Getting Through Myers and DeWall's Textbook Without Losing Your Mind
The Psychological Science Sixth Edition by Myers and DeWall is one of those gatekeeper textbooks you see in every intro psych syllabus. It's thick, it's expensive, and it covers more ground than most students actually absorb. I've assigned it, graded against it, and survived it as a student. Here's what actually matters when you're working with it. The book runs about 700 pages across roughly 15 chapters, organized into standard intro psych units: biological bases of behavior, sensation and perception, learning, cognition, developmental psychology, personality, disorders, and treatment. Each chapter follows the same skeleton — opening vignette, section headings, key terms in bold with definitions, chapter summary, and a set of self-check questions at the end. It's designed for review-friendly studying, which is both its strength and its weakness. I used to recommend reading every chapter cover to cover before lectures. That approach wastes time. The text is written so that the section summaries and the bolded key terms carry roughly 80 percent of the exam-relevant material. The vignettes and extended examples are there for engagement and some depth, but if you're under time pressure, skim those and anchor on the headings and the end-of-chapter summaries.
What Most People Miss About This Book
The first thing students get wrong is assuming the text is organized for narrative pleasure. It isn't. Myers and DeWall structure chapters around construct validity — the idea that a concept like "intelligence" or "memory" needs to be broken into measurable subcomponents. The book's inline discussion of research methods is actually one of its better features, but it's buried. Pay attention to the methodology callout boxes. They explain how researchers distinguish between correlation and causation, which is the single most tested concept in an intro psych course and the single most misunderstood by students. The second thing people miss is the difference between the main text and the specialized feature boxes. The green-bordered sections on "Psychology in Action" and the blue-bordered method boxes are where applied knowledge lives. Exam questions will often pull from these sections rather than the main narrative. I've seen professors construct entire quiz banks from the feature boxes alone. Don't ignore them because they look like extras.
A Problem I Ran Into and How I Fixed It
When I was teaching with this edition, I noticed that the 6th edition's treatment of confirmation bias in the critical thinking section was weaker than earlier editions. The concept was still there, but the examples had been simplified to the point where students couldn't distinguish confirmation bias from mere belief perseverance. Students were losing points on essays because they conflated the two. I couldn't fix the book, so I built a short supplementary exercise. I gave them five real-world scenarios and asked them to label each as confirmation bias, belief perseverance, or both. We walked through the answers together. It took about twenty minutes and closed the gap for almost everyone. Active recall beats passive reading every time. Close the book after each section and write down the three main points from memory. Then check. If you can't recall it without looking, you didn't learn it — you recognized it. Those are different cognitive processes. The text is written at a level where recognition feels like learning, and that's the trap. Use the end-of-chapter practice questions as a diagnostic tool before you consider the chapter done. If you score below 75 percent on those, go back and re-read the sections you missed. The practice questions mirror the format of most exam items, including the stimulus-based multiple choice questions that professors love to include.
Get the Full Details
Make your own flashcards for the key terms rather than using pre-made decks. The act of generating the definition forces you to process the term in your own words, which improves retention. Pre-made decks just reinforce recognition, not recall.
The Downsides You Should Know About
This edition has real limitations. The coverage of cultural psychology is thinner than it should be. Cross-cultural research findings are mentioned in passing rather than integrated throughout. If your course emphasizes diversity and cultural perspectives, you'll need supplemental readings. The clinical psychology chapters also lean heavily on DSM criteria without enough discussion of the ongoing debates about diagnostic reliability and the dimensional versus categorical models of psychopathology. Advanced students will find these sections reductive. The price is another issue. New copies run $200 to $280 depending on the retailer. Used copies or rental options bring that down to $40 to $80. The e-book version is cheaper but sometimes lacks the figure annotations that appear in the print edition, which matters for the visual-spatial material in the neuroscience chapters. If you're taking a more advanced course like cognitive psychology or abnormal psychology, this textbook won't be sufficient on its own. You'd be better served with texts like Cognition by Goldstein or Abnormal Psychology by Barlow and Durand. But for an introductory survey, this edition covers enough ground to get you through the requirements.
Where to Find It
The official publisher is Worth Publishers, an imprint of Macmillan Learning. You can order directly from their website or through major retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Chegg. Chegg offers both rental and purchase options with the added benefit of video tutorials that walk through key chapters. I've used those tutorials when a section just wasn't clicking, and they're genuinely useful for the biological psychology chapters where the terminology gets dense. Some instructors also make course pack copies available through the university bookstore or online. Check your syllabus — if your professor organized the readings themselves, they may have compiled a smaller packet rather than requiring the full textbook. That saves money and narrows your focus to what actually matters for your class. Don't buy it before your syllabus drops if you can avoid it. The edition requirements can shift between semesters, and sometimes professors move to a newer edition or switch textbooks entirely. Wait until you know for certain what you need.
