1.3: Scientific Thinking: Distinguishing Fact

• In the last part of the chapter, we'll discuss herbal remedies, long-term psychoanalysis, and energy therapies.

• Pseudoscientific treatments can cause psychological or physical damage, or even death, on rare occasions.
• The tragic case of Candace Newmaker, a 10-year-old child who received treatment for her behavioral problems in Colorado in 2000, illustrates this point.

• During rebirthing, children or adolescents reenact the trauma of birth with the assistance of one or more therapists.
• During her rebirthing session, two therapists wrapped her in a flannel blanket, sat on her, and squeezed her to make her feel pregnant.
• During the 40-minute session, Candace vomited several times and begged the therapists for air, complaining that she couldn't breathe and felt as though she was going to die.
• She was dead when she was unwrapped from her birth canal.

• It is not possible to think scientificly as a citizen.
• Scientific thinking skills can be applied to all aspects of our lives.
• We need scientific thinking skills to reach educated decisions about climate change, genetically modified foods, stemcell research, vaccine safety, novel medical treatments, and parenting and teaching practices, among dozens of other claims.

• The take- home message is that pseudoscience is important.
• Scientific thinking is important because it is our best safeguard against errors to which we are all prone.

• Key features of scientific skepticism are listed.
• Explain the text's six principles of scientific thinking.

• You will be able to.
• The scientific skeptic uses the approach of scientific skepticism persuasive evidence before accepting any claims.
• We should be certain to distinguish skepti throughout your life.

• Scientific skeptics are willing to change their minds if they are presented with evidence that challenges their preconceptions.
• They only change their minds when the evidence is persuasive.
• The Missouri principle is the motto of the scientific skeptic and can be found on many Missouri license plates.

• Scientific skepticism is not always willing to accept claims on the basis of authority alone.
• Scientific skeptics are reluctant to accept claims until they have met a high standard of evidence.
• We're often forced to accept the word of authorities because we don't have the time or expertise to evaluate our own claims.
• While reading this chapter, you're placing trust in the authors to give you accurate information about psychology.

• This doesn't mean you should accept everything we've written.
• Evaluate what we've written with skepticism.
• If you disagree with something we've written, you can ask your instructor or send us an e-mail.

• Critical thinking is a set of skills that can be used to evaluate claims.

• Confirmation bias, which can blind us to evidence we'd prefer to ignore, is a set of skills for overcoming scientific thinking.
• This framework of principles should be used when evaluating all psychological claims, including claims in the media, self-help books, on the Internet, and even in this text.
• Table 1.4 offers a number of user-friendly tips for critically evaluating information on the internet, and most of these tips should be of help with evaluating information in other popular sources.
• In an age where fake and real online news stories are becoming more difficult to distinguish, tips like this are important.
• Recent evidence shows that college students can't differentiate fake from real news stories.

• There are five questions to ask yourself when evaluating psychological web sites.

• That's a good sign if the site refers to peer-reviewed psychological.

• Be skeptical if the site contains multiple references.

Is the site mostly references to an If so?

Does the site make extreme claims?

• You may want to think twice before you accept its claims.

• The six principles of scientific thinking are used in this text.

• When they aren't, they are due to a third factor that concludes that eating ice cream causes crime.

• The American Northwest has claimed for decades that people remember without being discovered by more words from the beginning researchers.

• Thought Field Therapy is an "energy therapy" that is now practiced by thousands of mental health professionals.
• The idea that our bodies are surrounded by invisible energy fields and that anxiety disorders and other psychological conditions are caused by blocked energy fields is the basis of TFT.
• While asking clients to hum song tunes, therapists try to remove energy blockages by tapping on various body areas in a specific order.
• There isn't a shred of good evidence that it works, even though well-controlled studies show that it works better than nothing.
• A specific diet plan is not considered by most TFT advocates.
• She might have a different explanation for the success of the diet plan: like many other effective exercised or used another diet plan.
• Maybe the larger treatments for anxiety disorders were never hers to begin with.

