2024-01-22
49 分钟We all like to throw around terms that describe human behavior — “bystander apathy” and “steep learning curve” and “hard-wired.” Most of the time, they don’t actually mean what we think they mean. But don’t worry — the experts are getting it wrong, too.
Hey, there, it's Stephen Dubner.
We have popped into your freakonomics radio feed today with a bonus episode you may have heard the recent two part series we made on academic fraud.
Well, it reminded me of an episode we made several years ago that I thought you might like to hear.
Now it is called five psychology terms you are probably misusing.
The version you're about to hear has been updated as necessary.
A few of the people we interviewed have since died, including Scott Lilienfeld, the Emory University psychology professor whose work inspired this episode.
He died in 2020 at age 59 from pancreatic cancer.
His New York Times obituary noted that he spent much of his career trying to, quote, expose the many faces of pseudoscience in psychology, the difference between what we think we know and what we actually know.
That's coming up on today's bonus episode, five psychology terms you are probably misusing.
What prompted us to write this article was that many of us felt, I felt, that there was a lot of confusion about psychiatric psychological terminology, both in the popular media, pop psychology, and also even in academic circles.
Scott Lilienfeld was a professor of psychology at Emory for more than 25 years.
I'm a clinical psychologist by training, and I also have a real interest in the application of scientific thinking to psychology, and also how thinking sometimes goes wrong and can lead even the best and the brightest to embrace ideas that are sometimes questionable, maybe even pseudo scientific.
You are an author on a paper called 50 psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid a list of inaccurate, misleading, misusing, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases.
But you're also the author of an earlier book called 50 great myths of popular Psychology.
So this book is incredibly fun.
I love it.
It's hugely enjoyable on the one hand, but also hugely sobering on the other, because it's kind of like looking at a table of contents of the New York Times over the past 20 years.
And I mean that not in a complimentary way to the New York Times.
Because basically you're saying that all these things, all these ideas that people love to embrace and talk about, pass on, are somewhere between bogus and trumped up.
For instance, here are your chapter titles.