Psychology

Here’s a public access primer on psycho terms to lose. (In case you know someone who is going into debt for this stuff and must learn them in order to pass.) Maybe we are getting somewhere? Including: (1) A gene for. The news media is awash in reports of identifying “genes for” a myriad of phenotypes, including personality traits, mental illnesses, homosexuality, and political attitudes (Sapolsky, 1997). For example, in 2010, The Telegraph (2010) trumpeted the headline, “‘Liberal gene’ discovered by scientists.” Nevertheless, because genes code for proteins, there are no “genes for” phenotypes per se, including behavioral phenotypes (Falk, 2014). Moreover, genome-wide association studies of major psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, suggest that there are probably Read More ›

Anyone remember Stapel?: Some readers will recall the case of the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, former dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University, who was publicly exposed in 2011 for faking his data in several dozen published papers about human behavior that had made him famous – and who, after being caught, decided to publish a book about his con, detailing how and why he’d done it. Uncommon Descent ran a story about the case (see here), and another story about how it was exposed (see here), while James Barham discussed it at further length over on his blog, TheBestSchools.org, in an article entitled, More Scientists Behaving Badly. A story about the case appeared in Read More ›

Jerome Bruner, cognitive psychologist, 96: Through research and observation, Bruner understood that human behavior is always influenced by the world and culture in which we live. His work helped move the field of psychology away from strict behaviorism and contributed to the emergence of cognitive psychology. Bruner eventually turned his attention to developmental and educational psychology, with an interest in how children learn. He argued that the goal of teaching isn’t to pass on knowledge, but to teach students to think and solve problems for themselves. He promoted a so-called “spiral curriculum,” in which students learn basic concepts and then circle back to revisit them again and again as more complicated concepts are added over time. He is credited with Read More ›

UD regulars might want to check out this thread at The Skeptical Zone. And follow it all the way through. In it you’ll get to see: (1) EL make assertions (and doubles down on them) about a book she later admits she didn’t even bother to read, assertions which were demonstrable false; (2) Keiths jump from the possibility of error/fraud in scientific studies on psi/the paranormal to the conclusion that the results must have been fraud/error; (3) Countless groundless, blanket assertions best epitomized by Alan Fox’s blanket statement “It doesn’t happen”, who remains silent on how he knows psi events “don’t happen”; (4) DNA_Jock completely misrepresent a past comment of mine on TSZ that concerned a video on spoon-bending saying Read More ›

From a review of Psychology gone wrong They show how study results can get distorted and changed in re-telling. Remember the Little Albert experiment? An infant was conditioned to develop a fear of white rats by exposing him simultaneously to a white rat and a loud noise. This confirmed a popular theory, so it was immediately accepted as evidence that early childhood experiences could create lasting phobias that would extend to similar objects (in this case, to anything white and furry). Most psychology textbooks have misrepresented the facts about that experiment. They get the child’s age wrong, say he was conditioned with a white rabbit, and make up other stimuli that he supposedly reacted to, like a puppy and a Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: th three decades of data from more than 475,000 participants, a new study on narcissism from the University at Buffalo School of Management reveals that men, on average, are more narcissistic than women. Forthcoming in the journal Psychological Bulletin, the study compiled 31 years of narcissism research and found that men consistently scored higher in narcissism across multiple generations and regardless of age. “Narcissism is associated with various interpersonal dysfunctions, including an inability to maintain healthy long-term relationships, unethical behavior and aggression,” says lead author Emily Grijalva, PhD, assistant professor of organization and human resources in the UB School of Management. “At the same time, narcissism is shown to boost self-esteem, emotional stability and the tendency to emerge Read More ›

Here at Retraction Watch: Psychology has been home to some of the most infamous cases of fraud in recent years, and while it’s just a few bad apples who are spoiling the bunch, the field itself has seen an overall increase in retractions, according to a new paper by Jürgen Margraf appearing in Psychologische Rundschau and titled “Zur Lage der Psychologie.” That increase, Margraf found, is not entirely due to its most well-known fraudsters. More. On the other hand, maybe it’s nothing. 😉 See also: If peer review is working, why all the retractions? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Here: A well-replicated finding in the psychological literature is the negative correlation between religiosity and intelligence. However, several studies also conclude that one form of religiosity, church attendance, is protective against later-life cognitive decline. No effects of religious belief per se on cognitive decline have been found, potentially due to the restricted measures of belief used in previous studies. Here, we examined the associations between religiosity, intelligence, and cognitive change in a cohort of individuals (initial n = 550) with high-quality measures of religious belief taken at age 83 and multiple cognitive measures taken in childhood and at four waves between age 79 and 90. We found that religious belief, but not attendance, was negatively related to intelligence. The effect Read More ›