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最高的50位发展心理学家之一，也是25位最高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。
目錄：
1 Psychology Is Alive and Well and Doing Fine Among the Sciences 1
The Freud Problem 1
The Diversity of Modern Psychology 2
Implications of Diversity 3
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 16
Summary 18
2 Falsifiability: How to Foil Little Green Men in the Head 19
Theories and the Falsifiability Criterion 20
The Theory of Knocking Rhythms 22
Freud and Falsifiability 23
The Little Green Men 25
Not All Confirmations Are Equal 26
Falsifiability and Folk Wisdom 27
The Freedom to Admit a Mistake 28
Thoughts Are Cheap 30
Errors in Science: Getting Closer to the Truth 31
Summary 34
3 Operationism and Essentialism: “But, Doctor,What Does It Really Mean?” 35
Why Scientists Are Not Essentialists 35
Essentialists Like to Argue About the Meaning of Words 36
Operationists Link Concepts to Observable Events 37
Reliability and Validity 38
Direct and Indirect Operational Definitions 40
Scientific Concepts Evolve 40
Operational Definitions in Psychology 42
Operationism as a Humanizing Force 45
Essentialist Questions and the Misunderstanding of Psychology 47
Operationism and the Phrasing of Psychological
Questions 48
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 63
The Amazing Randi: Fighting Fire with Fire 65
Testimonials Open the Door to Pseudoscience 67
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 80
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 91
The Case of Clever Hans, the Wonder Horse 94
Clever Hans in the 1990s 96
Prying Variables Apart: Special Conditions 99
Intuitive Physics 101
Intuitive Psychology 103
Summary 104
7 “But It’s Not Real Life!”: The “Artificiality”
Criticism and Psychology 105
Why Natural Isn’t Always Necessary 105
The “Random Sample” Confusion 107
The Random Assignment Versus Random Sample Distinction 107
Theory-Driven Research Versus Direct Applications 108
Applications of Psychological Theory 113
The “College Sophomore” Problem 115
The Real-Life and College Sophomore
Problems in Perspective 119
Summary 120
8 Avoiding the Einstein Syndrome: The Importance of Converging Evidence 121
The Connectivity Principle 122
A Consumer’s Rule: Beware of Violations of Connectivity 123
The “Great-Leap” Model Versus the Gradual-Synthesis Model 125
Converging Evidence: Progress Despite Flaws 126
Converging Evidence in Psychology 129
Scientific Consensus 133
Methods and the Convergence Principle 135
The Progression to More Powerful Methods 136
A Counsel Against Despair 139
Summary 142
9 The Misguided Search for the “Magic Bullet”:The Issue of Multiple Causation 145
The Concept of Interaction 146
The Temptation of the Single-Cause Explanation 149
Summary 152
10 The Achilles’ Heel of Human Cognition:Probabilistic Reasoning 153
“Person-Who” Statistics 155
Probabilistic Reasoning and the Misunderstanding of Psychology 156
Psychological Research on Probabilistic Reasoning 158
Insufficient Use of Probabilistic Information 159
Failure to Use Sample Size Information 161
The Gambler’s Fallacy 162
A Further Word About Statistics and Probability 164
Summary 166
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 173
Personal Coincidences 176
Accepting Error in Order to Reduce Error: Clinical versus Actuarial Prediction 177
Summary 184
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 194
Isn’t Everyone a Psychologist? Implicit Theories of Behavior 200
The Source of Resistance to Scientific Psychology 201
The Final Word 206
References 207
Name Index 231
Subject Index 238
內容試閱：
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.
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