Psychology's tall tales

 https://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/09/tall-tales

"Psychology, unlike many of the other sciences, doesn't have a canon of uncontested facts," says Mark Levine, PhD, of the University of Exeter, who co-authored the American Psychologist article. "Because of this, psychology textbooks are not made up of facts students must learn. Instead, they are full of experiments and research techniques. Parables like the Kitty Genovese story serve to link the experiments to the real world. There is thus a strong incentive not to abandon the stories in the textbooks, even if the stories themselves are on shaky ground."