Practice question · Multiple choice
Positive psychology studies flow, resilience and well-being rather than disorder. Critics call it a rebranding of self-help. Why does the field's answer to that charge rest on method rather than on subject matter?
Hints
- Ask what actually separates a scientific claim about happiness from a bookshop one.
- The topic is the same in both cases. So the difference must lie elsewhere.
Show the answer
A. Because what distinguishes science is method, not subject matter.
Why
The charge cannot be answered by defending the topic, which really is shared with the self-help shelf, what separates them is whether a claim could fail, whether the measure reproduces, whether nulls are reported. The field's record there is mixed and instructive: several showpieces replicated poorly, and saying so is the better answer.
Practise Contemporary Trends
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Psychology I is free to start.
More questions on Contemporary Trends
- Select every statement that is TRUE about contemporary psychology.
- Large replication projects found a substantial share of published psychology findings did not reproduce. Why…
- Match each concrete description to the contemporary concept it names.
- Preregistration asks researchers to commit to their hypotheses and analysis plan before collecting data.…
- Order the events by which the replication crisis reshaped research practice.
- Sort each idea as a positive-psychology concept or a methodological reform.
- Positive psychology is often dismissed as optimism and self-help. What distinguishes it from that?