Highly Prevalent but Not Always Persistent

Abstract

Although past research has documented the prevalence of misconceptions in introductory psychology classes, few studies have assessed how readily upper-level undergraduate and graduate students endorse erroneous beliefs about the discipline. In Study 1, we administered a 30-item misconception test to an international sample of 670 undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students. Analyses indicated that participants identified and rejected the majority of misconceptions, with doctoral students performing better than their master's or undergraduate peers. In Study 2, we administered a revised version of our questionnaire to a novel sample of 557 students while controlling for number of years spent at university, psychology courses completed, and need for cognition. Once again, we found that graduate students rejected more, affirmed less, and reported lower levels of uncertainty than their undergraduate counterparts. Educational implications and future research directions are discussed.

Effects of Raising Student Teachers’ Metacognitive Awareness of Their Educational Psychological Misconceptions

“…Research in this field (recent reviews: Bensley & Lilienfeld, 2017;Hughes et al, 2013b) seems to confirm this picture. Endorsement of psychological misconceptions is positively related to faith in intuition and negatively related to critical thinking and information literacy (Bensley et al, 2014;Hughes et al, 2013bHughes et al, , 2015Kowalski & Taylor, 2017). Psychological misconceptions decrease-but do not cease to exist-with more psychology training and education (Amsel et al, 2011(Amsel et al, , 2014Gaze, 2014;Hughes et al, 2013aHughes et al, , 2013bHughes et al, , 2015McCarthy & Frantz, 2016;Taylor & Kowalski, 2004).…”

Misconceptions die hard: prevalence and reduction of wrong beliefs in topics from educational psychology among preservice teachers

“…Other common psychological misconceptions concern "People use only 10% of their brain" (e.g., Higbee and Clay 1998) or "Playing Mozart's music to infants boosts their intelligence" (e.g., Lilienfeld et al 2010). Psychological misconceptions seem to be highly prevalent among both the general population and psychology students (e.g., Furnham and Hughes 2014;Hughes et al 2015;Lilienfeld et al 2010;McCutcheon 1991;McCutcheon et al 1993;Taylor and Kowalski 2004;Vaughan 1977). Furnham and Hughes (2014) identified 37 myths in popular psychology believed by at least two-thirds of their sample of both, the general population and psychology students.…”

Refuting Mental Health Misconceptions: A Quasi-Experiment with Abnormal Psychology Courses

“…Unfortunately, completing an introductory psychology course may be an inadequate means of reducing misconceptions, as data have suggested mistaken beliefs often persist at the conclusion of those courses (Kuhle, Barber, & Bristol, 2009). Generally, research has shown that misconception endorsement appears to diminish as the number of psychology courses taken increases (Arntzen, Lokke, Lokke, & Eilertsen, 2010; Hughes et al., 2015; Taylor & Kowalski, 2004). However, optimism for this pattern should be restrained as upper-division psychology students have been shown to still endorse a large percentage of misconceptions (Gaze, 2014) as well as even revert back later in their education to endorsing popular myths (Lyddy & Hughes, 2012).…”