The Basics

Although there is more detail below, the object of the textbook and the teaching strategy is to teach students to be active in using scientific psychology to critically assess assertions about cognition and behavior.

Problems with Standard Textbooks

Often, textbooks spend pages trying to explain some intricate theory, only to later state, usually in one sentence or so, that the theory has not been supported by current research. One reason for this is that standard textbooks are commercial products. Publishers are in business and in order to stay in business they need to sell books. Many publishers seem to feel that they must include as many perspectives and theories as possible in order to try to attract sales from the widest possible audience. They also have to be careful not to take sides on any particular issue, lest they offend some potential purchaser. With some books, this has reached an absurd state in which viewpoints that have little or no value and that have not been supported by research are included and discussed. The texts excuse themselves by calling these viewpoints "approaches." Other fields do not do this. To make an analogy, an astronomy course would not spend time in detailed consideration of the view that the earth is the center of the solar system--the "geocentric approach" to the universe. For the past 400 years, all evidence has pointed to the contrary. The flat earth "approach" is not given much consideration either.

Books That Are Different, Really Different

This book is much more critical about psychology than most standard texts. The book has one overarching bias: Science. Scientific practice is the standard against which methods and findings are judged. Sometimes students find that the book is sarcastic about things in psychology that we consider to be muddle-headed and useless. That is what happens when a book has an attitude. Psychology, as we know it, is a relatively young science, and like any other scientific field, psychology is constantly evolving. New ideas about behavior are being formulated while old ones are discredited. New scientific strategies are devised to test new hypotheses. Our goal is to have the student view the field of psychology as it is today, not as it was years ago. We want students to be able to read the contemporary research literature and evaluate its assertions. We also want students to be critical of statements about cognition and behavior made by the media, friends, family, non-scientific psychological theorists, and others. In other words, we want students to behave like scientific thinkers. We avoid the term "critical thinking" because it has become so contaminated through wide usage. Instead we can be much more specific. We want the students to think empirically and skeptically.

Students who use the books gain a valuable set of skills that can be used in the real world. They learn to ask intelligent questions when presented with findings from studies. When they discuss assertions about human cognition and behavior, they sound as if they had a college education.

Why is there a chicken on the dedication page of the book?

The book has a chicken and a Latin motto on the dedication page. The motto, lightheartedly translated, can mean, "Not chicken to teach science" or "You cannot teach science to chickens." Either way, it is an emblem of our dedication and determination to teach students to use scientific thinking to assess assertions about behavior. Most psychology textbooks begin with strident statements about science and research methods, but quickly abandon these principles when discussing material that could not stand the rigor of scientific questioning. Those of us familiar with standard psychology textbooks can easily imagine what would happen if students really became scientific critical thinkers and then turned their critical guns on the rest of the content of a typical psychology text. Imagine what would happen if students followed up on the references in a standard book, critically evaluating the data--if any--behind the assertions in the text. In contrast to the problems this would make for a typical course, this is exactly what we want to happen. We are not afraid of penetrating questions about issues such as internal and external validity, adequacy of controls, appropriateness of operational definitions, and sample representativeness. As noted above, we are not chicken to teach science even though it turns the students into a critical wolf-pack, itching to get their teeth into each study.

Not surprisingly, many people have asked about the breed of the chicken pictured on the books. It is a Single-comb Black Minorca, a proud line once raised by Lary Shaffer’s great-grandfather, Martin Luther Shaffer.

Psychology Portrayed As Recent Research

The book contains contemporary scientific studies that have been rewritten for consumption by beginning students. Each chapter is a separate research story telling why the study was done, what was done, what was found, and what the conclusions indicate about human psychology. Each section is a story. People think in stories and stories are memorable. Anyone who doubts this should read a chapter--any chapter--in a standard beginning level psychology textbook--any textbook--and then try to tell the story of that chapter to someone else. This is difficult or impossible because there is no story. At best, the texts try to make a story by hitching together unrelated pieces of research in an odd patchwork. These chapters are like Frankenstein's monster--they are bits and pieces from here and there. Like the monster in the movie, they do not work, no matter how they are laced together. In contrast, the research stories in this book are tales that can be retold. Because they can be told, they can be remembered. We are frequently told by former students years after reading the book that they still remember, in detail, the contents of the chapters. 

There were several criteria for choosing the particular studies that are highlighted in the book. First, we wanted the articles to be quite current so that they would represent the cutting edge of research. Our own bias is toward empirical research that suggests some sort of application. While there is nothing wrong with purely theoretical research, it may not be the best vehicle for teaching beginning-level students. We chose generally robust articles to try to give good models of research. We had to exclude some otherwise promising studies because the design and analysis were so complicated that we could not imagine how to incorporate it into one of our chapters. We dramatically simplified a few very complex studies, but, for some others, the difficulties overwhelmed us and we abandoned the effort.

No So-called Pedagogical Aids

This book does not contain lists of defined vocabulary terms or condensed summaries of the material at the end of the chapter. Any technical terms that are not found in a standard dictionary are defined in context in the books. Students have to go look up the others. Graphs, charts, and tables are analogous to those found in the contemporary scientific literature. The chapters look like journal articles. There are no irrelevant color pictures. These are scientific psychology books, not People magazine. It is the student’s responsibility to interpret these figures and to extract the relevant information contained within them. We believe that the so-called "pedagogical aids" found in standard books encourage students to ignore the rest of the text. It is strange that these are supposed to be learning aids when, in contrast, they encourage the student to avoid learning. In life beyond college textbooks, students will have to look up some words and formulate their own summaries of chapters. College reading should train them to do this. Standard textbooks are utterly useless as part of this training because all the work is done for the student.

None of the material in this book is presented in "boxes." When trying to read standard texts, I never know when I am supposed to stop reading the text and start reading those chaotic and scattered boxes. I think many students solve this problem by skipping the boxes (or by skipping the text).  They can easily skip most of the reading in standard textbooks because some nice person has written a detailed summary at the end of the chapter. In some courses, exams are little more than vocabulary tests of the words that are listed and defined in the standard textbook. Psychology should be more than a list of vocabulary words.