DO PSYCHOLOGY COURSES REDUCE BELIEF IN PSYCHOLOGICAL MYTHS?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examined the degree to which psychology students accept popular psychology myths that are rejected by mainstream researchers (e.g., “people use only 10% of their brain's capacity”), and the effect of psychology courses on myth acceptance. Using a 20-item, true-false myth belief questionnaire, it examined the levels of gullibility among 94 undergraduates at different stages of their education, and related these to their educational and demographic backgrounds. High overall levels of myth acceptance (71%) were found, in line with earlier research. Myth acceptance decreased with the number of psychology courses that students had taken in university, but increased with the number that they had taken in junior college. Belief in myths was lower among students who were majoring in psychology, were older, had higher grades, and had advanced training in research methods, but it was not related to gender, geographical origin, or university year. It is concluded that university courses appear beneficial in encouraging methodological skepticism, whereas taking specialized psychology courses in junior college may hinder rather than promote critical thinking among undergraduates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".