhelming Impact of the Single Case 62
The Amazing Randi: Fighting Fire with Fire 64
Testimonials Open the Door to Pseudoscience 65
Summary 71
5 Correlation and Causation: Birth Control
by the Toaster Method 73
The Third-Variable Problem: Goldberger and Pellagra 74
Why Goldberger’s Evidence Was Better 75
The Directionality Problem 78
Selection Bias 79
Summary 83
6 Getting Things Under Control: The Case of Clever Hans 85
Snow and Cholera 86
Comparison, Control, and Manipulation 87
Random Assignment in Conjunction with Manipulation
Defines the True Experiment 88
The Importance of Control Groups 90
The Case of Clever Hans, the Wonder Horse 95
Clever Hans in the 1990s 97
Prying Variables Apart: Special Conditions 100
Intuitive Physics 102
Intuitive Psychology 103
Summary 106
7 “But It’s Not Real Life!”: The “Artificiality” Criticism and Psychology 107
Why Natural Isn’t Always Necessary 107
The “Random Sample” Confusion 108
The Random Assignment Versus Random Sample Distinction 109
Theory-Driven Research Versus Direct Applications 110
Applications of Psychological Theory 115
The “College Sophomore” Problem 117
The Real-Life and College Sophomore Problems in Perspective 120
Summary 121
8 Avoiding the Einstein Syndrome: The Importance of Converging Evidence 123
The Connectivity Principle 124
A Consumer’s Rule: Beware of Violations of Connectivity 125
The “Great-Leap” Model Versus the Gradual-Synthesis Model 126
Converging Evidence: Progress Despite Flaws 128
Converging Evidence in Psychology 130
Scientific Consensus 134
Methods and the Convergence Principle 136
The Progression to More Powerful Methods 137
A Counsel Against Despair 139
Summary 142
9 The Misguided Search for the “Magic Bullet”: The Issue of Multiple Causation 143
The Concept of Interaction 144
The Temptation of the Single-Cause Explanation 147
Summary 150
10 The Achilles’ Heel of Human Cognition:
Probabilistic Reasoning 151
“Person-Who” Statistics 153
Probabilistic Reasoning and the Misunderstanding
of Psychology 154
Psychological Research on Probabilistic Reasoning 156
Insufficient Use of Probabilistic Information 157
Failure to Use Sample-Size Information 159
The Gambler’s Fallacy 161
A Further Word About Statistics and Probability 163
Summary 165
11 The Role of Chance in Psychology 167
The Tendency to Try to Explain Chance Events 167
Explaining Chance: Illusory Correlation and the Illusion of Control 170
Chance and Psychology 172
Coincidence 172
Personal Coincidences 175
Accepting Error in Order to Reduce Error: Clinical Versus Actuarial Prediction 176
Summary 183
12 The Rodney Dangerfield of the Sciences 185
Psychology’s Image Problem 185
Psychology and Parapsychology 186
The Self-Help Literature 188
Recipe Knowledge 190
Psychology and Other Disciplines 192
Our Own Worst Enemies 193
Isn’t Everyone a Psychologist? Implicit Theories of Behavior 199
The Source of Resistance to Scientific Psychology 200
The Final Word 205
References 207
Credits 229
Name Index 230
Subject Index 237
【前言】
Preface
New to the Tenth Edition
The tenth edition of How to Think Straight About Psychology has no major structural revisions because a chapter reorganization occurred in a previous edition. The content and order of the chapters remain the same. At the request of reviewers and users, this edition remains at the same length as the ninth edition. Readers and users have not wanted the book to lengthen and, indeed, it has not. I have continued to update and revise the examples that are used in the book (while keeping those that are reader favorites).
Some dated examples have been replaced with more contemporary studies and issues. I have made a major effort to use contemporary citations that are relevant to the various concepts and experimental effects that are mentioned. A large number of new citations appear in this edition (172 new citations, to be exact!), so that the reader continues to have up-to-date references on all of the examples and concepts.
