oh, really?
Is it just me, or is it kind of cool to know that the experiments described in textbooks were done by professors that teach and research (or taught and researched) at your university? It’s not prideful in any sense, but it sort of makes everything a little more relevant, possibly because you have better access to these researchers who performed the research.
I mean, the community college I went to was a very good school, but it was unlikely that any of the professors did much contributing research; they were mainly lecturers. There were some that held positions at the school, but either taught at other nearby schools or did some sort of side project. Of the psychology professors that I had or known about, maybe one or two performed actual “research” but they were based at other schools.
I like reading about a particular experiment that was done in my textbook and recognizing at least one of the contributor’s last name, and beyond thinking “hey, that was my psychology/cognitive science professor!” I know that it’s possible that I could ask them about it and become more familiar with the research that they did.
In that way, it no longer becomes just an experiment you need to memorize for the upcoming midterms/finals. It no longer feels like some irrelevant study done somewhere at some university to which you can’t find very much information about except the publication itself —- and even that is too much work because it is often filled with so much indiscriminate jargon that you never knew existed.
So yeah —- it’s nice to know that there’s some connection to what is read in the endless pages of the textbook and the research!
