Psychologists Educating Students
to Think Skeptically

Teaching Activities

Activity #1: Backwards-Language Tapes

Three subscribers discuss ways of showing students the effects of expectation on perception. Joe Hatcher uses backwards-language tapes to do this and refers to the backwards-language experiments of John Vokey and Don Read at the University of Lethbridge. Tim Gaines describes a convenient method of creating your own tapes. Gary Peterson has found that even blank tapes provide an effective demonstration of expectancy effects.

Activity #2: Astrology and False Memory Demonstrations

Michael Kane advocates the use of magic routines to help students to learn that what they think they are seeing is not always correct. He uses astrology in one of his demonstrations to teach students about the "Barnum Effect" (also known as the "Forer Effect"). He also mentions one activity and one example that will demonstrate to students the fallibility of memory The activity makes use of word lists from the Deese-Roediger-McDermott memory studies. The example is the Challenger-explosion study:
Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (1992). Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. In E. Winograd & U. Neisser (Eds.), Affect and accuracy in recall: Studies of "flashbulb memories. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Activity #3: Shared Realities

Paul Price discusses the difficulty of getting students to question improbable beliefs that are widely shared by those with whom they interact every day. Paul makes suggestions regarding ways to get students to add more skeptical influences into their social networks. For an article on "shared realities," see:
Hardin, C.D., & Higgins, E.T. (1996). "Shared reality: How social verification makes the subjective objective". In R.M. Sorrentino & E.T. Higgins (eds.), Handbook of Motivation and Cognition (Vol. 3; pp. 28-84), New York: Guilford Press.

Activity #4: Horoscopes

I describe an article from a teaching journal in which daily horoscopes are used to teach students about expectancy effects.

Activity #5: Perceptual and Cognitive Illusions

Sharon Hutchins performs several demonstrations and activities that help students to understand the fallibility of inferential processes and memory. In doing this, she makes use of perceptual illusions, cognitive illusions (see M. Piattelli-Palmarini, 1994, Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds. Wiley), and activities that show influences on the formation of false memories (such as the Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists mentioned by Michael Kane above).

Activity #6: M&M Memory Experiment

Nancy Melucci describes several activities and demonstrations that help students learn to question their preconceptions and to better understand scientific methodology.

Activity #7: Auras and Experimental Design

Jim Friedrich describes a couple activities that help students to learn about proper experimental design and hypothesis testing. The first activity, in particular, makes students aware of the need to control for expectancy effects on the part of both experimenters and participants.

Activity #8: Researching Real-World Claims

Gary Levine describes an activity that can be used to teach students about experimental design.

Activity #9: Scientific Thinking

Jon Mueller describes an activity designed to help students learn to think scientifically, especially with regard to the kinds of evidence needed to support different kinds of claims.

Activity #10: Psychic Powers and Theory Evaluation

On the web site of the History of Science Society, Michael J. Crowe has described an activity using playing cards that allows him to illustrate two important misconceptions, one involving the reality of paranormal phenomena (specifically, precognition) and the other involving the collection of data to be used in theory evaluation.

Activity #11: Hypothesis Acceptance and Rejection

I quoted a passage from Feder (1999) that describes a card trick that can be used to teach students about hypothesis development and testing. In particular, the trick can help to teach students that it is not justifiable to accept a hypothesis simply because one has tested and rejected other hypotheses. Tim Gaines responded by briefly describing a variation on this trick.

Activity #12: References for Developing Magic Demonstrations

Gary Peterson cited two books that may help in developing class demonstrations using "magic." He also suggested asking professional magicians to give class demonstrations. Nevertheless, he cautioned that teachers need to be very clear about what critical-thinking lesson they want their students to learn when using such demonstrations.

Activity #13: Appearances Can be Deceptive

On the TIPS discussion list in April, 2001, Joe Hatcher asked a question about two tricks that he and some of his students had watched a "mind-reader" perform. Donald McBurney responded by describing the most likely techniques used by the magician. Because the tricks illustrate ways in which appearances may deceive us into developing false beliefs, it seemed to me worthwhile to consider using them as class demonstrations.

Activity #14: Media Reports of Research

Jon Mueller teaches students to critically examine media reports of psychological research with the following activity.

Activity #15: Teaching Skepticism Via the CRITIC Acronym

In an article written for the Skeptical Inquirer, Wayne Bartz outlined a technique for teaching students how to adopt a skeptical approach to knowledge claims in psychology and other disciplines.