Psychology Around Us

by Ronald J. Comer, Nancy Ogden, Michael Boyes

Psychology Around Us is the first introductory psychology textbook to successfully present psychology as an integrated discipline. Every chapter not only offers a thorough presentation of the concepts, applications, and research of that area but also illustrates the interrelations among the subfields of psychology—brain function, development, dysfunctions, and individual differences. This approach not only serves to engage students, but also presents psychology as a united and integrated discipline. Combined with a balance of Canadian and global research, rigorous scientific content, and engaging applications, this text is an invaluable resource for your Canadian introductory psychology students. In this second Canadian edition the chapters have been streamlined to be more accessible to students and many references have been updated.

Genres: Nonfiction, School

816 pages, Hardcover

First published December 30, 2009

About the author

Ronald J. Comer has been a professor in Princeton University's Department of Psychology for the past 50 years, also serving for many years as director of Clinical Psychology Studies and as chair of the university's Institutional Review Board. In 2016 he transitioned to emeritus status at the university. He has received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, where his various courses in psychopathology were among the university's most popular.
Professor Comer is also Clinical Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He has also been a practicing clinical psychologist and served as a consultant to numerous hospitals, family practice residency programs, and autism programs.
In addition to writing the textbooks Fundamentals of Psychopathology (eleventh edition), Psychopathology: Science and Practice (twelfth edition), Psychology Around Us (fourth edition), and Case Studies in Abnormal Psychology (third edition), Professor Comer has published a range of journal articles and produced numerous widely used educational video programs, including The Higher Education Video Library Series, The Video Anthology for Psychopathology, The Worth Video Collection for Psychopathology, Video Segments in Neuroscience, Introduction to Psychology Video Clipboard, and Developmental Psychology Video Clipboard.
Professor Comer was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and a graduate student at Clark University. He currently lives in Florida with his wife, Marlene.

Reviews

[Jurij Fedorov · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't read the full book. I just reviewed the 2018 Canadian edition to see how good it is for freshmen. So I focus on the topic that is most bias prone to review it critically.

Intelligence chapter

Mostly I read about IQ and evolutionary psychology in these textbooks because these topics are BY FAR the most misunderstood topics in psychology and so far there has not been a single psychology textbook that got g factor right. There are studies comparing textbooks and how many mistakes they make in intelligence chapters and out of hundreds of books not a single one was free from huge mistakes. The only ones who didn't do terribly were textbooks that only had a few pages on intelligence in a book of 500 pages. So I will use the intelligence chapter as an example to show what this book is.

The chapter itself focuses on alternative hypothetical theories of intelligence. g factor is lazily presented as the "outdated" way of thinking. This is in my view a lazy way to argue your point as laymen reading words like "outdated, old or too narrow" about an old theory will consider it debunked. It's a bad way to argue your point because it's not saying anything. g factor, as the authors also agree on, is still the main theory on intelligence and still the theory with most supporting evidence. Yet multiple intelligence theories are presented as an "improvement" on this old outdated concept. Which is a reach as these are philosophical ideas and not analytical studies. The authors here don't make this distinction explicit so reading this book you'd feel that Gardner's multiple intelligence is a renewal and improvement on old ideas yet it's closer to pseudoscience than any proper theory like g factor. When you are just describing random studies without being critical you get these misleading arguments.

So for example, the theories of emotional intelligence and social intelligence are seen as revolutionary and the support for these hypotheses are often many small cool anecdotes. Like using the The Big Bang Theory tv series Sheldon Cooper character to show that high IQ people are often stupid in other ways. Which again is not really statistics or even studies. It's just an ideological argument they are making. They also use a lot of "fun" link in the text itself like linking to specific Wordpress blogs and Youtube videos to "show" that their alternative intelligence theories are the proper ones. But their links also refer to single anecdotes and not studies and many of the anecdotes are highly questionable. Like some low IQ person showing off his huge impressive mental skills. On Youtube there is a huge amount of false videos exactly on this so it's highly questionable to just link to the video as "proof". Instead they could link to a study and then also have the link there. Did an autistic man really draw New York from memory alone? Well, maybe he did. But it's just as likely that he just cheated to get exposure and sell more art. If he really could do it he would likely repeat this in a scientific setting again and again and sell the art made there. Instead he did it just a few times in a TV show setting where he had full control over everything and could, if he wanted to, cheat. You can choose to believe it, but it's not science.

