Psychological Science Under Scrutiny: Recent Challenges and Proposed Solutions

• Discusses the pointed challenges posed by critics to the field of psychological research, which have given pause to psychological researchers across a broad spectrum of sub-fields
• Argues that those conducting psychological research need to fundamentally change the way they think about data and results, in order to ensure that psychology has a firm basis in empirical science
• Places the recent challenges discussed into a broad historical and conceptual perspective, and considers their implications for the future of psychological methodology and research
• Challenges discussed include confirmation bias, the effects of grant pressure, false-positive findings, overestimating the efficacy of medications, and high correlations in functional brain imaging
• Chapters are authored by internationally recognized experts in their fields, and are written with a minimum of specialized terminology to ensure accessibility to students and lay readers

Scott O. Lilienfeld is Professor of Psychology at Emory University. His principal areas of research are personality disorders, psychiatric classification and diagnosis, pseudoscience in mental health, and the teaching of psychology. He is the author or co-author of numerous publications including 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology (Wiley, 2009), and is co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology (Wiley, 2015).