ABSTRACT
Psychologists outnumber their colleagues in the other social sciences, and more than 14,000 psychologists belong to the American Psychological Association (APA). The APA Website, APA Online, offers a treasure trove of information but begins with a simple definition. Canadian professor Keith Stanovich’s overview of the discipline, How to Think Straight about Psychology, provides insights into some very basic problems confronting the discipline. Like all modern social sciences, the study of human psychology can be traced to the ancient Greeks. Plato implored his students to “know thyself,” acknowledging our species’ impressive introspective capabilities. Charles Darwin’s nineteenth-century theories of natural selection posited the revolutionary idea that Homo sapiens is subject to the same developmental laws as other species. In 1906, Russian biologist Ivan Pavlov began publishing accounts of his experiments on animals involving conditioned response. Behaviorism satisfied a desire in the twentieth century for a psychological theory more observable and measurable than psychoanalysis.