The goal of the book remains what it always was—to present a short introduction to the critical thinking skills that will help the student to better understand the subject matter of psychology. During the past decade and a half there has been an increased emphasis on the teaching of critical thinking in universities (Abrami et al., 2008; Sternberg, Roediger, & Halpern, 2006). Indeed, some state university systems have instituted curricular changes mandating an emphasis on critical thinking skills. At the same time, however, other educational scholars were arguing that critical thinking skills should not be isolated from specific factual content. How to Think Straight About Psychology combines these two trends. It is designed to provide the instructor with the opportunity to teach critical thinking within the rich content of modern psychology.
Readers are encouraged to send me comments at: keith.stanovich@utoronto.ca.
There exists a body of knowledge that is unknown to most people. This information concerns human behavior and consciousness in their various forms. It can be used to explain, predict, and control human actions. Those who have access to this knowledge use it to gain an understanding of other human beings. They have a more complete and accurate conception of what determines the behavior and thoughts of other individuals than do those
who do not have this knowledge.
Surprisingly enough, this unknown body of knowledge is the discipline of psychology.
What can I possibly mean when I say that the discipline of psychology is unknown? Surely, you may be thinking, this statement was not meant to be taken literally. Bookstores contain large sections full of titles dealing with psychology. Television and radio talk shows regularly feature psychological topics. Magazine articles quote people called psychologists talking about a variety of topics. Nevertheless, there is an important sense in which the field of psychology is unknown.
Despite much seeming media attention, the discipline of psychology remains for the most part hidden from the public. The transfer of “psychological” knowledge that is taking place via the media is largely an illusion. Few people are aware that the majority of the books they see in the psychology sections of many bookstores are written by individuals with absolutely no standing in the psychological community. Few are aware that many of the people to whom television applies the label psychologist would not be considered so by the American Psychological Association or the Association for Psychological Science. Few are aware that many of the most visible psychological “experts” have contributed no information to the fund of knowledge in the discipline of psychology.
The flurry of media attention paid to “psychological” topics has done more than simply present inaccurate information. It has also obscured the very real and growing knowledge base in the field of psychology. The general public is unsure about what is and is not psychology and is unable to independently evaluate claims about human behavior. Adding to the problem is the fact that many people have a vested interest in a public that is either without evaluative skills or that believes there is no way to evaluate psychological claims. The latter view, sometimes called the “anything goes” attitude, is one of the fallacies discussed in this book, and it is particularly costly to the public. Many pseudosciences are multimillion-dollar industries that depend on the lack of public awareness that claims about human behavior can be tested. The general public is also unaware that many of the claims made by these pseudosciences (e.g., astrology, psychic surgery, speed reading, biorhythms, therapeutic touch, subliminal self-help tapes, facilitated communication, and psychic detectives) have been tested and proved false. The existence of the pseudoscience industry, which is discussed in this book, increases the media’s tendency toward sensationalistic reporting of science. This tendency is worse in psychology than in other sciences, and
understanding the reasons why this is so is an important part of learning how to think straight about psychology.
This book, then, is directed not at potential researchers in psychology but at a much larger group: the consumers of psychological information. The target audience is the beginning psychology student and the general reader who have encountered information on psychological issues in the general media and have wondered how to go about evaluating its validity.
This book is not a standard introductory psychology text. It does not outline a list of facts that psychological research has uncovered. Indeed, telling everyone to take an introductory psychology course at a university is probably not the ultimate solution to the inaccurate portrayal of psychology in the media. There are many laypeople with a legitimate interest in psychology who do not have the time, money, or access to a university to pursue formal study. More importantly, as a teacher of university-level psychology courses, I am forced to admit that my colleagues and I often fail to give our beginning students a true understanding of the science of psychology. The reason is that lower-level courses often do not teach the critical analytical skills that are the focus of this book. As instructors, we often become obsessed with “content”—with “covering material.” Every time we stray a little from the syllabus to discuss issues such as psychology in the media, we feel a little guilty and begin to worry that we may not cover all the topics before the end of the term.
