1.2: Psychological Pseudoscience: Imposters

Give up reading medical reports altogether.

A researcher found that a third of the findings from published medical studies don't hold up in later studies.
The beauty of this messy process is that scientific knowledge is often tentative and open to revision.
Science is a process of continually revising and updating findings, which isn't a source of weakness.
Science's capacity for self-correction makes it strength as a method of inquiry.
We acquire knowledge about the world slowly and in small bits and pieces.

Good scientists don't try to "prove" their theories unless the evidence for them is overwhelming.

Science encourages us to question our findings and conclusions and to make mistakes in our belief systems.

Science makes us attend to data that we don't like.

Why are we drawn to pseudoscience?

We don't want you to become a scientist.

By acquiring these skills, you will be able to make better educated choices in your everyday life, such as what weight loss plan to choose, what type of psychotherapy to recommend to a friend, and Subliminal self-help tapes supposedly even what potential romantic partner to pursue.
You will learn how to avoid being influenced by messages that are not real.
The good news is that everyone can become a scientist.
Everyone can learn to think like one.

The popular psychology industry is constantly expanding and it's important to distinguish real from bogus claims.

The fact that the American public has unprecedented access to psychological knowledge is positive.

About 3,500 self-help books are published every year.

Some of these books are effective for treating depression, anxiety disorders, and other psychological problems, but about 95 percent of all self-help books have never been examined in research studies.

The growth of treatments and products that claim to cure almost every imaginable psychological ailment coincides with the expansion of the popular psychology industry.

There are more than 600 "brands" of psychotherapy, with new ones emerging every year.
Research shows that some of these treatments can help with psychological problems.
We don't know if the majority of psychotherapies help.
Some may be harmful.

Not all psychology information in popular culture is incorrect.

Some self-help books base their recommendations on research about psychological problems.
There are hundreds of Web sites that provide helpful information and advice about psychological topics such as memory, personality testing, and psychological disorders.

We need to be armed with accurate knowledge to evaluate psychology Web sites that contain misleading or incorrect information.

We need to distinguish claims that are genuinely scientific from those that are merely imposters of science.

We need to be careful, but not ful, to distinguish pseudoscientific claims from metaphysical claims, which are untestable and therefore lie outside the realm of science.

We can make pseudoscientific claims in research tests.

There are questionable beliefs.

A survey of the U.S. public shows that 25 percent believe in astrology, 26 percent believe that trees and other objects possess magical energies, 18 percent believe that they've had encounters with ghosts, and 15 percent have consulted psychics.

In the case of astrology, the scientific evidence for it is weak, but in the case of psychics, the evidence is weak.

It's troubling that many poorly supported beliefs are more popular than well supported beliefs.
There are more astrologers than astronomer in the landscape of modern life because of able claims.

The general public may have a hard time distinguishing accurate from inaccurate claims regarding astronomy.

The same principle applies to psychology.

We have listed some of the most useful warning signs in Table 1.1.

We'll use many of the rules of thumb in later chapters to help us become more informed consumers of psychological claims.
We should draw on them in everyday life.
None of these signs are proof that a set of claims is pseudoscientific.
The more signs we see in the case of a claim, the more skeptical we should be.

The psychic who claimed to predict the future failed all the tests because the experimenters stopped his extrasensory powers.

The woman practiced yoga for three weeks and hasn't had a day of depression since.

Although most scientists say that we use almost all our published brains, we've found a way to harness additional brain power previously undiscovered.

"psychobabble" is a term that doesn't make sense because it uses a fancy scientific method of stimulation.

Three of the most important warning signs will be discussed here.

The use of ad hoc immunizing hypotheses is excessive.

We know this is a mouthful.
For escape hatch or loophole that example, some psychics have claimed to perform feats of extrasensory percep defenders of a theory use to protect tion in the real world, like reading others' minds or forecasting the future.
When their theory was brought into the laboratory and tested under strict conditions, most have bombed.
The skeptical "vibes" of the experimenters are somehow interfering with psychic powers, and some of these psychics and their proponents have invoked an ad hoc immunizing hypothesis to explain away these failures.

