Several authors have increasingly recognized the problem of pseudoscience as a major threat confronting psychology and allied disciplines. We discuss the importance of courses in science and pseudoscience to undergraduate education in psychology and provide (a) a model syllabus for courses in the science and pseudoscience of psychology, (b) a list and description of suggested primary and supplemental texts for such courses, (c) a list of useful educational videos on science and pseudoscience, and (d) suggested Web sites that offer critical evaluations of pseudoscientificclaims. Finally, we briefly review the literature concerning the efficacy of courses in the science and pseudoscience of psychology and offer suggestions for future research in this area.

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Numerous studies have found that people respond more defensively to criticism made by out-group members than to criticism made by in-group members (this is known as the intergroup sensitivity effect, or ISE). Women attending a women's college participated in three experiments designed to identify moderators of the ISE. Consistent with predictions, the critic's group identity strongly predicted sensitivity to group-directed criticism (i.e., a large ISE) in Experiment 1. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the critic's freedom to choose her group identity interacted with the critic's group identity to predict defensiveness, such that criticism delivered by in-group members (but not by out-group members) was seen as more constructive if the critic had freely chosen her group membership. Experiment 3 examined whether strength of in-group identity affected the ISE. Contrary to predictions, strength of in-group identity did not interact with group identity of the critic to predict defensiveness. These results demonstrate that group identity of a critic is the overriding determinant of sensitivity to group-directed criticism. The implications of these findings for the attributional account of the intergroup sensitivity effect are considered.

The present investigation adopted a debiasing approach to the judgmental error known as the conjunction fallacy (Tversky & Kahneman, 1982). Such an approach was used to determine the extent to which the conjunction fallacy reflects task specific misunderstanding of particular judgment problems. The results suggest that (a) subjects' misunderstanding of conjunction problems is indeed somewhat task specific, and (b) a debiasing approach can effectively lower but not eliminate the conjunctive error rate for problems that do not strongly implicate representativeness thinking. Educational strategies based on statistical and probabilistic knowledge are discussed as an approach to debiasing inferential errors like the conjunction fallacy.

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