目录
Preface xiv
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 4
What, Then, Is Science 6
Systematic Empiricism 7
Publicly Verifiable Knowledge:Replication and Peer Review 8
Empirically Solvable Problems:Scientists' Search for Testable Theories 10
Psychology and Folk Wisdom:The Problem with “Common Sense” 11
Psychology as a Young Science 15
Summary 16
2 Falsifiability:How to Foil Little
Green Men in the Head 17
Theories and the Falsifiability Criterion 18
The Theory of Knocking Rhythms 19
Freud and Falsifiability 20
The Little Green Men 22
Not All Confirmations Are Equal 23
Falsifiability and Folk Wisdom 24
The Freedom to Admit a Mistake 25
Thoughts Are Cheap 27
Errors in Science:Getting Closer to the Truth 28
Summary 30
3 Operationism and Essentialism:
“But, Doctor, What Does It Really Mean ” 31
Why Scientists Are Not Essentialists 31
Essentialists Like to Argue About the Meaning of Words 32
Operationists Link Concepts to Observable Events 32
Reliability and Validity 34
Direct and Indirect Operational Definitions 37
Scientific Concepts Evolve 38
Operational Definitions in Psychology 40
Operationism as a Humanizing Force 42
Essentialist Questions and the Misunderstanding of Psychology 43
Summary 44
4 Testimonials and Case Study Evidence:
Placebo Effects and the Amazing Randi 45
The Place of the Case Study 47
Why Testimonials Are Worthless:Placebo Effects 48
The “Vividness” Problem 51
The Overwhelming Impact of the Single Case 53
Why Vivid Anecdotes and Testimonials Are So Potent 54
The Amazing Randi:Fighting Fire with Fire 55
Testimonials Open the Door to Pseudoscience 57
Summary 62
5 Correlation and Causation:Birth
Control by the Toaster Method 63
The Third-Variable Problem 64
Why Goldberger's Evidence Was Better 65
The Directionality Problem 68
Selection Bias 70
Summary 72
6 Getting Things Under Control:
The Case of Clever Hans 74
Snow and Cholera 75
Comparison, Control, and Manipulation 76
Random Assignment in Conjunction with
Manipulation Defines the True Experiment 77
The Importance of Control Groups 79
The Case of Clever Hans, the Wonder Horse 83
Clever Hans in the 1990s and in the Present Day 85
Prying Variables Apart:Special Conditions 88
Intuitive Physics 90
Intuitive Psychology 91
Summary 93
7 “But It's Not Real Life!”:
The “Artificiality” Criticism and Psychology 94
Why Natural Isn't Always Necessary 94
The Random Sample Versus Random Assignment Confusion 96
Theory-Driven Research Versus Direct Applications 97
Applications of Psychological Theory 99
The “College Sophomore” Problem 101
The Real-Life and College Sophomore Problems in Perspective 104
Summary 105
8 Avoiding the Einstein Syndrome:
The Importance of Converging Evidence 106
The Connectivity Principle 107
A Consumer's Rule:Beware of Violations of Connectivity 108
The “Great-Leap” Model Versus the Gradual-Synthesis Model 109
Converging Evidence:Progress Despite Flaws 110
Types of Converging Evidence 113
Scientific Consensus 118
Methods and the Convergence Principle 118
The Progression to More Powerful Methods 119
A Counsel Against Despair 122
Summary 124
9 The Misguided Search for the “Magic Bullet”:
The Issue of Multiple Causation 125
The Concept of Interaction 126
The Temptation of the Single-Cause Explanation 128
Summary 131
10 The Achilles' Heel of Human
Cognition:Probabilistic Reasoning 132
“Person-Who” Statistics 135
Probabilistic Reasoning and the Misunderstanding of Psychology 136
Psychological Research on Probabilistic Reasoning 138
Insufficient Use of Probabilistic Information 139
Failure to Use Sample-Size Information 140
The Gambler's Fallacy 142
A Further Word About Statistics and Probability 144
Summary 146
11 The Role of Chance in Psychology 147
The Tendency to Try to Explain Chance Events 147
Explaining Chance:Illusory Correlation and the Illusion of Control 150
Chance and Psychology 151
Coincidence 151
Personal Coincidences 153
Accepting Error in Order to Reduce Error:Clinical Versus Actuarial Prediction 155
Summary 160
12 The Rodney Dangerfield of the Sciences 162
Psychology's Image Problem 163
Psychology and Parapsychology 163
The Self-Help Literature 165
Recipe Knowledge 166
Psychology and Other Disciplines 167
Our Own Worst Enemies 168
Our Own Worst Enemies, Part II:Psychology
Has Become an Ideological Monoculture 172
Isn't Everyone a Psychologist Implicit Theories of Behavior 178
The Source of Resistance to Scientific Psychology 179
The Final Word 182
References 183
Name Index 210
Subject Index 217
摘要
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 and other “media psychologists” would certainly be named. If we leave out the media and pop psychologists, however, and consider only those who have had an impact on psychology as a discipline, there would be no question about the outcome of this informal survey. Sigmund Freud would be the winner hands down. B. F. Skinner would finish a distant second (Roediger, 2016; Sternberg, 2016). 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 views 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 5 percent of the membership (Engel, 2008). In another major psychological association, the Association for Psychological Science, they would be even less common. 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). Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik (2014) calls Freudian theory a zombie idea that has haunted English departments of universities long after it had nearly disappeared from psychology.
In short, modern psychology is not obsessed with the ideas of Sigmund Freud, 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 concern modern psychologists. This larger body of research and theory encompasses the work of 5 Nobel Prize winners (David Hubel, Daniel Kahneman, Herbert Simon, Roger Sperry, and Torsten Wiesel) and 17 winners of the National Medal of Science (Lowman & Benjamin, 2012), 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. In fact, Freud’s methods give 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. As one historian of psychotherapy has noted, “If Freud himself was a scientist, it was a strange science he was promulgating. . . . Psychoanalysis contained theories and hypotheses, but it lacked a method of empirical observation” (Engel, 2008, p. 17).
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 (Boudry & Buekens, 2011; Dufresne, 2007; Engel, 2008). 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. Second, we shall discuss what features are common to psychological investigations across a wide variety of domains (features missing from Freud’s work). We will see that there is one unifying characteristic of modern psychology: the quest to understand behavior by using the methods of science.
