Importance of pseudo-psychology to the study of psychology?

Answer 1

Pseudo-psychology is an important term to learn for the psychology student as well as the general public. Pseudo-psychology pertains to such things as advertisements that make untestable claims as to make their product seem more efficient than it actually is. While it may do no physical or psychological harm most times, people unknowningly give money to these businesses because of claims made in their ads.

It is important for the student to realize that pseudo-psychology is out there, and can give psychology a bad name. Eventually the general public figures out that whatever claim a business made using pseudo-psychology is false, and then starts to think that psychology itself is untrustworthy. Psychologists need to be careful in their experiments and report data that is truthful, or this will only add to public beliefs that psychology is not a real science.