Misconceptions About Psychological Science: A Review: Sean Hughes & Fiona Lyddy Sinead Lambe
Misconceptions About Psychological Science: A Review: Sean Hughes & Fiona Lyddy Sinead Lambe
Misconceptions About Psychological Science: A Review: Sean Hughes & Fiona Lyddy Sinead Lambe
Misconceptions about
Psychological Science: a review
This article provides an overview of the available evidence on psychological misconceptions, including
key findings, current directions and emerging issues for investigation. We begin by defining
misconceptions and then examine their prevalence and persistence, discuss their implications for
student learning and highlight potential strategies to eliminate or reduce their influence. Thereafter,
several theoretical and methodological issues that have traditionally defined research in this area are
discussed. In particular, we highlight the possibility that reported rates of misconceptions may in part
be driven by particular features of the measurement procedures employed. On the basis of this
analysis, potential avenues for future research are outlined.
Those students who come equipped to their studies with accurate pre-existing knowledge
demonstrate greater understanding and retention of new information compared to those who
harbour inaccurate or incomplete knowledge (Beier & Ackerman, 2005; Thompson & Zamboanga,
2003, 2004). Moreover, students who endorse disciplinary-inconsistent knowledge and beliefs often
find their learning of new concepts impaired (Dochy, Segers, & Buehl, 1999). Unfortunately, prior
to setting foot in the classroom, many students already hold a spectrum of incorrect preconceptions
about the core ideas and concepts relevant to their field of study --- whether it is biology (Nehm &
Reilly, 2007), physics (Hein, 1999), or chemistry (Stefani & Tsaparlis, 2009). Psychology is no
exception to this phenomenon.
Misconceptions about psychological issues, such as ‘Human memory works like a tape
recorder or video camera’, ‘Handwriting can reveal our personality traits’, and ‘People with
schizophrenia have multiple personalities’, are widespread and often difficult to eliminate
(Kowalski & Taylor, 2009; Lilienfeld, Lynn, Ruscio, & Beyerstein, 2009). Although misconceptions
decrease as the number of psychology courses taken increases, upper-level undergraduates still
accept a large variety of erroneous claims despite their training in the core concepts of the
discipline (Glass, Bartels, Ryan, & Stark-Wroblewski, 2008; Standing & Huber, 2003). This is a
cause for concern given that misconceptions are suggested to relate to academic performance
(Kuhle, Barber & Bristol, 2009; McCutcheon, 1991) as well as critical thinking ability (Kowalski &
Taylor, 2004). In this article we provide the reader with an overview of misconceptions about
psychological science. We begin by defining misconceptions and discuss their various properties.
We then examine their prevalence, their implications for student learning and various strategies for
combating their influence. Several theoretical and methodological issues that have traditionally
guided researchers in this area will also be evaluated. Finally, we highlight future work that may
promote a better understanding of the factors that give rise to and propagate persistent
misconceptions affecting our discipline.
20 http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/plat.2013.12.1.20
Misconception
1. People only use 10% of their total brain power (Della Sala, 1999; Higbee & Clay, 1998)
2. Playing classical music to infants increases their intelligence (Bangerter & Heath, 2004)
3. Responses on inkblot tests reveal a great deal about our personalities (Lenz et al., 2009)
4. People with schizophrenia have multiple personalities (Stuart & Arboleda-Florez, 2001)
5. Psychiatric hospital admissions and crimes increase during a full moon (Owens & McGowan, 2006)
6. The polygraph test can accurately detect dishonesty (Myers, Latter & Abdollahi-Arena, 2006)
7. Hypnosis can be used to reliably retrieve memories of forgotten events (Green, Page, Rasekhy, Johnson, &
Bernhardt, 2006)
8. People can learn a new language while asleep (Brown, 1983)
9. Some people are left-brained, others are right-brained (Lyddy & Hughes, 2012)
10. Opposites attract: People are most romantically attracted to individuals who differ from them in their
personality, interests, and attitudes (McCutcheon, 1991)
Misconceptions appear to stem from a variety of sources and may be broadly categorised into two
groups. On the one hand, we define factual misconceptions as beliefs that arise from incorrect or
incomplete information encountered in the popular media, classroom or the everyday
environment. Claims such as ‘Some people are left-brained, while others are right-brained’, ‘The
polygraph test can accurately detect dishonesty’, and ‘Intelligence tests are biased against certain
groups’, are more likely to be derived from sources external to the individual rather than their own
personal experiences.
