Dr. Lilienfeld will begin by laying out the magnitude and scope of the science-practice gap in clinical psychology and allied fields, which refers to striking disjunction between the research evidence for intervention and assessment techniques, on the one hand, and their use in everyday clinical practice, on the other. He will then examine both the distal and proximal sources of this gap, including the resistance to systematic research evidence, with a particular eye on commonplace errors in reasoning to which all of us are prone (e.g., naive realism, confirmation bias, and illusory correlation). In addition, he will discuss the perils of neurocentrism—the assumption that the brain-based level of analysis is inherently more important than other levels of analysis in understanding human behavior—and its implications for research and practice in clinical psychology. He will close with a plea for curricular reform designed to inculcate “fallible humility”—an awareness of our own strengths and limitations as information processors—in the next generation of students.
CE: 1.0 credit BACB