1. The problem, research question, or background?
Psychology is one of the most popular undergraduate majors in the United States. Although the psychology curriculum covers many topics, fewer than 10% of psychology departments offer a course in human intelligence (Norcross et al., 2016; Stoloff et al., 2010). As a result, many undergraduate psychology students will only learn about human intelligence in their introductory psychology course. We analyzed the content of introductory psychology textbooks to ascertain (1) the most frequently taught topics related to human intelligence, (2) the accuracy of information about human intelligence, and (3) the presence of logical fallacies about intelligence research.
2. Methods
We gathered the 29 top selling introductory psychology textbooks (according to amazon.com) and read the chapter/section on intelligence. Each concept, paragraph, vocabulary term, and section heading was coded to create a master list of concepts mentioned in the textbooks. An independently trained second coder examined 5 books and had high agreement (median = 92%) with the principal coder. Concepts were then combined into categories using an open coding scheme and identified the most frequently taught topics related to intelligence. Accuracy was judged against the report from the APA’s task force on intelligence (Neisser et al., 1996) and the Mainstream Statement on Intelligence (Gottfredson, 1997). When recording logical fallacies, we used a list from Gottfredson (2009) as the standard.
3. Results and conclusions
We found that—even with conservative standards of accuracy or logical fallacies—that 75.9% of textbooks contained inaccurate statements and 79.3% had logical fallacies in their sections about intelligence. The five most commonly taught topics were IQ (93.1% of books), Gardner’s multiple intelligences (93.1%), Spearman’s g (93.1%), Sternberg’s triarchic theory (89.7%), and how intelligence is measured (82.8%). On the other hand, the CHC model was only found in 27.6% of books. The textbooks contained an average of 1.69 fallacies (SD = 1.23, range = 0-4). We conclude that most psychology students are exposed to a surprising amount of inaccurate information and may have the mistaken impression that non-mainstream ideas (e.g., Strenberg or Gardner’s theories) are as empirically supported as g.
4. Discussion: what is new or important?
This is the first empirical investigation of the coverage of intelligence in the undergraduate curriculum. We believe that this study shows a great mismatch between mainstream work on intelligence and what is actually taught to students. For many people, an introductory psychology course is the only place where they will learn about the scientific evidence on intelligence. Therefore, we found the mismatch disturbing. These findings may shed light onto why the public understanding of intelligence is sometimes so different from what experts believe about the topic. We suggest that psychology departments offer an undergraduate course on intelligence to provide a deeper education on the topic and that textbook authors revise their work to eliminate inaccurate information and logical fallacies.
Although we would prefer to give a lightening talk, we are also willing to make an oral presentation or poster at the conference.
