Contents
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:
5 Correlation and Causation: Birth
6 Getting Things Under Control:
7 “But It’s Not Real Life!”:
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
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