The Myth That Made Social Psychology Famous

“Psychology, unlike many of the other sciences, doesn’t have a canon of uncontested facts. Because of this, psychology textbooks are not made up of facts students must learn. Instead, they are full of experiments and research techniques. Parables like the Kitty Genovese story serve to link the experiments to the real world. There is thus a strong incentive not to abandon the stories in the textbooks, even if the stories themselves are on shaky ground.”

If you want to read more about why people fail to intervene in emergencies--known as the "bystander effect"-- or some of the other famous ideas that have been challenged in social psychology, We strongly recommend reading Michael Inzlicht’s newsletter. It's part science, part confessional, which makes it a lot more interesting than the vast majority of newsletters. He regularly questions some of the biggest ideas in the field, including his own.