• Researchers and therapists have known for a long time that exposure can be therapeutic.
• The claims that run well ahead of the data are the result of not including the rival hypothesis that the effectiveness comes from exposure rather than tapping on specific body parts.

• We should ask ourselves if we've excluded other plausible explanations for the psychological claim.

• One of the most common mistakes laypersons make when interpreting studies is to conclude that one thing is related to the other.
• One fact that two variables are correlated doesn't mean that one causes the other.

• correlation isn't causation because it must cause the other.

• It's possible that variable A causes variable B.

• It's possible that variable A is caused by variable B.

• Many people forget that there's also a third possibility.

• It's a problem because it can lead us to think that A and B are related when they aren't.
• Researchers found that teenagers who listen to music with a lot of sexual lyrics have sex more often than teenagers who listen to music with tamer lyrics.
• The findings of the study were summarized in a headline that said "Sexual lyrics prompt teens to have sex".

• There is a chance that music with sexual lyrics causes sexual behavior.
• There is no way to know the data reported by the authors.
• Correlation is not a cause.

• A correlation between two things isn't proof of a connection.

• We can't test a theory if it isn't true.
• The principle of falsifiability doesn't mean that a theory can't be meaningful.

• Correlation isn't always related to something.

• The King theory can account for every conceivable outcome, but it doesn't explain everything.
• That's Features Syndicate.

• Predicting every possible outcome is capable of being disproved.

• The New York Yankees and New York Mets will both win tomorrow by three runs, but the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers will lose by one run.
• There is a chance he will be wrong.
• It wouldn't prove he's psychic, but it might make you wonder if he has some special abilities.

• Whenever we evaluate a psychological claim, we should ask ourselves if it's consistent with any evidence at all.

• One problem with these conclusions is that the news media doesn't tell us anything about the size of the studies on which they're based, and that the findings often haven't been psychological findings.

• A dependable science depends on the ability to reproduce.
• It increases the chance that the original findings were the result of chance if researchers' findings can't be compared.

• Over the past decade, psychological scientists have become more and more involved in determining the extent to which psychological findings are related to replication.
• Some of this heightened awareness is replicable.

• Early studies of the effectiveness of new drugs for schizophrenia showed larger effects than recent studies.
• The effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression may be the same as it has been over time.
• Most psychologists agree that the decline effect can sometimes exist.

• In 2015, they published a "bombshell" article that attempted to replicate 100 published findings in social and cognitive psychology; social psychology examines the effects of other people on our behaviors and attitudes, whereas cognitive psychology examines thinking processes.
• They found that only 40 percent of the original findings could be replicated.
• This sobering result doesn't mean that the original positive findings were wrong; it's possible that the later findings were wrong, or that the original findings hold up only in certain settings or among certain groups of individuals.

• We can't take the replicability of psychological results for granted according to a few researchers.

• Minor variations in the original design of spaceships brought aboard by aliens are most common.
• Those in various cultures, races, and geographical locations could be ferent participants.

• The more we can replicate our findings using different participants in different settings, the more confidence we can place in those findings.

• The media are more likely to report positive findings than failures.
• The initial findings may be fascinating or sensational, whereas replication failures are usually disappointing.
• This increases our confidence in investigators other than the original researchers, so it's important that they duplicate the results.
• If I tell you that I've created a recipe for the world's most delicious veal parmigiana, but it turns out that every other chef who follows my recipe ends up with a meal that tastes like an old piece of cardboard smothered in rotten cheese and six-month- Maybe I lied about my recipe.
• I might have been tossing in ingredients that weren't in the recipe.
• Maybe I'm such an amazing chef that nobody else can duplicate my feats.
• You have every right to doubt my recipe until someone else does it.
• The same principle applies to psychological research.

• The literature on ESP shows how important replicability is.
• Every time there is a blue moon, a researcher reports a new finding that seems to confirm the existence of ESP.
• Many of the initial positive findings were not replicated by independent researchers, which might lead a skeptical observer to wonder if many of the initial positive findings were true.

