“Psychology’s Zombie Ideas”

Hey, psychologists! Don’t get mad at me about the above title. I took it from a post at Macmillan Learning by David Myers, who’s a psychology professor and textbook writer. Myers presents some “mind-eating, refuse-to-die ideas” that are present in everyday psychology but are contradicted by research:

1. People often repress painful experiences, which years later may later reappear as recovered memories or disguised emotions. (In reality, we remember traumas all too well, often as unwanted flashbacks.)

2. In realms from sports to stock picking, it pays to go with the person who’s had the hot hand. . . .

3. Parental nurture shapes our abilities, personality, and sexual orientation. (The greatest and most oft-replicated surprise of psychological science is the minimal contribution of siblings’ “shared environment.”)

4. Immigrants are crime-prone. (Contrary to what President Donald Trump has alleged, and contrary to people’s greater fear of immigrants in regions where few immigrants live, immigrants do not have greater-than-average arrest and incarceration rates.)

5. Big round numbers: The brain has 100 billion neurons. 10 percent of people are gay. We use only 10 percent of our brain. 10,000 daily steps make for health. 10,000 practice hours make an expert. (Psychological science tells us to distrust such big round numbers.)

6. Psychology’s three most misunderstood concepts are that: “Negative reinforcement” refers to punishment. “Heritability” means how much of a person’s traits are attributable to genes. “Short-term memory” refers to your inability to remember what you experienced yesterday or last week, as opposed to long ago. (These zombie ideas are all false, as I explain here.)

7. Seasonal affective disorder causes more people to get depressed in winter, especially in cloudy places, and in northern latitudes. (This is still an open debate, but massive new data suggest to me that it just isn’t so.)

8. To raise healthy children, protect them from stress and other risks. (Actually, children are antifragile. Much as their immune systems develop protective antibodies from being challenged, children’s emotional resilience builds from experiencing normal stresses.)

9. Teaching should align with individual students’ “learning styles.” (Do students learn best when teaching builds on their responding to, say, auditory versus visual input? Nice-sounding idea, but researchers—here and here—continue to find little support for it.)

10. Well-intentioned therapies change lives. (Often yes, but sometimes no—as illustrated by the repeated failures of some therapy zombies: Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, D.A.R.E. Drug Abuse Prevention, Scared Straight crime prevention, Conversion Therapy for sexual reorientation, permanent weight-loss training programs.)

Of the above list, one is wrong (#2; see here), one is not psychology (#4), two seem too vague to have any real empirical content (#8 and #9), and for one, I’m not sure many people really hold the “zombie belief” in question (#10). But the other five seem reasonable. And, no joke, 5 out of 10 ain’t bad. If I gave a list of 10 recommendations, I’d be happy if some outsider felt that 5 of them made sense.

So, overall, I like Myers’s post. It’s commonsensical, relevant to everyday life, and connects theory with evidence—all good things that I aspire to in my own teaching. Based on this post, I bet he writes good textbooks.

Just one thing . . .

There’s one thing that bugs me, though: The zombie psychology ideas that Myers mention all seem to fall outside of current mainstream psychology. I guess that some of these ideas such as the effect of parental nurture or learning styles used to be popular in academic psychology, but no longer.

Here are some zombie psychology ideas that Myers didn’t mention:

11. Extreme evolutionary psychology: The claim that women are three times more likely to wear red or pink during certain times of the month, the claim that single women were 20 percentage points more likely to vote for Barack Obama during certain times of the month, the claim that beautiful parents are more likely to have girl babies, and lots more along those lines. These debunked claims all fit within a naive gender-essentialism that is popular within evolutionary psychology and in some segments of the public.

12. Claims that trivial things have large and consistent effects on people’s personal lives: The idea that disaster responses are much different for hurricanes with boy or girl names. The idea that all sorts of behaviors are different if your age ends in a 9. There are all these superficially plausible ideas but they are not borne out by the data.

13. Claims that trivial things have large and consistent effects on people’s political decisions: The claims that votes are determined by shark attacks, college football games, and subliminal smiley faces.

14. Embodied cognition, Sadness may impair color perception, Visual contrast polarizes moral judgment, etc etc etc.

OK, you get the idea. We could keep going and going. Just pick up an issue of Psychological Science or PNAS from a few years ago.

It’s good for a psychology textbook writer to point out misconceptions in psychology. Here’s how Myers ends his post:

When subjected to skeptical scrutiny, crazy-sounding ideas do sometimes find support. . . . But more often, as I suggest in Psychology 13th Edition (with Nathan DeWall), “science becomes society’s garbage collector, sending crazy-sounding ideas to the waste heap atop previous claims of perpetual motion machines, miracle cancer cures, and out-of-body travels. To sift reality from fantasy and fact from fiction therefore requires a scientific attitude: being skeptical but not cynical, open-minded but not gullible.”

That’s all fine. But watch out. Sometimes the call is coming from inside the house. Or, to be more specific, sometimes science (as manifested in the Association for Psychological Science, the National Academy of Sciences, etc.) is not “society’s garbage collector,” it’s society’s garbage creator, and it’s the institution that gives garbage a high value.

I’m not saying that psychology is worse than other fields. I’m just saying that if a psychologist is going to write about bad zombie ideas in psychology, it would make sense for him to include some that remain popular with high-status researchers within psychology itself.