This hypothesis makes it impossible to test the psychics' claims.

We've learned that many scientific claims are wrong.

In science, incorrect claims tend to be weeded out eventually, even if we don't like it.

In most pseudosciences, mistaken assertions never seem to go away because their proponents fall prey to belief perseverance, clinging to them despite contrary evidence.
New data is rarely updated in pseudoscientific claims.
Despite the discovery of outer planets in the solar system, most forms of astrology have remained the same for 4,000 years.

There's an old saying that says the anecdote isn't fact.

It shouldn't convince us to put much stock in other people's claims.
This kind of secondhand evidence is common in everyday life.
I felt less depressed after taking this herbal remedy, that's based on subjective impressions.

"anecdata" is the informal term for anec dotal evidence.

Compelling as this anecdote may seem, it doesn't constitute good scientific evidence.
Explanations rarely tell us anything about cause and effect.
The Matzo Ball Soup Weight-Loss Program may have caused a person to lose 85 pounds.
Maybe he went on an additional diet or started to work out very hard during that time.
He underwent drastic weight-loss surgery but didn't mention it.

Anecdotes don't tell us how representative the cases are.

We never heard from people who gained weight on the Matzo Ball Soup Weight-Loss Program.
It is difficult to verify anecdotes.
It's a risky idea in science and in everyday life, so we're taking his word for it.

Most anecdotes are hard to interpret as evidence.

"The clear message of history is that the anecdotal method delivers both wheat and chaff, but it does not enable us to tell which is which," said clinical psychologist Paul Meehl.

Many of us are drawn to pseudoscientific beliefs because of a number of reasons.

The way our brains work may be the central reason.

This tendency helps us to simplify the world we live in.
We wouldn't be able to process all the information without it.
This adaptive tendency can sometimes lead us astray because it can cause us to perceive meaningful patterns even when they're not there.

This is a striking example.

The physicist had an eerie experience when he read a phrase that reminded him of a childhood friend he hadn't thought of in decades.

Our tendency to see patterns in meaningless data is so pro that it is likely that we will find a name for it over the next few years.

It's probably the same time he or she calls.

Our tendency to underestimate coincidences leads us to eat a bacon cheeseburger for lunch tomorrow.

When flipping a coin, we tend to avoid bacon in a row, because "Streaks" of several consecutive heads become violently il soon afterwards.
The link between the cheeseburger and our becoming il was random.
The sequence above is very close to each other.
Our brains tend to look for patterns and random things.
It's usual that these sequences are better than they deserve.

Our tendency to detect dangerous is another example of patternicity.

From time to time, we fall prey to patternicity.

We may be the victims of assassination if we read through the similarities between Abraham Lin and John F. Kennedy.

Coincidences happened at the same time by chance.

They are everywhere for a moment.
If we think about the number of times one of your friends comes to mind, we can easily detect them.
We can think of the total number of phone calls you receive each month.

Scientific thinking is designed to counteract false victim to confirmation bias.

We need to find evidence that doesn't support our hypothesis.
We find coinci dicts our ideas.
In extreme forms, patternicity leads us to embrace dences to be far more interesting than noncidences, we tend to conspiracy theories in which individuals detect supposedly hidden forget that Lincoln was a Republican whereas Kennedy was a Democrat.

A final reflection of patternicity is our tendency to see images that are meaningful.

This version of patternicity has been experienced by anyone who has looked at a cloud or seen a man on the moon.
There is a photograph in Figure 1.5a.
The features bear an eerie resemblance to a human face.
Some people believed that the "Face on Mars" offered conclusive proof of intelligent life on the Red Planet.
NASA demanded evidence but was open minded.

It is possible to perceive meaningful people or objects in largely random stimuli.

The "nun bun," a cinnamon roll that looked like Mother Teresa, was discovered in a coffee shop in 1996.

The "Face on Mars" photo was taken by the Mars Viking Fact vs. Fiction Orbiter in 1976.

The face provided proof of intelligent life on other planets according to some.

NASA found nothing.