• If independent investigators have replicated the findings that support a psychological claim, it's a good sign.

• This principle was proposed by a Scottish philosopher in the 18th century.
• The more persuasive the evidence for a claim is, the more likely we are to accept it.

• Hundreds and even thousands of Americans are being lifted out of their beds, taken aboard flying saucers, and then returned to their beds hours later, according to a group of researchers.
• According to some alien abduction advocates, aliens are trying to create a race of alien-human hybrid by taking semen from human males to have sex with female aliens.

• Their claims are extraordinary because they imply that tens of thousands of flying saucers from other solar systems have escaped detection by hundreds of astronomer and air traffic controllers.
• Proponents of alien abduction have been unable to provide a shred of evidence that the abductees have actually encountered aliens.
• The self-reports of supposed abductees are all alien abduction proponents have to show for their claims.

• When evaluating a psychological claim, we should ask ourselves if the claim is counter to what we know already and if the evidence is as extraordinary as the claim.

• The results of the study don't necessarily show that drinking the Weight Buster leads to weight loss.
• Maybe people who drank the calories-laden drink consumed less food because they knew it was fat.
• The six people who drank the coffee worked hard to lose weight because they knew they were being studied.

• This critical thinking principle isn't relevant to this scenario because the study doesn't describe a correla, so try another one.

• You like to drink coffee in the morning to wake you up and stay alert in the afternoon.
• Specialty coffee drinks are delicious.

• People don't want to put on weight because of the weight loss claims.

• Moonbeams didn't conduct that study, or if they did, they were advertising a "grande" size caramel Frappuccino.
• They're not telling you what they found.

"Incredible as it sounds, you can 4."

• We should be skeptical of the findings that they lost weight.

• There is only one study that supports the hy control group in the evidence for Chapter 1.
• The claim is not supported by the evidence.

• The evidence reported by the store manager derives from a small, for the store manager's conclusions, such as that the six unreplicated study that's seriously flawed because it doesn't people studied aren't typical of al participants.

• If two explanations account equally well for a phenomenon, we should choose the more parsimonious one.
• The simplest explanation that does a good job of accounting for the evidence is what good researchers use.
• KISS is said to be the principle of keeping it simple, stupid.
• The hard-and-fast rule is not a guideline.
• Sometimes the best explanation for a phenomenon is the most complex.
• The rule of thumb is that it's right more often than it's wrong.

• Let's look at an example.
• Crop circles began appearing in wheat fields in England in the late 1970s and 1980s.
• Most of the designs were very complex.
• Many people believe that they came from distant planets.

• The crop circles are proof that aliens are in our world.

• The crop circle excitement came crashing down in 1991, when two British men confessed to creating the crop circles as a barroom prank intended to poke fun at uncritical believers in extraterrestrials.
• They used wooden plank and rope to stomp through tall fields of wheat to craft their designs.
• When confronted with two explanations that fit the evidence equally well, we should choose the simpler one.

• When evaluating a psychological claim, we should ask ourselves if the explanation is the simplest one that accounts for the data or if it is more complicated.

• Take a look at the major theoretical frameworks of psychology.
• The scientific approach to the study of the mind, brain, and behavior materialized slowly and in numerous fits and starts, and the field's initial attempts displayed many of the weaknesses that pseudoscientific approaches possess today.
• Informal efforts to understand how our minds work.

• Many of the same challenges have been faced by psychology throughout its history.
• It's important to understand how psychology evolved as a scientific discipline, one that relies on systematic research methods to avoid being fooled.

• The field of psychology was hard to distinguish from philosophy for a long time.
• They sat and contemplated the human mind psychology laboratory.
• The armchair is where Wundt is usually from.
• They relied on common sense.

• The landscape of psychology changed dramatically in the late 1800s.

• The first psychological laboratory in Germany was developed in 1879.
• 1879 is considered to be the birth year of scientific psychology.

