Psychological studies are often taken with cynicism. Many feel that they are common sense, random, or just ridiculous. In this book Stanovich shows why we believe this, and how true psychology follows the same rigorous standards than those of the other sciences.
By its nature psychology is easy to fake. We can look around our lives and come up with theories that explain what we have seen. These aren’t real experiments but they feel correct as they follow our experiences. We accumulate this common sense and expect it to help us live our lives. Many times psychological experiments follow the trends we saw ourselves. So how are they any better than us? Firstly, Stanovich attacks this “wisdom” that people have that is essentially folk wisdom that has never been tested. The reason that experiments often follow our wisdom is because we have created folk wisdom that is contradictory in nature, to the extent that no matter what the psychologist said we would say it “makes sense”. We would tell someone to “look before you leap”, but at the same time say “he who hesitates is lost”. We may say “it’s better to be safe than sorry”, but its also better to have loved and lost than not have loved at all. Opposites attract, but “birds of a feather flock together”. I should do my work now because “if not now, when?”, but I should also “cross a bridge when I come to it”. Because of these contradictions, we have fooled ourselves that we understand all situations because they all fall into these categories, when in reality we don't understand it at all. It is the job of a psychologist to find out which is the correct one in a certain situation. The reason we love these cliches so much is because they cant be falsified. No amount of further research will prove them to be false. This fools us into thinking we understand the world, when we really don't.
Because clichés are easy to manufacture there is a lot of pop and pseudo-psychologists that portray the field poorly. They come up with claims that cannot be proved incorrect, sounding really smart but really having nothing of value to share. From this comes a rule. The more a thing can be falsified, the better claim it is. Real psychologists try to make falsifiable claims.
Another problem people have with psych studies is when they know of someone where it wasn't true. However, like all predictions, scientists are only working in probabilities, it isn’t always true, just usually true. Knowing someone that smoked for many years but did not develop cancer, does not prove that smoking doesn't cause cancer, and the same is true for psychology.
Stanovich goes over many more ideas that really pervade all sciences and explains how they hold just as true for psychology. He is upset at pseudo-psychology that tarnishes the name of the field. If people were to really look at psychology as it truly was, we as a people could learn more about how we interact with each other.
How to Think Straight About Psychology was a great read that taught me a lot about psychology but even more about how science works in general.
