Preface
Chapter 1: Is psychology a science?
"Psychology is an inferior kind of science"
Reproducibility and the 'replication crisis'
Highly controlled experimental conditions
Clearly defined terminology
Predictability and testability: the 'theory crisis'
What should psychologists do?
Psychology is a different kind of science
Myths in psychology
Chapter 2: Visual perception
Myth: subliminal messages can motivate people's behaviour without their awareness
Myth: we generally detect changes in objects
Myth: visual perception provides us with very rich and accurate information about the environment at a glance
Myth: everyone agrees on the colour of a dress (or #theDress)
Myth: most people are 'face experts'
Why do we believe so many myths about visual perception?
Chapter 3: Mysteries of memory
Myth: "Memory is like a video camera"
Myth: memories do not change over time: they are permanent
Myth: repression and 'return of the repressed' are very common
Myth: amnesic patients have forgotten their pasts
Myth: the only function of (episodic) memory is to provide access to our past experiences
Myth: forgetting is a bad thing
Chapter 4: Thinking and cognition
Myth: 10,000 hours of practice produce outstanding performance
Myth: brain training improves your brain functioning and intelligence
Myth: we only use 10% of our brains
Myth: Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon be much more intelligent than humans
Myth: nudges are very effective at changing people's behaviour
Chapter 5: Intelligence
Myth: there are multiple intelligences in the human mind
Myth: it is important to match teaching methods to learning styles
Myth: emotional intelligence is helpful in life
Myth: IQ scores only measure how good someone is at taking intelligence tests
Myth: intelligence does not depend on genetic factors
Chapter 6: Personality
Myth: high self-esteem is highly desirable (and low self-esteem very undesirable)
Myth: situational factors overwhelm personality when predicting behaviour
Myth: personality measures do not predict consequential outcomes (like health, wealth and divorce) well enough to be useful
Myth: parenting practices are a major source of personality differences
Myth: men are from Mars, women are from Venus (men and women have dramatically different personalities)
Chapter 7: Social psychology
Myth: Milgram proved that most people will obey immoral orders
Myth: crowds typically panic in threatening situations
Myth: Zimbardo proved that the power structure in prisons makes guards aggressive and violent
Myth: individual differences in attitudes are mostly learned
Myth: happiness is influenced most strongly by what happens to us
Chapter 8: Mental disorders and their treatment
Myth: mental illnesses are due almost entirely to people's life experiences
Myth: psychiatric diagnoses or labels stigmatise people
Myth: The Rorschach Inkblot test is a very useful way of diagnosing most mental illnesses
Myth: people with multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder) have more than one distinct personality
Myth: most psychotherapy requires lying on a couch and recalling one's childhood
Myth: antidepressants are much more effective than psychotherapy for treating depression
Chapter 9: Psychology and the law
Myth: an eyewitness's confidence is never a good predictor of their identification accuracy
Myth: experts can nearly always identify the culprit from fingerprinting evidence
Myth: DNA tests are almost infallible for identifying culprits
Myth: the polygraph test is very good at detecting lying
Myth: hypnosis enhances eyewitnesses' memory
Myth: Offender profiling is (very) useful in identifying culprits
Chapter 10: How to become a mythbuster
Why do people subscribe to myths?
Distorted research: biased experimental design, reporting and interpretations of findings
Biased textbook coverage
Members of the public: confirmation bias or wishful thinking
Members of the public: deficient thinking about intrinsically improbable beliefs
Members of the public: mistaken extrapolation from limited personal experience
Members of the public: plausible beliefs based on general knowledge (kernel of truth)
Conclusions
Chapter 11: Brave new world
Experiments: the gold standard?
Developing new methods
Experimenter bias
The jingle-jangle fallacies
Granularity problem
Scientific analysis: meta-analysis
Scientific reporting
Psychology as a cumulative science
Conclusions
References