On the other hand, we defined ontological misconceptions as those that reflect naïve or
commonsense theories about thought, feelings and behaviour. Consider, for example, the emission
theory of vision, the mistaken notion that people see by emitting, from their eyes, rays that reflect
off objects. This notion is often affirmed by young children (Cottrell & Winer, 1994) as well as
college students (Winer, Cottrell, Karefilaki, & Gregg, 1996), stretches all the way back to the
ancient Greeks (Gross, 1999), and continues to influence cultural practices around the world (see
Winer, Rader, & Cottrell, 2003). While certainly influenced by the wider social context, it may be
the case that this misconception (among others) is rooted in an underlying naïve ontology that
differs dramatically from contemporary theory and research. In other words, several
misconceptions may represent the outcome of a collection of ontological assumptions, explanatory
concepts and causal mechanisms that, when taken together, form the basis of intuitive theories
about psychology (Amsel, Baird, & Ashley, 2011). For instance, the common belief in mind-body
dualism (Bloom, 2004) may propagate a variety of misconceptions surrounding extrasensory
perception, memories of previous lives and ‘out-of-body experiences’ (Lilienfeld et al., 2009). Thus
in the same way that people may harbour commonsense theories of motion (Reiner, Slotta, Chi, &
Resnick, 2000), or about life (Carey, 1985), it is also possible for misconceptions to be rooted in
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intuitive theories about the mind, cognitive illusions (Pohl, 2004), or even heuristics (Schick &
Vaughn, 2010). As we shall see later, this distinction between factual and ontological
misconceptions may be an important one, especially when it comes to developing strategies to
undermine or eliminate them.
Regardless of the type of misconception involved, three questions have guided empirical and
theoretical work in this research area. First, a majority of studies have attempted to document how
prevalent misconceptions are in both psychology students and the wider population. Second, in
light of their apparent resistance to extinction, the potential implications of holding misconceptions
for academic outcomes and critical thinking development has increasingly been explored. Finally,
given that misconceptions are responsive to correction when certain conditions are met, a number
of theoretical accounts have been offered to explain when and why this change occurs. In the
following sections, we provide a brief review of the relevant literature for each of these three
questions.
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Landau & Bavaria, 2003), refutational teaching strategies and critical thinking (Kowalski & Taylor,
2004). Consider teaching strategies: although misconceptions are often resistant to correction via
standard instruction, refutational readings (Guzzetti, 2000), essays (Miller, Wozniak, Rust, Miller, &
Slezak, 1996), lectures or some combination of the three (Kowalski & Taylor, 2009) have met with
success in eliminating them. In each case, a misconception is first highlighted and then directly
refuted using empirical evidence. Vaughan (1977) found that although the introductory course had
only a minimal impact upon student misconceptions (6.5% reduction), erroneous beliefs that did
change were those that had been directly refuted during the course. Likewise, when the
effectiveness of refutational text and lectures was compared to a standard lecture and text
combination (or no coverage of the misconceptions at all), the refutational approach was superior
in dispelling these beliefs (Kowalski & Taylor, 2009). Moreover, refutational lectures alone
produced a significant reduction in misconceptions above and beyond that contributed by the
refutational text. This preliminary work highlights that psychology instructors should tailor their
teaching strategies towards (a) explicitly identifying misconceptions to their students and then (b)
directly refuting them through lectures and readings. At the same time, alternative teaching
techniques may also provide a means for correcting student misunderstandings. Mazur (1997)
developed a teaching tool termed ConcepTest as a means to activate and then correct
misconceptions using a multiple-choice format (see Chew, 2004, for its application to psychology).
Amsel (2009) argues for the need to go beyond knowledge transmission in teaching psychology and
advocates meta-instruction --- teaching that aims to convey psychology’s beliefs and values and to
transform students’ identities as future members of the scientific community.
Critical Thinking
Although little work has investigated the interaction between misconceptions, academic
performance and critical thinking, the latter variable may play a role in reducing inaccurate beliefs.
McCutcheon, Apperson, Hanson, & Wynn (1992) found that while both course grades and critical
thinking independently predicted misconception endorsement, critical thinking was a significantly
better predictor. Likewise, Kowalski and Taylor (2004) found no relation between students’
academic performance and susceptibility to misconceptions prior to an introductory psychology
course, suggesting that both high- and low-performing students arrive at the discipline with
misunderstandings about its core concepts. Following the course, however, significant correlations
were observed between course grades, critical thinking ability and changes in misconceptions, with
the effect of academic performance moderated by its relation to critical thinking. Irrespective of
academic performance, those students who actively employed critical thinking skills to evaluate
newly encountered information were less susceptible to misconceptions.
