PSYC 1020H Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Peer Pressure, Canadian Psychological Association, Pseudoscience

• School: Trent University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1020H
• Professor: Wolfgang Lehmann

Document Summary

Psychology is the discipline concerned with behaviour and mental processes and how they are affected by an organism"s physical and mental state, and the external environment. Psychobabble is pseudoscience and quackery covered by scientific-sounding language that is made popular by the public thirst for psychological information and is accessed through unrealistic quick fixes". Popular psychological ideas that the public mistakenly believes to be true is false: playing beethoven to an infant will make them smarter, abused children inevitably become abusive parents, through a cycle of abuse. Popular opinion and common sense" not necessarily a reliable guide to human behaviour. Annette taylor & patricia kowalski gave 90 intro psych students a psychological information" questionnaire in 2004. Purpose was to determine how many of their students entered with false ideas and if that semester would dislodge them of those ideas. Despite all the answers on the test being false, the overall class accuracy was 38. 5%