Many textbooks will support their views with a bandwagon approach. They rely on modern views and popularity to claim their views are truth. As we see in the next chapter, truth and popularity are not generally friends. One does not imply the other. In addition to textbooks using a bandwagon approach, we will see this issue in the hall, “Come do this, everyone else.” The hallway gossip and trials will change between classes, so it is not much use in trying to give an example here. Instead, see if you can understand the flaws in this textbook reasoning, and then you can apply the logic to your persuasive friends who are probably not trying to be as intentional in manipulating you as the textbooks.

Several psychology textbooks teach that sexual experience outside of religious convention is healthy and to be embraced. For self-sexual gratification, one textbook paints the religious view of masturbation being a sin as pseudo-science and finishes by saying, “The modern view is that masturbation is a normal sexual behavior. Enlightened parents are well aware of this fact.” Other textbooks share that half of students under 18 have had sex and other statistics show that most US adults will have had sex with at least five other people over the course of their lives. These textbooks are not looking at facts and outcomes. They are not speaking of the effects of this “sexual freedom.” They do not talk about one parent homes, the aids epidemic, sexually transmitted diseases, or how this statistic for the United States is abnormal when compared with other nations. They do not speak on sex being more than just physical. They paint a bandwagon approach. Parents are “dumb” if they do not encourage self-sexual gratification (see Chapter 8). They do not use reason to support dangerous sexual expression, instead it is a simple implication of “if it is popular, it must be okay.” These authors are not helping future students, some of whom will be psychologists, to address these problems people face, but to push them to embrace these hurts. This bandwagon approach may exist in the textbook, but this is an approach that students will encounter even more with their friends.