Popular Notions about the Discipline of Psychology

Because everyone, almost by habit, tries to explain why people around them behave the way they do, most of us end up building our own informal 'theory' of human behaviour -- for instance, the common belief that people are basically lazy and need to be pushed, even coerced, to perform well. Such common-sense theories may or may not hold up once they are actually tested. Their basic weakness is that they are built entirely on hindsight: the explanation is chosen only after the behaviour has already happened. If a loved one moves far away, either 'out of sight, out of mind' or 'distance makes the heart grow fonder' can explain what follows -- and which saying gets used depends entirely on what actually happens afterwards, not on any advance prediction. Scientific psychology, by contrast, looks for patterns of behaviour that can be predicted in advance, not merely explained once they have already occurred.

A well-known example of common sense being overturned by research is a 1975 study by Carol Dweck on children who gave up too quickly when faced with a difficult problem or a failure. Common sense suggests building their confidence with a run of easy successes before introducing harder problems. Dweck tested exactly this: one group of children was trained for 25 days on problems they could always solve, while a second group faced a mix of easy and difficult problems and was explicitly taught, whenever they failed, to attribute the failure to not having tried hard enough rather than to lack of ability. When both groups were then given a fresh, harder set of problems, the group that had always succeeded gave up far more quickly than the group that had experienced -- and learned to interpret -- both success and failure. The common-sense prescription (protect confidence with easy wins) turned out to produce the opposite of the intended effect. …