User:Druss321/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Popular psychology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose popular psychology because it was rated as an "s" meaning that it had the highest rated need for improvement. A more personal reason that I chose it over the others that were also ranked that way is that I find how non psychologists engage with what they call "psychology" to be fascinating at points. I find myself growing frustrated as to why people choose books written from anecdotal evidence over empirical research. Is it because it's just not as fun to learn about? What personality traits lead people to have more beliefs in the realm of popular psychology than others? I don't intend to answer any of those questions here, but I would like to provide people with a better idea of what they are getting into when they pick up a book that was written by a hack psychologist or read posts on the internet about how they should take control of their mental health,

Lead Section
I think the lead section in this page is good because it describes what the different meanings of the term are and in what cases they are used. I don't think that there is much need for change in the opening paragraph other than maybe adding that someone with a psychology degree could still be considered a pop psychologist depending on what information they spread.

Content
By far the most glaring issue with the page is that it ends with a section entitles "current status of popular psychology" which only contains a citation from the 1960's. That's the whole section. I think a sub section about social media or other sources on the internet that are used as resources for psychology that do not have much scientific basis should also be addressed. If I could find a paper on the statistics of where people engage in psychology terms (Buzzfeed) I think it could give people a better idea about how wide spread pop psychology is.

Tone and Balance
Seems pretty unbiased. At one point it cites psychology of advertising as being one of the areas of psychology that "benefits" the public, when in my eyes it just makes us buy more things. I don't imagine it is worth the trouble to change that.

They only cite two examples of pop psychologists: Dr. Phil (who no longer has a license to practice) and Werner Erhard (who is just a self help speaker). I think they did this to avoid being controversial, but I think there could be more examples. They define a pop psychologist as being someone that is perceived as being a psychologist despite not having the credentials of one. If someone has the credentials of a psychologist, but their claim to fame is spreading information that has no scientific basis, are they considered a "pop psychologist?" Could I cite Jordan Peterson and one his books as being an example of pop psychology because they fit that description? Would that even stay on the web for more than 5 minutes without his fans deleting it?

Sources and References
Most of the paragraphs have references linked at the end, but some of the smaller ones do not. Some of the references do not have all the relevant citation information around it. I am not sure if this is normal on Wikipedia or not, or if it needs to be in APA/MLA.

Organization and Writing Quality
In the "popularization of psychology" portion of the article the blocks of quotes do not have quotes around them. The second block of quotes looks especially ugly as I am confused about what is a quote and what is a paraphrase.

Images and Media
This page does not have any images and I don't intend to add any.

Talk Page Discussion
The most recent post on the talk page of this article was from 2010. It looks like I have the page all to myself. Some of the arguments are about the inclusion of specific people, condescending tone (that I did not notice), and some people were upset that some of the articles cited were from articles that are not publicly available.

Overall Impression
The article had a good section about history as well as having some good examples of what pop psychology looks like, but I think the most relevant thing in the article as of today is their mention of Dr. Phil. My top priority with the paper is to update it more current information about how pop psychology is spread and to what degree it is spread. I also think it could some more examples of pop psychology so that the reader can connect with the writings more. I think terms that are frequently shared on social media such as "gas lighting" could be thrown in there.