Style of psychological explanation and perception of explanation’s scientificity by people without specialized psychological education

Psychology is criticized for non-replicability of results, practical non-significance and proximity to common sense. Public skepticism towards psychology is linked to underfinancing of academic research and impeding of solving social problems. Explanatory model used by psychologists can make a contribution to the problem. S. Hayes describes two most common explanatory models – mentalistic (behavior of organism explained by hypothetical processes inside organism) and contextual (behavior of organism explained by events outside the organism). Mentalistic and contextual explanations corresponds to methodological and radical behaviorisms, two most common philosophies of science among psychologists, according to S. Leigland. Literature review suggests lack of papers about discrimination between explanatory styles in terms of scientificity among people without specialized psychological education. We hypothesized that majority of participants discriminate mentalistic and contextual explanations of psychological phenomena and rate contextual explanations as more scientific. We tested hypotheses and replicated results with additional samples and stimuli. The overall sample consisted of 57 people who are not enrolled in or graduated from any Department of Psychology, average age – 22 года, 36 out of 57 (63%) – undergraduate students. Respondents filled in an online survey, which was made up of a number of sociodemographic questions and 24 explanations of psychological phenomena (12 mentalistic / 12 contextual). Participants rated scientificity of explanations via Likert Scale from 1 (completely unscientific) to 10 (completely scientific). Results oppose hypotheses: less than 50% of respondents discriminate explanatory styles (8 out of 54, 16%, 95% HDI 8-26%) and those who discriminate rate contextual explanations as less scientific (8 из 8, 93%, 95% HDI 71-100%%). Possible confounding variables: syntax, sentence length, use of psychological terms.