Exploring Psychology’s Low Epistemological Profile in Psychology Textbooks

Abstract

Unlike biology textbooks, psychology textbooks do not present autonomous facts of psychology but introduce students to the need for evidence in accounts of psychological knowledge. This paper concerns the range of ways in which textbooks deal with areas where there is knowledge in many sites in addition to academic psychology, using four examples from stress and health. Type A behaviour pattern is presented in detail in textbooks but not as established psychology; coping and health in students are dealt with by a change of genre which allows the readers’ concerns and knowledge to be placed outside science; stress is given origins in the psychological laboratory with other origins diminished, and then treated as an established entity; only post-traumatic stress disorder is taken for granted and not questioned, that is, it is given entity status without origins being provided and has no history of making within the textbooks themselves.

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