• If participants are asked to look at an object, they should report everything they see.
• Soon, psychologists around the world opened laboratories in departments of psychology, launching psychology as a full-fledged scientific discipline.

• Before becoming a science, psychology had to break free from spiritualism.
• In the mid- and late 1800s, Americans became fas, and one of William James's students was Mary Whiton Calkins, who seances.
• The first female president of the group sessions that took place in darkened rooms attempted to channel the spirits of deceased individuals.

• Being an outstanding student at mind reading and other extrasensory abilities.
• Many famous psychologists of the day, Harvard University, the faculty denied her including William James, invested a great deal of time and effort in the search for these tenure because of her gender and despite her paranormal capacities.

• The study from spiritualism was helped by the respectful distance developed by psychology.
• The psychology of human error of memory, sensation, and self-concept was created by it.

• The question of how people can fool themselves into believing things that aren't supported by evidence was asked by a growing number of psychologists in the late 1800s.

• Structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, and 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 are five major theoretical perspectives.
• The answer isn't completely clear.
• There is something valuable to contribute to scientific psychology, but each viewpoint has limitations.

• The table has the perspectives that shaped psychology.

• Sigmund Freud life experiences in behavior of conscious awareness contradictory because they're explaining behavior at different levels of analysis.
• Over time, psychology's view of what constitutes a scientific approach to behavior has changed and continues to evolve.

• The field of structuralism was founded by Edward Titchener, a British student who migrated to the United States in 1927.
• Structuralists wanted to create a map of the elements of consciousness similar to the periodic table of the elements.

• Structuralism eventually ran out of steam.
• There were at least two major problems.
• Highly trained introspectionists often disagreed on their subjective reports, suggesting that they weren't arriving at a truly objective set of basic elements of consciousness.
• If we ask a participant to add 10 and 5, he or she will quickly respond "15," but he or she will not be able to report what came to mind when doing this calculation.
• Structuralism was dealt a serious body blow by the phenomenon of imageless thought, which showed that some important aspects of human psychology lie outside conscious awareness.

• Structuralists assumed that a single, imperfect method could provide all of the information needed for a complete science of psychology.
• Since introspectionism came and went, psychologists have learned that multiple methods are needed to understand complex psychological phenomena.

• Structuralists' approach and methods were rejected by the founder of functionalism, William James.
• James said that careful introspection doesn't yield a fixed number of static elements of consciousness but instead an ever changing stream of consciousness.

• The functionalists believed that Darwin's theory applied to psy to understand the adaptive purposes of chological characteristics.

• Func psychological characteristics tionalism was absorbed into mainstream scientific psychology and continues to influence it in many ways.

• Many American psychologists were growing impatient with the touchy-feely nature of their discipline by the early 20th century.
• They believed that Titchener was leading psychology down a wrong path.
• The study of consciousness was a waste of time because researchers couldn't prove the existence of the basic elements of mental experience.
• They argued that psychological science must be objective.

• The flamboyant American psychologist, John school of psychology, was the most prominent critic.
• The proper subject matter of observable behavior psychology was observable behavior.
• Subjective reports of experience should not be used in psychology.
• If it followed his lead, psychology could become just as scientific as physics, chemistry, and other behaviorism.

• They said that all of these behaviors are the product of a few basic learning principles.
• Skinner argued that psychology can and should account for all psychological phenomena, even those that are unobservable, such as thoughts and feelings.

• We don't need to peer inside the organisms to understand these principles.
• Scientific psychology is still felt today because of behaviorism.

• Although early behaviorists' deep distrust of subjective observations of conscious experience almost certainly went too far, these psychologists warned us of the dangers of relying too heavily on reports that we can't verify objectively.

• Although some behaviorists acknowledged that humans and even many intelligent animals think, they viewed thinking as just another form of behavior.
• According to the Swiss psychologist school of psychology, children see the world in vastly different ways than adults.
• cognitivists argued that thinking is so central to psychology that it merits a separate discipline in its own right.

