Psychology’s top blunders, part one.

I don’t like the magazine Psychology Today. Instead of presenting the latest psychological findings in a layman-friendly format, the monthly instead peddles relationship advice and thinly-veiled book advertisements. So while I wouldn’t recommend a subscription to anyone (you’d better serve yourself by subscribing to a division of the APA), the magazine did feature one article in February 2005 that piqued my interest: Psychology’s Top Ten Misguided Ideas.

Composed by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies Director Dr. Robert Epstein, the ten-part list includes many psychological buzzwords and memes that the pop psych crowd (like most Psychology Today readers) still consider legitimate. I’d like to discuss a portion of Epstein’s list below:

1. Projective Tests

The popular images of psychology and psychiatry have a few iconic mainstays. You know the therapist cliché: a patient laid on a long couch, rambling about childhood trauma to a near-silent facilitator scribbling away. In nearly equal footing, many people associate projective tests, such as word association and Rorschach ink blots, with legitimate psychology.

The logic behind projective tests says that a therapist can quickly dig into a client’s preoccupations and mindset based on their knee-jerk responses to ambiguous things. This assumes that a patient would always see the same thing in the same ink blot; a sex addict would always recall lewd scenes; a veteran with Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder would always recognize carnage.

But projective tests neglect the effect of priming entirely. A wide variety of psychological studies have demonstrated that earlier access …

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Jesus Camp – How to train young children to be “soldiers in God’s army.”

I haven't seen "Jesus Camp" yet, but I plan to.  This is an ABC documentary on Jesus Camp.  Personally, I'd flunk out of camp because I'd have a hard time praying in the company of a facade of George W. Bush, as though he were a leader sent specially by…

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The Onion and the transubstantiation

Rather than describe The Onion's most recent sacrilege, you can take a look here.  Remember, if you so much as smirk, you will have paved your own ultimate path to hell.  I've written very little on the doctrine of the transubstantiation, the topic of this Onion article.  This surprises me, because the…

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Why are there so many synonyms for poop?

I don’t usually go around discussing poop.

That might have changed forever, though, once I stumbled upon smellypoop.com, a site dedicated to disseminating information about . . . well, poop.  Smellypoop.com is a refreshingly frank site presenting “solid” information on a subject that simultaneously compels and repels. 

For example, smellypoop.com addresses each of the following topics (as well as others):

  • What is poop made of?
  • Why does poop stink?
  • Why is bird poop white?
  • Are there people who eat poop?
  • Why does some poop float?
  • What Happens When I’m At WORK and I have to Poop? 

But there’s more.  Smellypoop.com provides comprehensive research on the topic of farts. You can order fake poop and poop-themed greeting cards at the site (click on “Order Fake Poop and Other Great Gifts”).  There is a poop forum and a poop photo gallery.   You’ll find poop poems, poop riddles, and poop sayings, including “Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day” (attributed to Harry S Truman).

What especially interests me, though, is the comprehensive list of poop synonyms at smellypoop.com.  There are hundreds of them.  Though I was already aware of dozens of poop terms (including the classic four-letter reference and oldie-but-goodie “number two”), I was woefully unaware of the vast number of poop synonyms.  Thanks to stinkypoop.com, my repertoire now includes terms like “blind eels,” “bootycakes,” “colon cobras,” “dookie-doop-droop” “mooky-stinks,” and the quaint but useful “pooplets.”

Why so many synonyms for a basic bodily function, I wondered?  Then it hit me: …

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Sticky Superstitions

A week or two ago, Erich provided a link to a page entitled, “Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?”. The site has a number of excellent videos, among them a 10-minute short that equates prayer with any other form of superstition. If not equal in terms of dogmatic obedience, prayer and superstition at least share the same degree of efficacy: absolutely none whatsoever. So why do superstitions form, and in spite of their pointlessness, stick?

For some background, let’s rewind to the 1940’s. In this decade B.F. Skinner, the psychologist who essentially founded behaviorism, conducted the most groundbreaking studies on behavioral conditioning this side of Pavlov’s salivating dogs. Even if you can’t recite his findings from rote-memory like a Psych 101 student, you know some of the terminology his studies created- positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and the concept of “behavioral conditioning” itself.

Not as well known, Skinner’s research on pigeons also suggested one way superstitious behavior comes into practice. Skinner placed some of his infamous pigeons in a cage attached to a mechanism that delivered food at a totally random interval. The birds soon began to associate their own behavior with the food delivery, and kept repeating whatever they had done at the time food entered the cage, as though this would initiate more food.

The conditioning led to a variety of bizarre bird “superstitions”. Skinner reported birds that “turned counter-clockwise about the cage”; “thrust [their heads] into one of the upper corners of the cage”; and …

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