An Insufficiently Substantiated Claim Based on a Confirmation Strategy: Comment on Bartels’ “Indoctrination in Introduction to Psychology”

Abstract

In his target article on “Indoctrination in Introduction to Psychology,” Bartels proposes that in introductory textbooks of psychology studies and their results are systematically presented in such a way that they tend to correspond to left-liberal political positions and that the state of psychological knowledge is reflected in a correspondingly distorted way. In our commentary, we clarify that the evidence Bartels presents for this claim is insufficient. At first, he takes a purely hypothesis-confirming approach based on selective sampling. Second, he draws an invalid causal inference from a supposed liberal majority in the psychological community to their representation of psychological content in textbooks. And third, he assigns introductory textbooks a function that we believe they do not have. Nonetheless, we welcome the discussion of how best to teach critical reflective thinking in psychology courses.