• A student who gets a B+ on his first psychology exam should be taken.
• A student accustomed to getting Fs on his tests might view this grade as a reward, while a student accustomed to As might view it as a punishment.
• cognitivists maintain that without understanding how people evaluate information, we'll never fully understand the causes of their behavior.

• Today's approach to cognitive psychology is thriving and has spread to such diverse areas as language, problem solving, concept formation, intelligence, memory, and even psychotherapy.
• cognitivism examines the link between brain functioning and other mental functions, allowing psychologists to better understand how the brain works.
• We're unaware of the promise of allowing Sigmund Freud's work, which examines the relation between brain functioning and emotion.

• Contrary to popular belief, most psychologists in Europe aren't psycho menting the same as they are in the United States.
• Sigmund Freud founded the field of psychoanalysis.
• Not even psychoanalysts are in sharp contrast to behavior.
• According to Freud.

• Psychoanalysts say that a lot of our everyday psychological life is filled with symbols.
• Freudians wouldn't treat an embarrassing blooper like an isolated mistake if you accidentally referred to one of your female professors as "mom".
• They would suggest that you transfer to a different course because your professor may remind you of your mother.
• By 34 Chapter 1 they can get to the root of our psychological conflicts.
• Psychoanalysts place more emphasis on the role of infant and childhood experiences.
• In the first few years of life, our personality is shaped by our interactions with our parents.

• The influence of Freud on scientific psychology is controversial.
• Some critics argue that the progress of scientific psychology was retarded by the focus on unconscious processes that are difficult or impossible to change.

• The assertion that a great deal of important mental processing goes on outside conscious awareness has held up well in scientific research.
• It's not clear whether the Freudian view of the unconscious bears any resemblance to the more contemporary view of unconscious processing, which doesn't involve a lot of hidden memories and impulses.

• The different levels of analysis of these subdisciplines had a greater impact on how we biological to cultural.
• In most major psychology departments, researchers think about themselves and the world.

• There are more than 106,000 psychologists in the United States alone.
• The American Psychological Association is the world's largest association of psychologists with more than 117,000 members.

• The Association for Psychological Science, which broke away from the APA in 1988, has more than 25,000 members.
• The percentage of women and minorities within the APA has grown over time.

• There are many settings in which psychologists are employed.

• The data came from the National Science Foundation.

• Some work in research settings while others work in practice settings.
• A few of the most important types of psychologists are described in Table 1.6.
• It debunks 35% of common myths about what a psychologist does and 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611

• The fields of psychology and psychology majors are very diverse.

• The table has types of psychologists, what they do, and what they don't do.

• You need a PhD to become a therapist.

• Mental health is a Psy.D.
• and therapists can work in colleges and universities.

• Counseling psychology is similar to clinical psychology in that it is mostly self-contained life problems.

• School psychology is a term for remedying students' behavioral, emotional, and educational psychology.

• Conduct research on infants', children's, and most of their time on their hands and knees playing with elderly people's emotional, children.

• Misconception: Experimental psychologists do all of their thinking in psychological laboratories, and social behaviors of humans work in psychological laboratories.

• Many conduct research in real-world settings, examining how people acquire language, remember events, apply mental concepts, and the like.

• All biological psychologists use a Biological Psychologist in their research.

• Most work in research settings that don't require investigators to damage organisms' nervous systems.

• Work in prisons, jails, and other settings to assess Misconception, most forensic psychologists are criminal forensic psychologists and diagnose inmates and assist with their profilers, like those employed by the FBI.

• Work in companies and businesses to help select Misconception: Most industrial/organizational productive employees, evaluate performance, psychologists work on a one-to-one basis with examine the effects of different working and employees to increase their motivation and productivity.

• The great debates of psychology have changed over the past three decades.

• We need to set the stage for things to come now that we have learned about the past and present of psychology.

• It is likely to continue to shape itself in the future.

