Misinformation in Intro Psych Textbooks

We're still misleading students, the general public, and ourselves

Photo by Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash

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Introductory psychology textbooks still haven’t caught up with the science. Despite years of criticism, they continue to promote debunked research, to present psychology as more settled than it is, and to be overly credulous of ideas that buttress progressive political pieties.

Among other things, many intro psych textbooks gloss over flaws in famous studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment; misrepresent areas like evolutionary psychology; present highly contested but left-friendly ideas like stereotype threat as settled science; promote psychological myths such as that violent video games cause real-world violence; and ignore exaggerations and distortions in famous case studies like that of Phineas Gage and Kitty Genovese.

The relative frequencies of these and other errors are shown in the table below.

The table comes from a recent paper by Jeffrey Brown and Christopher Ferguson. Here’s the abstract:

Recent scholarship has identified that factual errors have been common in introductory psychology textbooks. These errors tend to be in the direction of making psychological research appear more consistent than it is, as well as promoting viewpoints consistent with politically progressive ideologies. Some famous experiments in psychology have also seen serious questions raised about their validity. Given that these conversations have gone on for about a decade, it is worth considering whether identification of these issues resulted in improved coverage in introductory textbooks. Textbooks were sampled at two time points. Sixteen textbooks were sampled in 2018, and 18 in 2023. Although some improvements are seen from earlier studies, results indicated that errors in textbooks have remained common even after this issue had been clearly identified in the published literature. Misreporting of basic scientific information remains common in introductory textbooks, despite improvements in some areas. Textbook authors should be alert to potential misinformation, particularly related to controversial topics. Introductory psychology teachers may need to be aware that not all information presented in textbooks is true.

You can access the Brown and Ferguson paper here, or request a free copy from the authors here.

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