Psychology: A Closed System of Self-Evident Information?

Abstract

To estimate the self-evidence of basic principles of psychology, 50 UCLA introductory psychology students answered 21 multiple-choice questions each embodying one learning or memory phenomenon. 71% of the items were answered correctly more often than chance. The probability of an item being answered correctly was unrelated to the subjects' familiarity with the names of the phenomena and unrelated to professional psychologists' ratings of the importance of the phenomena. The possibility that we may spend an inordinate amount of item dealing with self-evident principles, because we do not seek outside evaluation of our work, is discussed.