• Counseling to white paper that wasn't written on.

• We're shaped by our environments.
• For most of the 20th century, most psychologists women comprise three-fourths to four-fifths of those attaining PhD assumed that virtually all human behavior was the product of learning.

• Modern psychologists have come to realize that human behavior is a result of our genes and environments.

• Some people have declared the nature-nurture debate dead because they agree that genes and environment play crucial roles in most human behaviors.
• We still have a lot to learn about how nature and nurture work together.
• The New Yorker Collection 2003 shows that the old dichotomy between nature and nurture is not as old as it used to be.

• William James and other functionalists believe that many human psychological systems, like memory, emotion, and personality, help organisms survive and reproduce.
• Natural selection favored the fact that American men spend billions of dollars each year on mental and physical things, just as it did on physical things.

• Fitness has nothing to do with how strong an organisms is.
• For example, humans who have discipline that applies Charles at least some degree of anxiety probably survived at higher rates than humans who lacked Darwin's theory of natural selection.

• Behavioral theory suggests that animals and people are driven by their a.
• When engaging in behavior, there is a free will.

• Humanistic theory and therapies refer to people's ability to control their own.
• Regardless of their past, they will have a free will.

• Sigmund Freud believed that humans have an innate sense of aggression.
• Nature must be reined in by the ego and superego.
• Humans are born with certain negative characteristics.

• Social psychologists believe that humans learn their behavioral customs.
• Nature how to interact with authority figures and how to express emotion.

• Evolutionary psychology has received some criticism.
• Many of its predictions are very difficult to change.
• In part, that's because behavior, unlike the bones of dinosaurs, early humans, and other animals, doesn't leave fossils.
• It is more difficult to determine the evolutionary functions of anxiety or depression than it is to determine the functions of birds' wings.
• Two researchers speculated that male baldness serves an evolutionary function because women perceive a receding hair as a sign of maturity.
• It would be easy to explain why women preferred men with a lot of hair to bald men.
• Evolutionary explanations could be used to account for either outcome.
• Evolutionary psychology has the potential to be an important unifying framework for psychology, but we should beware of evolutionary explanations that can fit almost any piece of evidence after the fact.

• You may think that you can decide to continue reading or take a break at the end of the chapter.
• Our legal system is based on the idea of free will.
• We punish criminals because they are free to disobey the law.
• The legal system assumes that severe mental illness can interfere with people's free will in the insanity defense.
• Some psychologists think we all have free will.

• Free will is an illusion according to many others.
• Skinner argued that our sense of free will stems from the fact that we aren't aware of the thousands of subtle environmental influences impinging on our behavior at any given moment.
• We conclude mistakenly that we're free because we don't realize all of the influences acting on our behavior, like puppets in a play who don't realize that actors are pulling their strings.
• Our behaviors are determined by Skinner and others.

• Without conscious awareness is that.
• We can come to believe that someone else is making 38 Chapter 1 behaviors.
• They say they're being compelled to do it by some outside force.
• There is strong evidence that they are generating this behavior on their own.
• According to many determinists, our everyday behaviors are produced in the same way--triggered automatically by influences of which we're unaware.
• Other psychologists don't think we have a great deal of conscious control over our behavior.

• Today's fire trucks are lime yellow.
• According to psychological research, lime-yellow objects are easier to spot in the dark than are red objects.

• Throughout this text, we'll discover that psychological science and scientific thinking have many important applications for everyday life.
• Basic is different from applied research.

• There is a healthy mix of people conducting basic research, such as investigators who study the laws of learning, and applied research, such as investigators who study how to help people cope with the psychological burden of cancer.

• Few people are aware of the impact psychology has on their lives.
• Most of us don't realize that psychological science has found its way into more aspects of society than we realize.

• If you live in a big city, you may have seen a gradual change in the color of the fire engines in the advertisement.
• The old fire engines were bright red.

• Lime-yellow objects are easier to see in the dark.

