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Sneak Preview SNEAK PREVIEW For more information on adopting this title for your course, please contact us at: [email protected] or 800-200-3908 Scientific Perspectives on Pseudoscience and the Paranormal Scientific Perspectives on Pseudoscience and the Paranormal Readings for General Psychology Second Edition edited by Timothy J. Lawson Bassim Hamadeh, CEO and Publisher Jennifer McCarthy, Field Acquisitions Editor Michelle Piehl, Senior Project Editor Casey Hands, Associate Production Editor Jess Estrella, Senior Graphic Designer Stephanie Kohl, Licensing Coordinator Gustavo Youngberg, Interior Designer Natalie Piccotti, Director of Marketinger Kassie Graves, Vice President of Editorial Jamie Giganti, Director of Academic Publishing Copyright © 2019 by Cognella, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter in- vented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information retrieval system without the written permission of Cognella, Inc. For inquiries regarding permissions, translations, foreign rights, audio rights, and any other forms of reproduction, please contact the Cognella Licensing Department at [email protected]. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Cover image: Copyright © 2017 iStockphoto LP/fergregory. Copyright © 2013 iStockphoto LP/Messier111. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN: 978-1-5165-2726-7 (pbk) / 978-1-5165-2727-4 (br) To Anna, Alexandra, and Ryan BRIEF CONTENTS PREFACE 1 1 What Is Pseudoscience? 5 2 Methodological and Statistical Reasoning 19 3 Neuroscience and Consciousness 47 4 Child Development 87 5 Sensation and Perception 113 6 Learning and Memory 139 7 Cognition 181 8 Personality and Psychological Testing 215 9 Psychological Disorders and Therapies 255 10 Social Psychology 307 INDEX 345 vii CONTENTS Preface 1 1 What Is Pseudoscience? 5 1.1 “Science Versus Pseudoscience” 5 Timothy J. Lawson 2 Methodological and Statistical Reasoning 19 2.1 “Why Bogus Therapies Seem to Work” 19 Barry Beyerstein 2.2 “The Suggestibility of Young Children” 31 Maggie Bruck and Stephen Ceci 2.3 “On the Belief That Arthritis Pain Is Related to the Weather” 40 Donald Redelmeier and Amos Tversky 3 Neuroscience and Consciousness 47 3.1 “Why Right-Brain Teaching Is Half-Witted: A Critique of the Misapplication of Neuroscience to Education” 47 Annukka Lindell and Evan Kidd 3.2 “Can Minds Leave Bodies? A Cognitive Science Perspective” 62 D. Alan Bensley 3.3 “Dream Interpretation and False Beliefs” 74 Giuliana Mazzoni, Pasquale Lombardo, Stefano Malvagia, and Elizabeth Loftus 4 Child Development 87 4.1 “Do Babies Learn From Baby Media?” 87 Judy DeLoache, Cynthia Chiong, Kathleen Sherman, Nadia Islam, Mieke Vanderborght, Georgana Troseth, Gabrielle Strouse, and Katherine O’Doherty 4.2 “Separating Fact From Fiction in the Etiology and Treatment of Autism: A Scientific Review of the Evidence” 96 James Herbert, Ian Sharp, and Brandon Gaudiano 4.3 “The Myth of the Mozart Effect” 108 Will Dowd ix 5 Sensation and Perception 113 5.1 “What’s That I Smell? The Claims of Aromatherapy” 113 Lynn McCutcheon 5.2 “The Subtle Power of Hidden Messages” 120 Wolfgang Stroebe 5.3 “Psychic Crime Detectives: A New Test for Measuring Their Successes and Failures” 130 Richard Wiseman, Donald West, and Roy Stemman 6 Learning and Memory 139 6.1 “Do Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learners Need Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Instruction?” 139 Daniel Willingham 6.2 “Past-Life Identities, UFO Abductions, and Satanic Ritual Abuse: The Social Construction of Memories” 151 Nicholas Spanos, Cheryl Burgess, and Melissa Faith Burgess 6.3 “Memory Recovery Techniques in Psychotherapy: Problems and Pitfalls” 165 Steven Jay Lynn, Elizabeth Loftus, Scott Lilienfeld, and Timothy Lock 7 Cognition 181 7.1 “Nostradamus’s Clever ‘Clairvoyance’: The Power of Ambiguous Specificity” 181 Maziar Yafeh and Chip Heath 7.2 “Like Goes With Like: The Role of Representativeness in Erroneous and Pseudoscientific Beliefs,” 190 Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky 7.3 “Some Systematic Biases of Everyday Judgment” 204 Thomas Gilovich 8 Personality and Psychological Testing 215 8.1 “Criminal Profiling: Granfalloons and Gobbledygook” 215 Brent Snook, Paul Gendreau, Craig Bennell, and Paul Taylor 8.2 “What’s wrong with this picture?” 