Description: What do Psychologists do in courtroom when they serve as expert witnesses? This is a huge and complicated topic so let’s focus in a bit. If a Psychologist has been asked by the court to assess an accused individual and if they use a measure or two in order to develop their opinion of… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Assessment: Intellectual-Cognitive Measures
Personality Testing: Diversion or Thin Edge of the Big Data Wedge?
Description: How do you feel about personality tests? If your response to this question is some version of “meh” you might want to reconsider. Aside from being a part of all introductory psychology course curricula many people view personality tests as those diversions they encounter in magazines (well, on line these days). However, it is… Read more »
Eurocentric Bias in Psychology: Remembering Joseph White
Description: You may not have known of Joseph White, a psychologist who died recently, but you should know about what he spent his life trying to do. White spent much of his career and life pointing out that the core theories within the discipline of psychology were blindly eurocentric. By this he meant that the… Read more »
Hiring and Other Prediction Decisions: Interviews Help, Right?
Description: Imagine you are going to hire someone to work for you. What information would you want to gather before making a hiring decision? Would you want to interview the applicants who looked good on paper? How much weight would the interview have in your decision about who to hire? How about if you were… Read more »
Eugenics and Forced Sterilization in Your Community?
Description: It is often hard to see local examples of some of the historical issues that come up in relation to the earlier days of psychology or the application of concepts related to psychology to the general population. The idea that it made sense from a social policy perspective to create a mechanism whereby “mentally… Read more »
Is Common Sense a Problem?
Description: It is quite common for those talking about the nature of human rationality to point out that a number of the shortcuts or heuristics that we use in analyzing information that the world is presenting us may in fact lead us in the direction of making decisions that are ultimately less rational. This review… Read more »