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| Preface | |
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| Psychology Is Alive and Well (and Doing Fine Among the Sciences) | |
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| The Freud Problem | |
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| The Diversity of Modern Psychology | |
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| Implications of Diversity | |
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| Unity in Science | |
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| What, Then, Is Science? | |
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| Systematic Empiricism | |
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| Publicly Verifiable Knowledge: Replication and Peer Review | |
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| Empirically Solvable Problems: Scientists' Search for Testable Theories | |
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| Psychology and Folk Wisdom: The Problem with "Common Sense" | |
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| Psychology as a Young Science | |
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| Summary | |
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| Falsifiability: How to Foil Little Green Men in the Head | |
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| Theories and the Falsifiability Criterion | |
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| The Theory of Knocking Rhythms | |
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| Freud and Falsifiability | |
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| The Little Green Men | |
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| Not All Confirmations Are Equal | |
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| Falsifiability and Folk Wisdom | |
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| The Freedom to Admit a Mistake | |
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| Thoughts Are Cheap | |
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| Errors in Science: Getting Closer to the Truth | |
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| Summary | |
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| Operationism and Essentialism: "But, Doctor, What Does It Really Mean?" | |
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| Why Scientists Are Not Essentialists | |
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| Essentialists Like to Argue About the Meaning of Words | |
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| Operationists Link Concepts to Observable Events | |
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| Reliability and Validity | |
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| Direct and Indirect Operational Definitions | |
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| Scientific Concepts Evolve | |
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| Operational Definitions in Psychology | |
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| Operationism as a Humanizing Force | |
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| Essentialist Questions and the Misunderstanding of Psychology | |
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| Summary | |
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| Testimonials and Case Study Evidence: Placebo Effects and the Amazing Randi | |
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| The Place of the Case Study | |
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| Why Testimonials Are Worthless: Placebo Effects | |
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| The "Vividness" Problem | |
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| The Overwhelming Impact of the Single Case | |
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| The Amazing Randi: Fighting Fire with Fire | |
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| Testimonials Open the Door to Pseudoscience | |
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| Summary | |
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| Correlation and Causation: Birth Control by the Toaster Method | |
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| The Third-Variable Problem: Goldberger and Pellagra | |
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| Why Goldberger's Evidence Was Better | |
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| The Directionality Problem | |
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| Selection Bias | |
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| Summary | |
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| Getting Things Under Control: The Case of Clever Hans | |
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| Snow and Cholera | |
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| Comparison, Control, and Manipulation | |
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| Random Assignment in Conjunction with Manipulation Defines the True Experiment | |
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| The Importance of Control Groups | |
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| The Case of Clever Hans, the Wonder Horse | |
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| Clever Hans in the 1990s | |
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| Prying Variables Apart: Special Conditions | |
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| Intuitive Physics | |
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| Intuitive Psychology | |
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| Summary | |
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| "But It's Not Real Life!": The "Artificiality" Criticism and Psychology | |
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| Why Natural Isn't Always Necessary | |
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| The "Random Sample" Confusion | |
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| The Random Assignment Versus Random Sample Distinction | |
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| Theory-Driven Research Versus Direct Applications | |
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| Applications of Psychological Theory | |
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| The "College Sophomore" Problem | |
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| The Real-Life and College Sophomore Problems in Perspective | |
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| Summary | |
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| Avoiding the Einstein Syndrome: The Importance of Converging Evidence | |
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| The Connectivity Principle | |
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| A Consumer's Rule: Beware of Violations of Connectivity | |
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| The "Great-Leap" Model Versus the Gradual-Synthesis Model | |
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| Converging Evidence: Progress Despite Flaws | |
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| Converging Evidence in Psychology | |
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| Scientific Consensus | |
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| Methods and the Convergence Principle | |
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| The Progression to More Powerful Methods | |
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| A Counsel Against Despair | |
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| Summary | |
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| The Misguided Search for the "Magic Bullet": The Issue of Multiple Causation | |
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| The Concept of Interaction | |
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| The Temptation of the Single-Cause Explanation | |
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| Summary | |
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| The Achilles' Heel of Human Cognition: Probabilistic Reasoning | |
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| "Person-Who" Statistics | |
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| Probabilistic Reasoning and the Misunderstanding of Psychology | |
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| Psychological Research on Probabilistic Reasoning | |
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| Insufficient Use of Probabilistic Information | |
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| Failure to Use Sample-Size Information | |
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| The Gambler's Fallacy | |
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| A Further Word About Statistics and Probability | |
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| Summary | |
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| The Role of Chance in Psychology | |
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| The Tendency to Try to Explain Chance Events | |
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| Explaining Chance: Illusory Correlation and the Illusion of Control | |
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| Chance and Psychology | |
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| Coincidence | |
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| Personal Coincidences | |
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| Accepting Error in Order to Reduce Error: Clinical Versus Actuarial Prediction | |
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| Summary | |
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| The Rodney Dangerfield of the Sciences | |
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| Psychology's Image Problem | |
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| Psychology and Parapsychology | |
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| The Self-Help Literature | |
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| Recipe Knowledge | |
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| Psychology and Other Disciplines | |
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| Our Own Worst Enemies | |
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| Isn't Everyone a Psychologist? Implicit Theories of Behavior | |
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| The Source of Resistance to Scientific Psychology | |
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| The Final Word | |
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| References | |
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| Credits | |
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| Name Index | |
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| Subject Index | |