Consider the average introductory psychology textbook. Many now contain between 600 and 800 multicolumned pages and reference literally hundreds of studies in the published literature. Of course, there is nothing wrong with such books containing so much material. It simply reflects the increasing knowledge base in psychology. There are, however, some unfortunate side effects. Instructors are often so busy trying to cram their students full of dozens of theories, facts, and experiments that they fail to deal with some of the fundamental questions and misconceptions that students bring with them to the study of psychology. Rather than dealing directly with these misconceptions, the instructors (and the introductory textbook authors) often hope that if students are exposed to enough of the empirical content of psychology, they will simply induce the answers to their questions. In short, the instructors hope that students will recognize the implicit answers to these questions in the discussions of empirical research in several content areas. All too often this hope is frustrated. In a final review session—or in office hours at the end of the term—instructors are often shocked and discouraged by questions and comments that might have been expected on the first day of the course but not after 14 weeks: “But psychology experiments aren’t real life; what can they tell us?”; “Psychology just can’t be a real science like chemistry, can it?”; “But I heard a therapist on TV say the opposite of what our textbook said”; “I think this theory isstupid—my brother behaves just the opposite of what it says”; “Psychology is nothing more than common sense, isn’t it?”; “Everyone knows what anxiety
is—why bother defining it?” For many students, such questions are not implicitly answered merely by a consideration of the content of psychology. In this book, I deal explicitly with the confusions that underlie questions and comments such as these.
Unfortunately, research has shown that the average introductory psychology course does surprisingly little to correct some of entering students’ misconceptions about the discipline (Keith & Beins, 2008; Kowalski & Taylor, 2009; Standing & Huber, 2003; Taylor & Kowalski, 2004). This unfortunate fact provides the rationale for this book. Psychology students need explicit instruction in the critical thinking skills that will make them into independent evaluators of psychological information.
Years after students have forgotten the content of an introductory psychology course, they will still use the fundamental principles covered in this book to evaluate psychological claims. Long after Erikson’s stages of development have been forgotten, students will be using the thinking tools introduced in this text to evaluate new psychological information encountered in the media. Once acquired, these skills will serve as lifelong tools that will aid in the evaluation of knowledge claims. First, they provide the ability to conduct an initial gross assessment of plausibility. Second, these skills provide some criteria for assessing the reliability of “expert” opinion.
Because the need to rely on expert opinion can never be eliminated in a complex society, the evaluation of an expert’s credibility becomes essential to knowledge acquisition. Although these critical thinking skills can be applied to any discipline or body of knowledge, they are particularly important in the area of psychology because the field is so often misrepresented in the general media.
Many psychologists are pessimistic about any effort to stem the tide of misinformation about their discipline. Although this pessimism is, unfortunately, often justified, this “consumer’s guide” to psychology was motivated by the idea that psychologists must not let this problem become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Although I have welcomed the opportunity to prepare several editions of How to Think Straight About Psychology, it is unfortunately true that the reasons for the book’s existence are just as applicable today as they were when I wrote the first edition. Media presentations of psychology are just as misleading as they ever were, and students in introductory psychology courses enter with as many misconceptions as they ever did. Thus, the goals of all subsequent editions have remained the same. These goals are shared by an increasing number of psychology instructors. Stanford University psychologist Roger Shepard (1983) echoed all the concerns that motivated the writing of the first edition of this text: “Although most undergraduate psychology students may not go on to scientific careers, one hopes that they acquire some facility for the critical evaluation of the incomplete, naive, confused, or exaggerated reports of social science ‘findings’ to which they will continue to be exposed by the popular media. . . . Widespread notions that human behavior and mental phenomena can be adequately understood through unaided common sense or, worse, by reference to
nonempirical pseudosciences, such as astrology, present us with a continuing challenge” (p. 855).
The goal of this book is to present a short introduction to the critical thinking skills that will help students to better understand the subject matter of psychology and better understand events in the world in which they live.
【书摘与插画】
The Freud Problem
Stop 100 people on the street and ask them to name a psychologist, either living or dead. Record the responses. Of course, Dr. Phil, Wayne Dyer, and other “media psychologists” would certainly be named. If we leave out the media and pop psychologists, however, and consider only those who have made a recognized contribution to psychological knowledge, there would be no question about the outcome of this informal survey. Sigmund Freud would be the winner hands down. B. F. Skinner would probably finish a distant second. No other psychologist would get enough recognition even to
bother about. Thus, Freud, along with the pop psychology presented in the media, largely defines psychology in the public mind.
