Back in early August, Jason wrote a post that declared sports the United States' national religion. At the time, I took Jason's observation as (slightly embittered) hyperbole about our cultural landscape's infatuation with passtimes that achieve absolutely nothing productive. A bit of an excessive rant, thought I, a mere illustration…
I know who Mrs. Cain was. We don't talk about her or her family much, but things just wouldn't have been paradise without her or them. She was one of the many illegal immigrants in Paradise that did the actual work of tending the Garden of Eden--you know, the hoeing,…
The Bill passed by congress on the detainee and interrogation issue is one of the more frustrating examples of Democratic cowardice and political expedience. It does not substantively change anything. Personally, I feel the only utility in having a law in the first place is to use as a cudgel…
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 …
http://www.jhm.org/home-new.asp One of the difficulties of carrying on dialogue with some folks is the cloying urge to stop being polite and just explode with a perfunctory "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?!?" This is my reaction when I hear or read enough of the kind of thing to be found…