“You’ll Never Guess Who Wrote That: 78 Surprising Authors of Psychological Publications” by Scott O. Lilienfeld (Emory University) & Steven Jay Lynn (Binghamton University): Perspectives on Psychological Science Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 419-41 (July 2016). The abstract:
One can find psychological authors in the most unexpected places. We present a capsule summary of scholarly publications of psychological interest authored or coauthored by 78 surprising individuals, most of whom are celebrities or relatives of celebrities, historical figures, or people who have otherwise achieved visibility in academic circles, politics, religion, art, and diverse realms of popular culture. Still other publications are authored by individuals who are far better known for their contributions to popular than to academic psychology. The publications, stretching across more than two centuries, encompass a wide swath of domains of psychological inquiry and highlight the intersection of psychology with fields that fall outside its traditional borders, including public health, economics, law, neurosurgery, and even magic. Many of these scholarly contributions have enriched psychology and its allied disciplines, such as psychiatry, in largely unappreciated ways, and they illustrate the penetration of psychological knowledge into multiple scientific disciplines and everyday life. At the same time, our author list demonstrates that remarkable intellectual accomplishments in one scientific domain, such as physics, do not necessarily translate into success in psychology and underscores the distinction between intelligence, on the one hand, and critical thinking and wisdom, on the other
A majot point of the study is that both popular writers and successful scientists in other fields are inclined to seriously underestimate the challenges of doing research in a number of subfields of linguistics — I mean, how hard could it be? — notably psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, phonetics, semantics, and syntactic variation — all of which can fairly be said to be hard that is to say, difficult, science — a point made clearly in the full article.
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