At Science of Us Jesse Singal reports on a review of popular introductory texts that found them wanting:
In spring of 2012, Ferguson and his colleagues solicited and received 24 popular introductory textbooks, and then got to work evaluating them. Specifically, they evaluated those textbooks’ coverage of seven “controversial ideas in psychology†— ideas where there’s genuine mainstream disagreement among researchers — and also checked for the presence of five well-known scientific urban legends that, as far as the psychological Establishment is concerned, have been debunked.
Basically, the study found that the texts tended to be biased and frequently reported garbage as fact.
That’s not new. It was true half a century ago, too.
I may have told this story before but the only class in college I was ever kicked out of was a mathematical psychology class. At the end of the first session the prof called me to his desk and politely told me to get out on the grounds that I knew too much math. As an alternative he gave me an independent study that I spent developing mathematical models of psychological experiments.
When I took Intro to psych some 20 years ago, the books lacked the type of specificity the researchers here are examining. We were learning schools of thought (some of which were obviously not built on models of mathematical analysis), terminology, value systems implicit in how issues are framed, and basically how to think about things from the perspective of the field. (In retrospect I would analogize it to law school, where one doesn’t learn much law because laws change, but learn the language and structure of law)