Unfortunately this mix of "hi young freshman chick, have you seen this super cool video?" and then the overview of psychology theories doesn't mix well. Especially because they just include ALL theories. There is no critical selection where they remove outdated disproven ideas or maybe make a small sub mini-chapter called "unscientific hypotheses". Everything is just mixed in a big soup bowl and they assume the reader will himself see what is bullshit or not. Which frankly is impossible unless you know about all of this already. Half the studies they included didn't replicate. So half this stuff is not really good science as such.

Another thing is their biases and argument style:

"In addition to adapting Binet’s test for use in American schools, Terman had a larger goal—a goal that today is considered reprehensible. He was an advocate of the nineteenth century eugenics movement, which sought to discourage people deemed as “unfit” from reproducing, while encouraging “fit” individuals to have children (Leonard, 2016). He believed that his IQ test could help determine the “fitness” of individuals to reproduce."

Here they present Terman as a man with reprehensible ideas or as they put it, "that today is considered reprehensible". This type of argument is used everywhere to make basically all their main points. Here you may nod in agreement if you are progressive and say: "Yes, eugenics is now considered reprehensible and Terman is in fact bad". But it's not a proper argument. What is reprehensible or good here? How do they define it? What is "today"? Who is considering it reprehensible? Experts? Freshmen? Laymen? In this example you may not care about being critical because you yourself may hate eugenics, but the point is that these type of arguments are incomplete and lazy and don't tell us anything we can use to make further conclusions. And it's how they conclude all their points to lean very heavily into the environment influence side in the nature vs. nurture debate.

The lazy pro nurture analysis is the tool used in every single case. It's a lazy progressive ideology used to analyze every single idea and theory. There is no focus on statistics or the size of studies. For example, IQ tests are made to sound racially and gender biased as the authors use the stereotype threat to show how tests are unfair towards Black people. They quote some small experiments, many 50 years old. Yet they don't talk about how most of these experiments couldn't be replicated and are now considered part of the replication crisis. Just the fact that they were once done is enough to include them here to "attack" g factor and IQ tests. Again, lazy analysis. I like the concept of attacking g factor, but using outdated vague ideas and small p-hacked studies is not the way to go. If you are going to use anything you can find to attack g factor then at least also try to be critical of these small counter-claims. Instead the critique only goes in one direction and these authors totally skip replication crisis in their analysis. It's like we are stuck in the 70's here.

There are different degrees of bias of course. In one textbook I saw a huge photo of Hillary and then 2 pages dedicated to "Hillary the hero". Here the authors use words like harmful, hurtful, racist to tell us why the theory of racial intelligence differences is wrong. Which is less on the nose, but just as biased. It's impressive that they basically mention everything important in this field. But it's less impressive that they pick the most ideological sources to have a final say. They constantly refer to known biased books about intelligence in their conclusive remarks on a topic. Which again is not something a freshman will spot. A freshman won't read a specific name and understand it's a left-wing source that is very heavily pro nurture and attacks all heritability claims.

The photos are actually where I think they can get away with their bias. Half the photos showing smart kids are Black children and then other half are minority students. They avoid White kids overall here. Which does seem weird, but this is not wrong or right. They use these photos especially in sections about raising IQ. According to this book you can basically increase IQ in 20 different ways and they even include suggestions to parents so they can increase the general intelligence of their children. This of course is not possible, but the book gets away with it by not making big concrete promises. It's just vague general rules about what to do with children and how culture may increase IQ. But since they don't mention any good studies or numbers they are just making vague claims you can't even disprove. At least this is not direct misinformation like the p-hacked studies they use to make general claims.

