Stanovich in How to Think Straight About

Stanovich

In How to Think Straight About Psychology, author Keith Stanovich tries to bring the reader into the human mind and help us understand ourselves and one another. In this work, he discusses how important it is to conduct experimentation so that we can compare one set of data to another. One particular thing that he discussed was the concept of intuitive psychology. People use the trained ability to compare and contrast with their own mindsets in order to judge what they perceive to be either real or false. He speculates that there is virtually no correlation between what people claim they believe and how they actually behave. In fact, he lists various things that people as a whole believe which are not empirically true. It is as if he is claiming that the majority of the world's population is comprised of hypocrites.

In discussing the "compare and contrast" model, Stanovich states that people have to be trained to compare ourselves with others. People as a whole, he says, do not look outwardly to compare themselves with other individuals or with the culture as a whole. Rather, society has to teach the individual to compare him or herself with the masses. This relates back to some of the humanities wherein certain psychological and sociological ideas come into play. For example, there is the idea of sign and signifier wherein nothing has any real meaning. The only way that something has meaning is because the society as a whole gives that thing meaning.

This is also related to what Stanovich says about people's beliefs. He uses the example that people who are highly religious are supposed to be generous and give to charities. The data, he says, does not reflect this idea. People who are religious are supposed to donate to charities, but they don't. Supposedly this is indicative of the innate hypocrisy between mankind and his beliefs. He points to certain other things that the majority of the population believes to be true, such as the mythology that blink people have stronger hearing.