Stanovich Reading #1 PDF

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Psych 212 Stanovich Reading #1 29 August 2019 After reading the first chapter of the Stanovich text, there were many new things I learned that I previously did not know. The first was about how a lot of people base their understandings of psychology on Sigmund Frued. He is not popular among psychologists because of a multitude of reasons, one being that his research methods were unrepresentative of how modern day psychologists collect their research. He did not use controls in his experiments which can result in data being skewed and biased. He also believed that case studies could determine the truth or falsity of theories. When I took psych 101 as an AP class in high school, I remember focusing heavily on Fruedian concepts not knowing that he had many flaws in his research. It’s baffling how learning about his studies didn’t raise questions about the validity of the data and that our teacher didn’t seem to question it either. Another thing that stood out to me was the information about the APA. I didn’t know that there are 54 different divisions of psychology and that those have even more sub categories. It's incredible how much is tied to psychology and even more incredible that people still have a difficult time accepting and understanding the findings that arise from psychological research. The chapter did discuss a few things that I knew to be correct but could never find the right way to word it in a conversation or assignment. For example, in the Implications of Diversity section, it discusses that people come into psychology hoping to learn about some grand psychological theory that explains all aspects of human behavior, but are disappointed when that’s not the case. Psychology contains many theories that explain different aspects of behavior. That seems like something that should be common sense because this is true for other sciences as well. In addition, in the same section, the text talks about how psychology is viewed as a “hub discipline” because its findings have wide implications for other fields. Personally, I feel that technically this could be true for all the sciences because a finding in one field can also have implications for another field. All the sciences tie together in one way or another and that is why all the sciences should be considered hub disciplines. Lastly, I learned that folk wisdom is a huge problem in society because it's “after the fact” wisdom that can't be refuted and is useless in a predictive sense....