How can you distinguish scientific psychology from the popular notions about the discipline of psychology?

Scientific knowledge governed by psychology often runs against common sense. One such example is a study performed by Dweck (1975). She was concerned with children who gave up too easily when faced with a difficult problem or failure. Common sense tells to give them easy problems in order to increase their success rate so that their confidence goes up. Only later should we give them difficult problems which they will be able to solve because of their new-found confidence Dweck’s study tested this. She took two groups of students who were trained for 25 days in solving math problems. The first group was given easy problems which they were always able to solve. The second group had a mix of easy and difficult problems. The students failed in solving the difficult problems. Whenever this happened Dweck told them that their failure was because they had not tried hard enough and persuaded them not to give up and keep trying. After the training period was over, a new set of math problems were given to the two groups. Dweck found the result against the common belief. Those who had always succeeded because they were given easy problems, gave up much faster when they faced failure than those who had experience of both success and failure and were taught to attribute failure to their lack of effort.

There are many other common sense notions which may not be true. For example, it was believed in some cultures that men are more intelligent than women. Empirical studies have shown that this is not true. Common sense also tells us that one is not able to give one’s best if he is asked to perform before a large audience. However, psychological studies have shown that if he has practiced well, he may actually perform better because the presence of others helps his performance.