The notoriety of Freud has greatly affected the general public’s conceptions about the field of psychology and has contributed to many misunderstandings. For example, many introductory psychology students are surprised to learn that, if all the members of the American Psychological Association (APA) who were concerned with Freudian psychoanalysis were collected, they would make up less than 10 percent of the membership. In another major psychological association, the Association for Psychological Science, they would make up considerably less than 5 percent. One popular introductory psychology textbook (Wade & Tavris, 2008) is over 700 pages long, yet contains only 15 pages on which either Freud or psychoanalysis is mentioned—and these 15 pages often contain
criticism (“most Freudian concepts were, and still are, rejected by most empirically oriented psychologists,” p. 19).
In short, modern psychology is not obsessed with the ideas of Sigmund Freud (as are the media and some humanities disciplines), nor is it largely defined by them. Freud’s work is an extremely small part of the varied set of issues, data, and theories that are the concern of modern psychologists. This
larger body of research and theory encompasses the work of five recent Nobel Prize winners (David Hubel, Daniel Kahneman, Herbert Simon, Roger Sperry, and Torsten Wiesel) and a former director of the National Science Foundation (Richard Atkinson), all of whom are virtually unknown to the public.
It is bad enough that Freud’s importance to modern psychology is vastly exaggerated. What makes the situation worse is that Freud’s methods of investigation are completely unrepresentative of how modern psychologists conduct their research (recall that Freud began his work over a hundred years ago). In fact, the study of Freud’s methods gives an utterly misleading impression of psychological research. For example, Freud did not use controlled experimentation, which, as we shall see in Chapter 6, is the most potent weapon in the modern psychologist’s arsenal of methods. Freud thought that case studies could establish the truth or falsity of theories. We shall see in Chapter 4 why this idea is mistaken. Finally, a critical problem with Freud’s work concerns the connection between theory and behavioral data. As we shall see in Chapter 2, for a theory to be considered scientific, the link between the theory and behavioral data must meet some minimal requirements. Freud’s theories do not meet these criteria (Dufresne, 2007; Hines, 2003; Macmillan, 1997; McCullough, 2001). To make a long story short, Freud built an elaborate theory on a database (case studies and introspection) that was not substantial enough to support it. Freud concentrated on building complicated theoretical structures, but he did not, as modern psychologists do, ensure that they would rest on a database of reliable, replicable behavioral relationships. In summary, familiarity with Freud’s style of work can be a significant impediment to the understanding of modern psychology.
In this chapter, we shall deal with the Freud problem in two ways. First, when we illustrate the diversity of modern psychology, the rather minor position occupied by Freud will become clear (see Haggbloom et al., 2002; Robins, Gosling, & Craik, 1999, 2000). Second, we shall discuss what features are common to psychological investigations across a wide variety of domains. A passing knowledge of Freud’s work has obscured from the general public what is the only unifying characteristic of modern psychology: the quest to understand behavior by using the methods of science.
The Diversity of Modern Psychology
There is, in fact, a great diversity of content and perspectives in modern psychology. This diversity drastically reduces the coherence of psychology as a discipline. Henry Gleitman (1981), winner of the American Psychological Foundation’s Distinguished Teaching Award, characterized psychology as “a loosely federated intellectual empire that stretches from the domains of the biological sciences on one border to those of the social sciences on the other” (p. 774). Commentators outside of psychology have criticized this diversity. For example, anthropologist Clifford Geertz (2000) has complained that “from the outside, at least, it does not look like a single field, divided into schools and specialties in the usual way. It looks like an assortment of disparate and disconnected inquiries classed together because they all make reference in some way or other to something or other called mental
functioning” (p. 187).
Understanding that psychology is composed of an incredibly wide and diverse set of investigations is critical to an appreciation of the nature of the discipline. Simply presenting some of the concrete indications of this diversity will illustrate the point. The APAhas 54 different divisions, each representing either a particular area of research and study or a particular area of practice (see Table 1.1). From the table, you can see the range of subjects studied by psychologists, the range of settings involved, and the different aspects of behavior studied. The other large organization of psychologists—the Association for Psychological Science—is just as diverse. Actually, Table 1.1 understates the diversity within the field of psychology because it gives the impression that each division is a specific specialty area. In fact, each of the 54 divisions listed in the table is a broad area of study that contains a wide variety of subdivisions! In short, it is difficult to exaggerate the diversity of the topics that fall within the field of psychology.