226 Scott Lilienfeld, James Wood, and Howard Garb 8.3 “Portrait of a Lie” 237 Matthias Gamer 8.4 “Voice Stress Analysis: Only 15% of Lies About Drug Use Detected in Field Test” 247 Kelly Damphousse x | Scientific Perspectives on Pseudoscience and the Paranormal 9 Psychological Disorders and Therapies 255 9.1 “Dissociative Identity Disorder: A Contemporary Scientific Perspective” 255 Scott Lilienfeld and Steven Jay Lynn 9.2 “Can We Really Tap Our Problems Away? A Critical Analysis of Thought Field Therapy” 276 Brandon Gaudiano and James Herbert 9.3 “A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch” 288 Linda Rosa, Emily Rosa, Larry Sarner, and Stephen Barrett 10 Social Psychology 307 10.1 “Mass Delusions and Hysterias: Highlights From the Past Millennium” 307 Robert Bartholomew and Erich Goode 10.2 “Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding” 321 Brad Bushman 10.3 “False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform” 335 Saul Kassin Index 345 xi PREFACE “In a world in which the media, self-help industry, and Internet are disseminating psychological pseudoscience at an ever-increasing pace, the critical thinking skills needed to distinguish science from pseudoscience should be considered mandatory for all psychology students.” —Scott Lilienfeld (2005) Unless yoU have avoided all popular media in the past few years, you’ve probably seen a number of extraordinary claims about therapies, products, and people’s abilities that seem to defy what we know about physics, biology, and psychology. You may have seen people who claim they can communicate with the dead, psychic detectives who can apparently solve crimes by “seeing” a crime scene that is miles away, nurses who claim to heal people simply by waving their hands above their patients’ bodies, and people who claim they were abducted by aliens who conducted horrific experiments on them. Gallup polls (e.g., Moore, 2005) suggest that many people believe in paranormal phenomena. For example, 41% of Americans believe in extrasensory perception (ESP), 21% believe that people can communicate mentally with someone who has died, and 25% believe in astrology. Scientists have actually studied these phenomena and a wide variety of other paranormal and pseudoscientific phenomena. In this book you will read what they have discovered and how they think about such claims. The fact that some college students hold beliefs in pseudoscientific and paranormal phe- nomena became apparent to me early in my career. Several years after I became a psychology professor, I took several of my brightest students to a professional psychology conference in Chicago. One night, while walking to a restaurant, they spotted a psychic’s office. When they told me that they had a strong belief in psychic abilities, I wondered how they could hold such a belief after I had taught them about psychology, critical thinking, and the scientific method. It was at that point that I realized that even though I had taught them what science is, I had not specifically addressed what science is not (i.e., pseudoscience). Since then I have been teaching students what scientists know about pseudoscience and the paranormal, and we’ve all found it to be a fascinating lesson in scientific reasoning as well as the cognitive and social forces that conspire to create pseudoscientific and paranormal beliefs. Purpose of the Book As Lawson and Brown (2018) noted, psychologists are becoming increasingly aware of and concerned about the problem of pseudoscience in psychology. Psychology students and the 1 general public are constantly exposed to pseudoscientific and paranormal claims through the media, the Internet, and pop psychology books. Psychology professors are becoming more concerned about teaching students to think critically about these claims. I hope that instructors will find this book of readings to be a useful tool for educating students about such claims. This book was designed to give beginning psychology students the opportunity to read original sources from psychologists and other scientists who have investigated pseudoscientific and paranormal phenomena related to psychology. These original sources allow students to get a close-up look at how scientists think about these phenomena, how they design research studies to investigate such phenomena, and why they are critical of pseudoscientific and paranormal claims. Students will also learn about scientific perspectives on a wide variety of specific pseudoscientific and paranormal phenomena. Along the way, they will encounter interesting examples that bring to life important psychological concepts (e.g., representative- ness heuristic, confirmation bias) and scientific principles (i.e., correlation does not mean causation; the importance of replication of research findings). I carefully selected the readings in each chapter to ensure that (a) the articles were fairly brief, (b) they were written by scientists knowledgeable about the
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