What is Reddit's opinion of How to Think Straight About Psychology (10th Edition)?

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I was just turned on to this which takes on a lot of misunderstanding of psychology and beliefs in pseudopsychology and therefore others denigrating [psychology as bad science.

If I taught psyc-101 I would absolutely require reading this. The chapters on operationalization and clinical vs statistical prediction are outstanding.

How to Think Straight About Psychology.

I would buy an old edition, but the best introduction to psychology is How to Think Straight About Psychology. Doesn't just give an overview of the field, but explains the difference between what is and is not psychology.

http://www.amazon.com/Think-Straight-About-Psychology-Edition/dp/0205914128

From the description:

Keith Stanovich's widely used and highly acclaimed book presents a short introduction to the critical thinking skills that will help students to better understand the subject matter of psychology. How to Think Straight about Psychology, 10e helps students recognize pseudoscience and be able to distinguish it from true psychological research, aiding students to become more discriminating consumers of psychological information.

Learning Goals Upon completing this book, readers should be able to: Evaluate psychological claims they encounter in the general media. Distinguish between pseudoscience and true psychological research. Apply psychological knowledge to better understand events in the world around them.

I was just recomended and read this book. It's great and addresses the common misnderstabnding oif psychology as being super soft and pseudoscince. Most people that think they undrestand psychology often go for pseudoscientific soft aspects of it, but this clears a lot of things up.

https://www.amazon.com/Think-Straight-About-Psychology-10th/dp/0205914128

Also, I know that the world of industrial and organizational psychology is working on getting a STEM classification from the US government. I forget all the details but there are two ways to get it certified as STEM. ONe I believe is the dept. of homeland security that uses career classification such as this for visa issuing purposes. In this case, STEM classification is for student visa purposes.

The other institution is one of the larger science groups that slip my mind. Both have slightly different definitions, but certain subdisciplines should meet their criteria. You have to keep in mind that psychology is very heavily statistically driven. It's a very quantitative field. And you are correct that with the brain becoming more and more measurable and important to the field it is going to continue in the direction of a hard science such as biology.

I kind of look at it as, "who cares?" To me, a bigger problem is that science, in general, is being denigrated.

I don't know if this helps, but psychology is the science for learning and teaching about other sciences. That's kind of cool and psychology can help design effective hard science learning programs.

Have you read this book? https://www.amazon.com/Think-Straight-About-Psychology-10th/dp/0205914128

>Freud was a strict adherent to the scientific method

No therapist nor therapy is completely successful, that would be a miracle. I don't know Freud's complete bibliography of published cases, but from what I read even Freud himself considered the case of Dora a failure. But when Freudian psychoanalysis is measured with the empirical tools we have today the success rate is not that high compared to other therapies (and none of them is 100% successful).

Anyway, I was not arguing if Freud was a good therapist or not, I was criticizing his theoretical framework. If you think he was "a strict adherent to the scientific method", you don't really know what scientific method is in the Karl Popper sense of the word.

The standard intro textbook on scientific method in psychology, How to Think Straight About Psychology by Keith E. Stanovich, have just called it's first chapter "The Freud Problem". You should find a pdf or torrent of that book online easy, check out that chapter. Or just read this or this summary.

As for Freuds view of religion being emotional immature, I find it ironic that the movement he started himself was more dogmatic than most Christian denominations alive today. Freud managed to come in conflict with almost all the intellectual capacities that he managed to lure to the cult of psychoanalysis, basically because he disagreed when people tried to evolve his ideas. Eugene Bleuer, the man who defined schizophrenia put it best: this 'all or nothing' is in my opinion necessary for religious communities and useful for political parties...but for science I consider it harmful. There is a reason that Freud is being taught in the humanites department but not in the psychology department.