This widely used brief paperback supplement focuses on applying critical thinking techniques to standard concepts in psychology and teaches students to recognize and critically appraise pseudoscience. In particular, this text provides tips on evaluating claims that arise in discussions of psychology in the media and self-help literature. By boldly examining common misconceptions in psychology, this text helps students become more critical and discriminating consumers of psychological information. *Examples used to illustrate psychological concepts have been updated to enhance student interest. *A total of 132 new references integrate contemporary studies to provide a current view of the field. *Section on the concept of memes (made famous by Richard Dawkins) and itsrelation to falsifiability has been added to Chapter 12. *Presents psychological topics such as falsifiability, operationalism, experimentalcontrol, converging evidence, correlational vs. experimental studies, andstatistics as "tools" for critical evaluation, providing students with a set of practical consumer skills to independently evaluate psychological claims. * Provides instructors with the opportunity to teach critical thinking skills within the rich context of modern psychology. *An intriguing table of contents piques the reader's interest.
Keith E. Stanovich is currently Professor of Human Development and Applied Psychology at the University of Toronto. His book, What Intelligence Tests Miss, won the 2010 Grawemeyer Award in Education.
Stanovich is the author of over 200 scientific articles. In a three-year survey of citation rates during the mid-1990s (see Byrnes, J. P. (1997). Explaining citation counts of senior developmental psychologists. Developmental Review, 17, 62-77), Stanovich was listed as one of the 50 most-cited developmental psychologists, and one of the 25 most productive educational psychologists (see Smith, M. C., et al., Productivity of educational psychologists in educational psychology journals, 1997-2001. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 28, 422-430). In a citation survey of the period 1982-1992, he was designated the most cited reading disability researcher in the world (Nicolson, R. I. Developmental dyslexia: Past, present and future. Dyslexia, 1996, 2, 190-207).
Stanovich is the only two-time winner of the Albert J. Harris Award from the International Reading Association for influential articles on reading. In 1995 he was elected to the Reading Hall of Fame as the youngest member of that honorary society. In 1997 he was given the Sylvia Scribner Award from the American Educational Research Association, and in 2000 he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. Stanovich is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Divisions 3, 7, 8, & 15), the American Psychological Society, the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities, and is a Charter Member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. He was a member of the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children of National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences.
From 1986-2000 Stanovich was the Associate Editor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, a leading journal of human development. His introductory textbook, How to Think Straight About Psychology, published by Allyn & Bacon, is in its Ninth Edition and has been adopted by over 300 institutions of higher education. He is the author of five other books, including What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought (Yale University Press), The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (University of Chicago Press), Decision Making and Rationality in the Modern World (Oxford University Press), and Progress in Understanding Reading (Guilford Press).
