The Blog of a Chronic Content Creator
A colleague and I are creating a Discord server to discuss psychology and all things related (Technology, community, academia, culture, etc…) We’re hoping to use it with our students, and our colleagues and friends.
If you’d like to join in, head over to https://go.jonwestfall.com/psychout and jump in. Right now just a few channels in there for general talk, posting news that you’d like to discuss, and just some fun. So stop by, post some stuff, and enjoy.
Each semester I teach General Psychology, I do an activity where I ask a series of True/False questions to determine if my students believe some of the biggest “myths” of the field. Recently I asked our excellent Graduate Assistant to pull the previous semesters (5 in total) and report the percentage of people who got each question right. I then averaged them and sorted by most likely to be wrong to least.
Here are the “Biggest Myths” in psychology, with the percentage of students who got the question right:
| We learn more effectively when taught via our preferred “Learning Style” (False) | 8% |
| Blind people possess greater acuity in the sense channels of hearing and touch (False) | 17% |
| When you burn your hand, neural information travels to your brain at nearly the speed of light (False) | 19% |
| If you want someone to continue doing sometihng, you should reward them on a consistent basis (False) | 35% |
| Most people would administer a near-fatal electrical shock if an experimenter told them to. (True) | 41% |
| Violent offenders usually have a diagnosis of mental illness (False) | 46% |
| Human memory is like a recording of what happened (False) | 47% |
| A psychologist can determine a person’s hidden problems by analyzing his or her dreams (False) | 51% |
| It is an optical illusion when the moon appears larger on the horizon than it does overhead (True) | 54% |
| We use about 10% of our brain (False) | 54% |
| Hypnosis can help people accurately recall a crime scene (False) | 59% |
| People are either Right Brained (Creative) or Left Brained (logical) (False) | 63% |
| Playing classical music for a young infant will result in an increase in his or her IQ (False) | 66% |
| People with one eye can still see in three dimensions (True) | 67% |
| US Law Requires Television and Film to portray mental disorders accurately (False) | 68% |
| Ivan Pavlov, who documented classical conditioning, was not a psychologist! (True) | 70% |
| Quizzes in magazines like Cosmopolitan or on websites like Buzzfeed are surprisingly accurate. (False) | 76% |
| We experience stress when good as well as bad things happen to us. (True) | 79% |
| Simple wording changes can alter a person’s decision (eg, “75% will live” vs “25% will die”) (True) | 82% |
| Lie detector tests are accurate (False) | 85% |