A camera artifact in the original photograph that just happened to place a black dot where a nostril should be, and perhaps most important, caused the patternicity in this instance.

Finding comfort in our beliefs.

Motivational is one of the reasons for the popularity of pseudoscience.
According to the old saying, "hope springs eternal", many pseudoscientific claims, such as astrology, may give us comfort because they seem to offer us a sense of control over an often unpredictable world.
When we feel a loss of control over our surroundings, we're more prone to patternicity.
Some participants were deprived of a sense of control, for example, by having them try to solve an unsolvable puzzle or recall a real-life experience in which they felt helpless, and found that they were more likely than other participants to perceive a conspiracy.
The results may help explain why so many of us believe in astrology, ESP, (b) and other belief systems that claim to foretell the future; they give us a sense of control over the uncontrollable.

We cope with these feelings of terror, advocates of this theory underlying sense of terror with which propose, by adopting cultural worldviews that assure us that our lives possess a broader we cope by adopting reassuring meaning and purpose--one that extends well beyond our vanishingly brief existence on cultural worldviews

Research shows that many of the same people who are convinced that Princess Diana died in a murder plot are also certain that she faked her own death.

Galinsky's study participants who were deprived of a sense of control were more likely to have higher levels of beliefs in the supernatural than other participants.

It's likely that such beliefs are comforting to a lot of people on the bottom because they imply the exis drawing of the planet Saturn.

We still need to evaluate the claims on their own merits.

Regardless of whether they're correct or not, we're likely to hold many supernatural beliefs.

We must learn to avoid common pitfalls in reasoning to which we're prone in order to avoid being tempted by pseudoscience.

It's easy for us to make mistakes because they make sense.
Scientific thinking often requires us to cast aside our beloved intuitions, but it can be difficult for all of us.

Three important logical fallacies that are essential to bear in mind when evaluating psychological claims can be found in Table 1.3.

They can help us to separate science from pseudoscience and avoid falling prey to dubious assertions in everyday life.

Table 1.3 shows how to avoid logical fallacies when evaluating psychological claims.

A mistake of framing a question as though we can only answer it in one of two ways.

My psychology professor keeps talking about how the scientific method is people important for overcoming biases.

Evolutionary psychologists say that sexual infidelity is a product of natural selection.

If we're honest with ourselves, we'll realize that findings that challenge our beliefs often make us uncomfortable or angry, whereas findings that confirm these beliefs often make us happy or at least relieved.

It must be wrong if a scientific claim makes us feel upset or indignant.
In the case of scientific questions concerning the psychological effects of day care, which are scientifically controversial, we need to keep an open mind to the data.

It's an error because popular opinion isn't a reliable guide to the accuracy of an assertion.

Almost everyone thought the sun revolved around the earth, but they were wrong.

Not Me Fallacy was the tragic victim of Candace Newmaker.

My psychology professor talks about how scientific methods are important for overcoming biases.

It can lead us to simulation of birth contractions.

Many pseudoscientists fall into this trap because they're certain their claims are right and uncontaminated by mistakes in their thinking, and they don't bother to conduct scientific studies to test these claims.

Scientists can fall prey to this error if they are not careful.

We live with our accents all the time, so we don't think we have an accent.

Few of us believe that we have biases because we've grown accustomed to seeing the world through our own psychological lens.
If you want to see the not me fallacy at work, watch a debate between two intelligent people who hold very different views on a political issue.
More likely than not, you will see that the debate participants are aware of their biases, but not of their own.

Stem-cell research is controversial because both people who are highly intelligent are prone to bias blind spot.

We shouldn't assume that more knowledge or sophistication will make us immune to this error.
The bias blind spot reminds us that we all need to be humble and that science can assist us in this regard.

We've been talking a lot about pseudoscience.

There are a lot of questionable claims that we encounter in everyday life.

There are three reasons to be concerned about pseudoscience.

What we give up is opportunity costs.

Even treatments that are harmless can cause harm if they cause people to not want to get a treatment that works.
In the United States, at most a third of people with major depression, a severe disorder associated with a dramatically heightened risk for suicide, receive any treatment at all.