Abstract
More than a million students take introductory psychology each year in North America, but numerous studies suggest that at the end of the course, most of them endorse misconceptions about behavior and mental processes that may misguide decision making about important personal, social, political, and economic matters. Those studies offer valuable snapshots of the problem, but they used differing misconception tests and most of them tested small numbers of students in a single course at a single institution. The present study was designed to provide a broader perspective by collecting scores on the same misconceptions test from 933 students taught by 14 instructors over five academic terms at eight different institutions. They endorsed an average of 22.09 (55.2%) out of 40 misconceptions. This endorsement rate mirrored the results of smaller scale studies and was about the same regardless of institution, academic major, or exposure to psychology in high school. There were, however, small negative correlations between endorsement rates and (a) students’ reported grade point average and (b) instructors’ reported efforts at debunking misconceptions. Taken together, our results confirm the need for introductory psychology courses to focus more attention on combatting socially significant misconceptions about behavior and mental processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)