Importantly, these findings may also clarify the ambiguous relationship between academic
performance and misconception endorsement noted previously. In other words, both variables
could be moderated by a third factor that was uncontrolled for in the aforementioned studies (i.e.,
critical thinking). To examine this issue further, future research could examine whether training
aimed at improving critical thinking results in similar reductions in misconceptions for both low-
and high-performing students. Similarly, little work has directly compared whether generic versus
subject-specific critical thinking is a better predictor of academic performance and misconception
endorsement. For instance, will students who are specifically trained to think sceptically about
psychological theory and research also apply those skills to other intellectual domains and everyday
life (e.g., when evaluating advertisements, political propaganda or new medicines)?
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either a single test or a pre-post design to probe for changes immediately following a course or
manipulation. When such a strategy is adopted, researchers and educators alike may inadvertently
view misconceptions as being successfully eliminated. Yet it is possible that a ‘rebound effect’ may
occur whereby inaccuracies addressed within a single class or course are temporarily reduced but
nevertheless re-emerge once course content moves on to other areas (Lyddy & Hughes, 2012). Put
differently, when researchers introduce a manipulation to reduce misconceptions, and then test the
effectiveness of that manipulation within a single class or course, it is not possible to know with
certainty that misconceptions have truly been eliminated across time and context. Consequently,
future research will need to adopt a longitudinal assessment of misconceptions to ascertain the
degree and duration of change long after the course has ended. It should also be noted that the
majority of research in this area has focused solely on undergraduate (introductory) psychology
students. A detailed picture of the prevalence and transmission of misconceptions at all levels of the
discipline will only emerge by directing attention towards graduate students and university-level
educators as well as introductory or advanced undergraduates.
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questionnaire resulted in students reporting uncertainty for 12% of responses (Gardner & Dalsing,
1986).
To circumvent these problems, multiple-choice scales have increasingly been used to
sensitively discriminate the direction and relative strength of the belief, as well as to register
responses due to uncertainty or guessing (Assanand, Pinel, & Lehman, 1998; McCutcheon, 1991).
Others have also argued for the inclusion of procedures that capture how confident students are in
their misconceptions. Taylor and Kowalski (2004) constructed a 48-item true/false questionnaire
but also included a 1-10 confidence scale in order to assess the strength of students’ prior beliefs.
Following an introductory course (employing a refutational format), correct identification of
misconceptions nearly doubled. In addition, rated confidence for accurate beliefs increased,
whereas confidence for misconceptions that students still endorsed decreased. This suggests that
confidence ratings may provide an index of misconceptions that are retained but are in the process
of changing. If this is the case, then inaccurate beliefs may change in degree rather than kind.
Although admittedly speculative, misconception correction may be a gradual developmental
process rather than a sudden and revolutionary one.
To conclude, an accurate and sensitive index of psychological misconceptions requires that
the procedures used are subject to careful scrutiny. Future work will need to determine whether
the language and structure of self-report questionnaires affect the degree to which students affirm
misconceptions. Doing so would serve to identify differences in misconceptions that arise not from
the application of faulty knowledge and beliefs but as a result of the measure employed (see
Hughes et al., 2013). At the same time, research will need to ascertain the utility of alternative
procedures above and beyond self-report questionnaires. Towards this end, future work could
import novel methods from other disciplines and compare performance on these tasks against
existing questionnaires. Adopting such a strategy would enable educators to better identify
legitimate methods of assessing their students’ knowledge and beliefs. Finally, the potential
influence of demand-compliance or self-presentation effects may also require attention, given that
participants may be alert to the fact that such questionnaires target popular misconceptions.
Although several authors have included filler items to mask their intended manipulation (Kowalski
& Taylor, 2009), the majority of studies have not. Further research will need to systematically
manipulate the presence versus absence of filler items, or even cover stories to determine their
influence on task performance.
