Oh, your love language is receiving gifts? Here’s a gift written in my love language: debunking fuckery.
(Merry Christmas. I’m sorry or you’re welcome)
Today’s Moment of Science… Pop! There goes a few beliefs in pop-psychology.
– How much of your brain are you using? In the 2014 movie Lucy, Scarlet Johansson’s titular character takes a drug that allows her to access all of her brain and she gets goddamn super powers. In 2011’s Limitless, Bradley Cooper plays a struggling writer who gets a magic pill that lets him complete a manuscript in a weekend and become a zillionaire, which really under-sells the benefits of Adderall.
There’s some wild misconception that we only use 10% of our brains (Cooper is generously given 20% in Limitless). As much as I claim that drinking kills the dumb brain cells first, we use all of our brains. This myth likely started with early twentieth century psychologist William James. His work suggested that most people did not “live at their maximum of energy,” meaning we didn’t reach our full potential. Which… fair (and rude). This started showing up in print in the late 1920s as the ten percent myth. It’s sometimes misattributed to Einstein. When reached for comment, Einstein said “I didn’t fucking say that.”
– INFJ? ESTF? GTFO. Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, started working together on personality-typing during WWII. Briggs got way into Carl Jung’s work on personality, skipped the academic nonsense and went straight into the hard work of making shit up.
The test gained popularity with social science institutions for decades anyway. Some employers today even ask job candidates for their results from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment (MBTI). But a 1993 article stated there was “insufficient evidence to support the tenets of and claims about the utility of the test,” and reviews have not improved since. I’d critique the peer reviewed studies published by the mother-daughter duo, but they never produced any.
MBTI is largely viewed as pseudoscience, as are most of the popular online personality tests. None will really predict personality over the course of a lifetime because, contrary to popular belief, personality traits aren’t immutable. Hell, these tests are barely predictive of the results from one time a person takes the test to the next. About half of people get different results with the MBTI when taking evaluations a month apart (I’m rarely an extrovert twice in a row). That’s not a personality change, and it’s certainly not science. That’s a shitty MySpace quiz with no measurable benefits over astrology.
– The Bystander Effect sounds terrifying. The way I first heard it, a crowd watched a woman being raped and murdered in broad daylight and did nothing. Witnesses may figure it’s someone else’s responsibility and opt to not get involved. You’re virtually no safer for the presence of strangers than you would be alone. But hey, the cops will definitely be there to help in two minutes if someone just calls them.
This one is lazy copaganda taken from a dramatic reimagining of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese. Published by the New York Times a few weeks after the fact, it claimed 38 witnesses ignored her cries for help. In reality, she was attacked and killed at 3am in a neighborhood where 38 people likely weren’t even awake. It wasn’t broad daylight, nobody saw the entire attack, and there were maybe a dozen total “witnesses,” most of whom only heard her yelling but didn’t realize what was happening. Multiple people attempted to contact the police.
Though some experimental results suggest the bystander effect is real, hear me out, reality itself might be a better gauge of how often people help in reality. A 2019 analysis of crimes caught on surveillance footage showed that bystanders intervene over 90% of the time. The more bystanders, the better the chances that one of them would act.
– The Dunning-Kruger effect is often simplified down to “stupid person is too stupid to comprehend the depths of their own stupidity.” This is held in contrast with experts who understand how vast an entire field of study is, conversely leading them to underestimate their skills. When someone drops into my comments section telling me, a chemist, that I should educate myself about their definitely real chemical-free diet, someone might call this an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
But the effect is about skills, not intelligence or being wrong. Someone with a low degree of skill in a particular area may have a bit of unearned confidence specifically with regards to that set of skills.
That is, if this isn’t all just statistical noise. Newer studies (that never even set out to disprove the idea) produced data that suggest people are pretty good at estimating their skill level, but we all have a tendency to think we’re above average. The degree to which this effect occurs and what the cause(s) might be are still being poked at.
So is that ‘chemical free diet’ an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Without more information, we just know that person’s wrong. If the effect is real, a more clear example might involve scientists wandering off from their field of study. A Nobel Prize winning quantum physicist who’s high on the smell of their own farts might, with great confidence, say some daffy shit about vitamin megadoses (I see you, Linus Pauling). Similarly, medical doctors seem so highly skilled, lest their confidence propel them to look like utter buffoons when they talk about quantum mechanics (yes, Deepak Chopra is a real medical doctor).
Of course, this isn’t to be confused with the Dunning Kruger Erect, which is when a man is overly confident in his ability to satisfy a woman.
(My Mother is very proud of me.)
– What’s your love language? Author of The Five Love Languages series, Gary Chapman, cracked this special code to help you better communicate love with your partner. Chapman, who has a PhD and hosts a radio talk-show, defines ‘love language’ as how someone prefers to receive love. The list includes physical touch, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and words of affirmation. Sounds plausible. Ish.
But love languages aren’t even slightly grounded in science. These books were initially published as Christian literature, which makes sense since Chapman was a Baptist pastor. Knowing he has a PhD, I thought he might have pulled from experiences in clinical work as a therapist, but this motherfucker has never been a licensed therapist of any sort. His PhD from goddamn bible college is in adult education. He’s also listed as a contributor to Focus on the Family, an organization that’s focused mainly on homophobia. Chapman isn’t promoting evidence-based advice to help communicate love. He’s barely not a bible salesman, promoting a lame version of Christianity.
This has been your Moment of Science, pretty sure Freud would have had a field day with being told by a sweary divorcee with a praise kink how much of his field has amounted to birdcage lining.
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