Are you an auditory or visual learner? Are you right-brained or left-brained? What’s your Myers-Briggs personality type? Our society has developed an obsession with popular psychology. Questions such as these pervade the media, social media, and even formalized settings such as job training. However, many of these tidbits of information that are considered common knowledge are based in little to no scientific evidence. How, then, did they come to be so widespread? In this class, we will cover several topics in pop psychology and separate fact from fiction based on available scientific evidence. We will also discuss how myths arise and spread, implications of believing them, the role of the media in scientific communication, how to critically evaluate evidence, and why humans are so infatuated with learning more about themselves.
- Teacher: Stephanie Mallinas