• If you were able to research how we can use avoid a bad accident, you may have a psychologist to thank.
• Cars only had two brake lights for basic research.
• The idea of placing a third brake light at the base of cars' back was a hit in the early 1970s.

• The risk of rear-end accidents is not uncommon when police use such lineups.
• He found a 61 percent lower rate of rear-end acci prone to error in taxis without the new brake lights.

• All new American cars have three brake lights.

• The average American sees more than 100 commercial messages a day.
• Many of them were created by psychologists.
• In the 1920s and 1930s, psychology was applied to advertising.
• The marketing success of companies depends on psychological researchers.
• The left side of the page is more attractive to readers than the right side of the page, according to psychologists who study magazine advertisements.
• The right side of the page captures readers' attention more than the left side.

• You probably had to take at least one test to get into college.

• You can thank psychiatrists with expertise in measuring academic achievement and knowledge, who were primarily responsible for developing these measures.
• The tests are far from perfect predictors of academic performance, but they do better than chance in forecasting how students perform in college.

• The victims of violent crimes are often asked to pick a suspect from a lineup.

• These are the lineups we've seen the most on crime shows.
• Those in which victims view each person individually and then decide whether he or she was the culprit are more accurate than simultaneous lineups.
• Police departments around the United States are increasingly using sequential lineups.

• Many American public schools were legally required to be racially divided.
• The law of the land in the United States was that "separate but equal" facilities were sufficient to guarantee racial equality.

• The self-esteem of African American children was negatively impacted by school segregation.

• The fruits of psychological research are all around us.
• In most cases, psychology has changed the landscape of everyday life for the better.

• We should always insist on rigorous research evidence when evaluating psychological claims in the news or entertainment media.

• It's a way of life.

• Learning to think scientifically will help you make better decisions in everyday life.

• Insist on insomnia treatments, speed-reading courses, urban legends, political conspiracy theories, unidentified flying objects, and "overnight cures" for mental disorders.
• Some of the claims are true.
• The media doesn't give much guidance for sorting out which claims are scientific or pseudoscientific.
• Online "news" sources are a mix of real and fake stories.

• Common sense can only take us so far in evaluating claims, so we can come to appreciate the need for scientific evidence to avoid being fooled and to avoid fooling ourselves.
• We will find out in the next chapter.

• Key features of scientific skepticism are listed.

• Scientific skepticism requires us to evaluate all claims with an ior.
• Our intuitive understanding of our open mind and our insistence on compelling evidence is what makes us different from other people.
• Skeptics evaluate claims on their own merits and are often mistaken.
• They are unwilling to accept them on the basis of authority alone.

• Confirmation bias has assumed importance over the past decade due to the realization that certain psychological findings are that support our hypotheses and deny, dismiss, or distort challenging for independent investigators to reproduce.

• Adherence to our beliefs is a tendency.
• There are safeguards against these 1.4: Psychology's Past and Present: What a Long, two errors.

• Functionalism hopes to understand the adaptive purposes of rules of science by not playing with pseudoscientific claims.
• pseudoscience doesn't have the safe behavior.
• The belief that psychological guards against confirmation bias and perseverance belief that science must be completely objective and derived from laws of characterize science led to behaviorism.

• The importance of mental processes in understanding behavior was emphasized by the cognitive view.
• Why are we drawn to pseudoscience?

• There are many types of psychologists.
• As psychologists often conduct therapy, opportunity costs and direct harm can result from clinical and counsel claims.
• School psycholo is a result of dangerous treatments.
• They can lead to the development of intervention programs for children in school.
• Industrial/organizational psychologists work in modern life.

• Free prisons or court settings are where forensic psychologists work.
• Will-determinism debate is conducted by many other psychologists.
• Developmental study behaviors are not caused by factors systematic change in individuals over time.
• The field of psychologists study learning and thinking.

• The nature-nurture debate asks if our behaviors are attributable mostly to our genes criminal justice system and education, and it is one of the great debates.