26
successful learning results only when students critically evaluate previously held beliefs as well as
revise and replace them with new and disciplinary consistent information. Given that it is easier for
people to ignore, reinterpret, or reject new information rather than to revise their existing beliefs,
conceptual change requires four conditions to be met: (1) students must be motivated (i.e.,
dissatisfied with their prior belief); (2) the alternative explanatory concept must be intelligible
(meaningful and non-contradictory); (3) the alternative concept must be plausible (believable to the
student); and (4) the alternative concept must be useful (aids the student in solving problems) (see
Treagust & Duit, 2008). This ‘re-evaluation’ process is assumed to occur when teaching
purposefully ‘activates’ prior knowledge and then creates a cognitive conflict between that
knowledge and the information to be learned. In contrast to their ontological counterparts, factual
misconceptions may not require that a rich network of assumptions, explanatory concepts and
causal mechanisms be examined, modified and restructured. Rather, and as noted in the
introduction, these inaccuracies usually reflect faulty or incorrect information contacted through
exposure to the media and popular culture. Consequently, correcting claims such as ‘People with
schizophrenia have multiple personalities’, ‘Playing Mozart to babies increases their intelligence’,
or ‘There has recently been a massive epidemic of infantile autism’, may not involve conceptual
change --- at least as defined above. Instead, factual misconceptions may be undermined or even
eliminated via refutational teaching practices that alert students to their mistaken beliefs while
providing relevant, accurate information about the topic of concern. In doing so, these techniques
may create a ‘cognitive conflict’ between the old and new knowledge, while also providing
coherent and credible accounts for the student to adopt. A revision of the misconception may
subsequently take place when the student is dissatisfied with their prior belief and the newly
presented information is construed as intelligible, plausible, and useful (see Kowalski & Taylor,
2009). Despite a wealth of theoretical work in this area, several questions require attention. On the
one hand, research on conceptual change and its mediating role in the reduction of misconceptions
has largely been correlational in nature. Further insight into the causal role of conceptual change in
misconception revision awaits research that (a) clearly operationalises this construct, and (b)
demonstrates that indirectly manipulating this variable produces concomitant changes in
misconceptions. On the other hand, future research will also need to determine whether carving
misconceptions into factual and ontological varieties has useful implications for educational
researchers and instructors alike. For example, are the strategies necessary for undermining factual
misconceptions also successful in targeting ontological misconceptions? Is it the case that changes
in misconceptions reflect the ability to sceptically evaluate and modify naïve theories of psychology
or simply the capacity to answer specific questions that have been directly instructed during a
course?
Conclusion
Students do not arrive to the study of psychological science as blank slates but rather come
equipped with varying amounts of (inaccurate) knowledge and beliefs. Although the reported
prevalence of misconceptions about psychology is subject to large variation across studies, these
inaccuracies appear to reflect a genuine, replicable and general phenomenon. Several authors have
theorised that these erroneous beliefs have negative consequences for student learning; however
there is no conclusive agreement on this issue to date. Nevertheless, misconceptions appear highly
resistant to standard classroom instruction, such that many students may leave both introductory
and more advanced psychology courses equipped with a host of inaccurate beliefs. Although
difficult to change, misconceptions can be corrected when instructors highlight not only what is
correct or empirically verified, but also what is incorrect and empirically unsupported.
Documenting how readily students affirm inaccuracies about the discipline constitutes a
necessary first step --- but only a first step. A more detailed picture will emerge only by addressing
whether and why misconceptions constitute a serious impediment for critical thinking or learning
more generally. Likewise, are misconceptions present at all levels of the discipline (e.g., graduate
students and faculty members), and are they moderated by cultural factors? Is the tendency to
affirm misconceptions trans-contextual, such that those students who readily affirm psychological
misconceptions are also more likely to agree with erroneous medical, consumer or political claims?
27
Although refutation instruction has met with success in dispelling misconceptions, what impact
would a critical thinking course, that explicitly equips students with a set of intellectual tools, have
for rejecting erroneous claims? In answering these and related questions, future work will need to
pay careful attention to methodological issues surrounding core properties of misconception
questionnaires. Only by doing so will we identify the factors responsible for shaping, maintaining
and extinguishing misconceptions about our discipline.
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SEAN HUGHES* is a post-doctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. His interests include
Relational Frame Theory and its relationship to human learning, language and (implicit) social
cognition. Correspondence: sean.hughes@ugent.be
FIONA LYDDY is a senior lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Research
interests include student learning, communication, science literacy and numerical cognition.
SINEAD LAMBE is a trainee clinical psychologist at the University of Bath. Research interests
include adult mental health, memory in depression, and psychosis.
*Contact author.
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