And birds still fly forwards too, no less. From Jesse Singal at New York Magazine:
a paper published last month in Current Psychology by Christopher Ferguson of Stetson University and Jeffrey Brown and Amanda Torres of Texas A&M, the authors evaluated a bunch of psychology textbooks to see how rigorously they covered a bunch of controversial or frequently misrepresented subjects. The results weren’t great.
In spring of 2012, Ferguson and his colleagues solicited and received 24 popular introductory textbooks, and then got to work evaluating them. Specifically, they evaluated those textbooks’ coverage of seven “controversial ideas in psychology” — ideas where there’s genuine mainstream disagreement among researchers — and also checked for the presence of five well-known scientific urban legends that, as far as the psychological Establishment is concerned, have been debunked.
And you’ll never guess what they found: Lack of nuance where it would be essential and a museum of urban legends.
Ferguson and his co-authors’ findings suggest that many textbooks are doing a really lackluster job at imparting an appropriate level of nuance and complexity. More.
In point of fact, they’re not even trying. All sides agree: progressive politics is gutting social sciences of meaningful content.
But as long as students pay without protest, it’s hard to see how anything will change. Except that, gradually, schools may just start de-emphasizing or dumping social sciences.
See also: Seven myths of social psychology
Broad agreement that politics is strangling the social sciences
and
New social sciences scandal: Oft-cited paper is complete rubbish—again?
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