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Keith Stanovich's widely used and highly acclaimed book helps instructors teach critical-thinking skills within the rich context of psychology. It can be used as a stand-alone text or as a supplement in introductory psychology, critical-thinking, as well as research methods and statistics courses. It is the premier text of its kind.
Stanovich helps students become more discriminating consumers of psychological information by helping them recognize pseudoscience and be able to distinguish it from true psychological research. Psychological topics such as falsifiability, operationalism, experimental control, converging evidence, correlational vs. experimental studies, and statistics are presented as tools for critical evaluation, giving students a set of practical consumer skills to independently evaluate psychological claims. Students also are given a set of “consumer rules” for dealing with psychology in the media.
How to Think Straight About Psychology says what many instructors would like to say about the discipline of psychology but haven't found a way to. That is one reason adopters have called it “an instructor's dream text” and often comment “I wish I had written it. It tells my students just what I want them to hear about psychology.”
New to the eighth edition are expanded discussions of reliability and validity, meta-analysis, and the differences between random sampling versus random assignment.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More about "thinking straight" than just "psychology",
By Antony Van der Mude (vandermude@aol.com) (Summit, NJ, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: How to Think Straight About Psychology (Paperback)
This is a wise, thoughtful book about the scientific method, and how we use these techniques to arrive at an understanding of the world. It talks about the nature of knowledge, what scientific truth is, and how common misconceptions can lead us astray. In short, the phrase "about psychology" is superfluous; this is a book about thinking straight.
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Wish I'd read this sooner!,
By
This review is from: How to Think Straight about Psychology, Seventh Edition (Paperback)
I was forced to read this book upon taking up my role as Lecturer In Neuroscience in Sheffield Uni Dept of Psychology. I run the course that uses this text as its examinable material. Like many practioners of 'hard science' I'd always view psychology as a bit of a light-weight subject with its over-reliance on statistical methods, questionaires, touchy-feely-types etc and the many TV psychologists one can see almost daily, further dragging down their subject into the depths of pseudoscience. However, on reading this book I realised that there IS some merit in psychology. This text explains many concepts that turn observation into SCIENCE. It explains why science is so powerful in getting at the truth of the matter by constantly trying to refute itself! Which other disipline would have the courage to try and disprove itself and, if successful, rethink its hypotheses in light of the new findings to forge a new and more robust hypothesis? Stanovich explains how the scientific process does just this and he does it in an entertaining and light way without dumbing down in any way. Stanovich could make this text more appealing to a wider audience by expanding its scope and perhaps not concentrating quite so much on psychology, but on science in general. He'd have to change the title then, of course! I wish I'd read this book when I was an under-/post-graduate studying Physiology/Neurophysiology-it would have given me a greater understanding of what I was trying to do. Its other great gift to me is when I'm confronted with a New Ager expounding the virtues of crystals,chakaras,angels,faith healing etc and trying to bring modern science into disrepute. The information in this book helps me to show them why they're barking up the wrong tree and I'm not! I often end such a conversation with, "...science isn't all bad, but there's nothing you can show me that I can say is at all good" Buy this book! My students, buy this book, read it and learn from it! I'm setting the exam questions right now!
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Methodology Primer for Everyone,
By A Customer
This review is from: How to Think Straight About Psychology (6th Edition) (Paperback)
Stanovich was assigned reading in my psych class years ago (this review is of the 4th edition). It's the best introduction to sound methodology in the behavioral sciences I've ever read. As previous reviewers have pointed out, the critical thinking skills you learn from this book can (and OUGHT to) be applied) to many, many other facets of our daily life. It's not just for psych majors, but for everyone who reads a newspaper, buys consumer products, votes in elections, etc. And you don't need a background in statistics to benefit from it. A worthy companion to Darrell Huff's classic "How to Lie with Statistics" and John Allen Paulos's "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper".
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