Here is one of the suggestions for raising IQ in your child. They have a photo of a Black dad with a Black kid and then a bunch of suggestions for increasing IQ in between many other subchapters about raising IQ in other ways. Not really anything "wrong", but just misguided and misleading. It's actually something I support doing personally. But that of course doesn't mean it affects IQ. Likely not as there is no good evidence for it. The authors just found a paper suggesting this with no good scientific support:

"Provide a variety of forms of daily stimulation: build in some play time with your child and, when she is older, with other children. Where possible, include your child in outings to local stores or even just for walks around your neighbourhood."

Here is an example of basically all their main claims. You can see how this is highly misleading when it's just mentioned without any critical counter-point of explanation about the gene/environment correlation:

"Studies have indicated that young children from poor families typically receive less intellectual stimulation than do children from wealthier homes (Arnold & Doctoroff, 2003). They have, on average, far fewer books and educational toys, for example, and their parents read to them less. Only half of preschoolers from families on public assistance have alphabet books, compared with 97 percent of children from wealthy homes (Mason et al., 1990; Chambers, Cheung, & Slavin, 2016). It appears that their early environmental limitations may place poor children at a severe disadvantage when it comes to developing intellectual and academic skills."

Here is another statement about environmental influence on IQ. Again a vague and misleading claim:

"Environment can contribute to giftedness. Many gifted people are raised in nurturing and stimulating environments."

Again a statement on giftedness and how it's not a great thing. This statement is directly misleading. It's part of their larger argument about how smart people are socially weak and how Sheldon Cooper is a prototypical example of a smart person. I'm sure you can find some random smaller studies showing this, but this is not an effect we can conclusively say is real:

"Some people gifted in academic or other forms of intelligence may not be equally gifted with social and emotional intelligence.  Some psychologists have observed that gifted children often display disproportionate social and emotional difficulties, especially during adolescence. Many are socially isolated and introverted."

Of course they are not directly claiming most smart people are autistic or socially handicapped in other ways. It's not said directly, but it's quite clear this is their main point. Any freshman reading this chapter will think this is basically a modern fact in psychology because the chapter starts and ends with this example and always brings up nurture support for it. It's highly misleading. They also don't promise that using their methods you can create a mini-Einstein. Rather it's an unsaid assumption all throughout the chapter and book overall. Which again will for sure mislead any freshman and give readers bad ideas about how our brains work. There is no way you read this book as a layman and don't go away with these conclusions about how intelligence works. The chapter overall is not about intelligence, but rather an attack on the g factor theory. Which it doesn't do well, but at least if it was called "Why g factor is wrong and why parent are extremely important" I would feel like it delivered on the stated goal. Instead it mentions most big studies, but doesn't have a single piece of modern critical psychology analysis. All analysis is just lazy culture war concepts mixed with bad studies. Which again becomes clear as 70% of the time they mention terrible p-hacked studies it's when they are trying to illustrate ideological points. So you know they cannot be scientifically critical because if they were they couldn't get away with such laziness. They would need to attack their own claims.

So what if your professor is one of the authors and forces you to read the book in the psychology class? It's hard to give a conclusive answer. It does actually mention most main research, but you can easily find much better textbooks. I would recommend you avoid this one if you can find something better and more modern. This is basically written by people who intellectually skipped the replication crisis. Yet you could use the book to show how psychology can be misguided and biased in the wrong hands. But for that you would need to actually look up the sources they used and read many of them. If you are a critical reader this book is fine at times as you know what claims to be critical off. If not then it will confuse you as much as inform you. For example, the intelligence chapter spends a similar amount of space on talking about a silly non-scientific Youtube video or a TV show character than it does on explaining group differences in intelligence. And only race group differences are mentioned for some reason. They could instead have written about group differences in the same race, but I assume they wanted to "disprove" the whole theory with ideological points and just referring to general group differences would make this impossible. It would require them to actually do intellectual work.

Lazy book.

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did I like reading it, no
Was some of the stuff interesting, yes

[Tallia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really did like this book of psych! Offering a new and simple way into understanding psychology!

[amelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant introduction to Psychology: recommended as my core text for my prelim modules during my undergraduate BSc, Comer provides a good taste of the subject in this relatively easy read. As with any text book it can be a little heavy, but holds a fairly informal tone relative to some academic research, and includes helpful summaries and case study sections. Fully recommend to the budding Psychology student as a starting point.