Psychological Mythbusting

Catalog description

With the constant bombardment of "pop psychology" in the media, it has become extremely difficult to evaluate the validity of questionable claims about human behavior (e.g. people tend to be left-brained or right-brained, students have different learning styles, men are from Mars and women are from Venus). Moreover, although many pseudo-scientific claims have been debunked by valid scientific methods, these unsubstantiated claims continue to be believed by large numbers of laypeople, thus the gulf between empirical research and popular opinion has only widened.To deal with the heightened concern over pseudoscience, the purpose of this class will be to develop a set of solid critical thinking skills to evaluate the legitimacy of common claims found in popular psychology.