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Psychological Science

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New authors bring a winning combination of cutting-edge research and real-world impact 

W. W. Norton is excited to announce that award-winning authors Elizabeth Phelps and Elliot Berkman will bring their ideas and energy to Psychological Science 7e. Our authors are committed to encouraging students to learn and evaluate psychology through the lens of methods, replication, and the open science era. Looking beyond the text, Liz and Elliot applied their experience with the introductory psychology course to all aspects of the teaching and learning tools, including InQuizitive’s adaptive assessment, new ZAPS 3.0 interactive labs with instructor support, a hands-on approach to visualizing brain science through a new interactive 3D brain, and exciting new interactive neuron animations. They are committed to introducing students to a more modern view of the field—one that shows the real-world impact of psychology and showcases the work of diverse researchers throughout.   This purchase offers access to the digital ebook only.

3018 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 1, 2022

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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
1 review
May 29, 2025
I read this textbook for 2 of my classes, and although there is lots of great information, I do have quite a lot of criticisms. A lot of my opinions may seem controversial and might potentially make some people upset, but that doesn’t mean that they are wrong or that they don’t deserve any consideration. The point of this isn’t to prove how bad the textbook is and how right I am, but to simply inform people about these issues so we can create better editions in the future, which I think is super important.

The textbook focuses heavily on women's and racial issues. Which I first want to say is great. I think those groups of people deserve to have their problems recognized and to make people aware about them. While there is some concern for men in minority groups, men’s issues in general are basically completely ignored. The idea that men, especially white men, suffer, seems to barely exist in this textbook at all and if they do suffer, it is almost framed in a way where it is their fault and there is no real concern for what caused them to suffer in the first place. It will go on about how marriage is better for men and how men are likely to live longer than women, but mentions nothing about how men are a lot more likely to kill themselves and a third of men haven’t even had sex in the last year, and many other issues which are both very important and also deserve to be recognized. The textbook does actually say that men are dying more because of their harmful lifestyle factors such as opioid and alcohol abuse, but still doesn’t state the real factors on why they are engaging in those behavior or even have much concern for the struggles they go through that lead to them to doing them in the first place. It goes on about how they drink more than women, but once again, does not concern itself with any potential struggles that lead them to drinking more in the first place.

The textbook almost portrays this idea that white men are at fault for all these racial and sexist issues. And although throughout history, they may be responsible for a lot of them and some of those still persist today, we have to make sure that we don’t push a narrative of blaming everything on men which is very likely to push a lot of males out of the field of psychology, causing them to suffer even more, since we are likely to have fewer voices and male perspectives and ideas on this subject that can be very valuable. All these issues have many different underlying factors that contribute to it and the idea of everything simply being one person or a group of people's fault, is simply false. We should still be able to learn from what we did wrong and take accountability, but the goal shouldn’t be to blame people, it should be figuring out what lead to these problems coming about in the first place and then figuring out effective ways to deal with them by working together. I find it ironic how the textbook goes on about how we need to be careful about all these different biases that we can fall prey to (which is important to know about), but at the same time, completely ignoring men's issues also creates a huge bias. Now obviously there are so many different issues that it would be impossible to cover every single one of them, but leaving out and not showing any real concern for the issues of such a large demographic of people (men), I do not think is appropriate. The textbook seems to be too concerned with aligning itself to the current political agenda instead of actually trying to tell the truth about these issues and psychology in general.

The textbook also omits any responsibility that minority groups or women play in any of these issues. They go on and talk about all the racial tendencies people have and how they can prevent that (which I think is great, we should all try our best to be aware of these), but there is no responsibility placed on how women and minority groups should be handling or expressing these issue. Because the truth is that we all have a responsibility and role to play in these issues. One personal example I can give is when I had a Muslim friend come out to my cabin a long time ago and he was speeding around driving recklessly. When my parents confronted him about it and were upset at him, he went on to say how they are racist and how they don't like him, even though this was not an issue of racism at all, it was an issue of endangering other people and inappropriate behavior. And I have seen multiple situations now where people will pull the racist card and similar acts whenever something ideal doesn’t happen. Even if my perception was somehow wrong about these situations, it's still something important to consider. Inappropriate use of the term racism, sexism, etc, in situations like this are likely to cause other people to not respect them and take them seriously, which can ruin it for people that actually are facing real problems in racism or sexism. It also deteriorates the true meaning and value of having that terminology in the first place. We all need to hold each other accountable and solve these problems collectively or else we are going to constantly be at a deadlock or at least only minimal progress will be made with these issues. Whether its racism, sexism, childhood trauma, or whatever unfortunate situation that happened, we all have a responsibility for dealing with our emotional state appropriately.

Although most of the information in the textbook seemed accurate, the wording of certain parts was pretty misleading. One example was the section about intersexuality. The textbook states that 1-2% of people have some ambiguity in their assigned sex and because of intersexuality, an intersexual spectrum may be needed to account for this large amount of people. But they don't mention the percent of people that actually qualify for being intersex and if you do your own research, you will find out that the amount of people that meet the criteria for being intersexual by clinicians is likely more around 0.018%, but the textbook does not mention this number. If this is true, then a spectrum for intersex may not be needed as much as the textbook presents it. Once again, we need to make sure we include all necessary information and to make sure we are using these terms accurately or else the value and meaning of these terms will be lost. Whether the number for people who are actually intersex is actually 0.018% or closer to 1-2%, isn’t my main point. The point is that it's still important to think critically and question things that don’t seem right, even for material in academia.

Like I first mentioned, there is a lot of good information in the textbook, but it paints a pretty inaccurate picture of reality by leaving out some very key issues and important concepts. I hope the newer addition of this textbook undergoes some major changes. Overall, I am pretty disappointed in this textbook but hope we can recognize these issues better in the future and to integrate an approach focused more on accountability and working collectively to solve these issues in psychology.
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95 reviews1 follower
January 4, 2024
I cannot believe I read a whole academic textbook. I actually read it. Cover to cover. Wild. Didn't think this would ever happen. Not that this textbook was particularly invigorating or anything it just feels like that scene in life of Pi when he uses the pencil down to the nub and it runs out. He runs out of pencil. That just doesn't happen. Or like chapstick, you never actually use an entire tube of chapstick.

Anyways looking forward to spending another $100+ to read the next newest edition in which they only slightly change every passage and tell readers that they were actually wrong all along.
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