Limits of Scientific Psychology | Nick Brown | TEDxRhodes

so malice asked us to talk about know something is an island so know science is an island what do I mean by that well yeah TEDx Ted TEDx talks are generally pretty positive about science and I'm gonna do something a little bit different I'm going to ask you to be skeptical about science when we say no science is an island while science can't exist in isolation from people the scientists themselves are people some of the science we do yeah isn't about people when we're looking up at the galaxies when we're looking at our particle accelerators all of that would be true whether or not people were around to observe it but people and society decided that that science was worth doing and put the money in and yeah the people doing the science a part of society too and science is relevant even these big even these big astronomy and relativity and quantum mechanics are all important quantum mechanics is what's bringing you the sound right now through all these transistors and if you didn't think relativity was very much used to you when you drive down the street the satellites that are sending you the GPS signal that are telling you when to turn by using general and special relativity to correct in opposite directions the signal that's coming in so I'm not here to question science here is a wonderful piece of science going overhead and we're all very happy that it works so the side say I want to talk about here today is psychology psychology is my field now I don't know exactly what Manoj told you I've come to psychology pretty late in life I'm still a bit of an outsider but I may use the word we meaning psychologists and if there are any psychologists here I apologise for including myself in that number I'm not really a proper psychologist like most sciences psychology started off as a branch of philosophy many of the great philosophers of antiquity were also the leading scientists of their day this is Baruch Spinoza he wrote a lot of psychological stuff in his writings this is Friedrich Nietzsche and if you've read any Nietzsche there's an awful lot of psychology in there but in the second half of the 19th century psychology after physics and chemistry and the Natural Sciences kind of split away from philosophy got its own journals it started doing scientific things like making hypotheses making observations performing experiments making deductive inferences but although psychology has been using those methods for over a century now really it doesn't have very much to show for it psychology has not become what we call a cumulative science we don't have to derive relativity from first principles every time we get a new bunch of physics undergraduates in we just teach them and it's true this is a nice little article I read recently that illustrates this frustration where is psychologies nonstick frying pan there there is a belief at least I think in the english-speaking world that we didn't have the frying nonstick frying pan until we had the space program that actually isn't true the Teflon was invented before the Second World War but when you hold a nonstick frying pan in your hand our model is somehow that you got that from the astronauts now we're not producing that kind of technology from a psychology as the author says you know whenever we've tried to apply psychology in in large numbers we quite often get it wrong we've had cognitive behavioral therapy but we also have recovered memory therapy that resulted in a lot of innocent people going to jail so why is this well you can't turn a science into a technology until the science is solid and repeatable you can't have an industrial revolution until you can make parts you have to be able to really forget about the science the science has to just sit there in a corner and work same for the electronics revolution the people at Intel who design processes very few of them have to worry about how a transistor works it's just a couple of lines on a diagram for them and the biggest problem for psychology is that yeah human beings are individual and unique and that is what makes us human beings try to imagine what it would be like if we weren't all unique imagine that there are hundreds of copies of you personally what is what makes you special when there's a hundred two hundred a thousand of you so psychologists have a problem they don't want too many other differences between the people in their research because that confuses whatever their search is for whatever little thing they're looking for today so at some level without have them having to be evil the success of psychologists depends on denying an amount of your individuality so they say things like we split our participants into equal sized groups matched by age and sex so here is an example of two equal sized groups of people matched by age and sex I don't think that's necessarily what they were trying to achieve what happens in practice is recruiting people for psychological studies is expensive and time-consuming so we tend to use just people who are readily available so the overwhelming majority of people who take part in psychological studies are Westerners or in ninety six percent of people in studies are Westerners only 12% of the population 68 percent of all the people in psychological studies are American of those sixty eight percent 77 percent are white 67 percent of them are studying psychology if you're majoring in psychology at an American University you are four thousand times more likely to be taking part in psychological research than anybody else and so the first problem is we don't have the right people the second is we're not really getting people to do what we think they're doing these days you can't just give people electric shocks and you can't dress them up as prison guards and tell them to be horrible to other participants so psychologists spend a lot of time designing substitutes for these behaviors and then trying to justify how they're close to the real thing so for example if you're researching into positive and negative emotions and how they might differently affect people what you tend to do is you throw them a video you also some people a comedy video and also some people a video about someone with cancer and maybe if you want some people to be in a neutral mood you'll show them a nature documentary or something and they watch that for 10 minutes and you say we have induced a positive or negative mood in these people but these are especially if they're undergraduates these are people who've been watching for hours of television every day since they were born and you might wonder just how much of a difference ten minutes of TV viewing is gonna make they're pretty much used to just switching off the TV and getting on with their lives where the real happy or sad things happen and to make it even worse when we want to find out how people are feeling we just ask them we can't do a lot better than that because we still don't have a machine to look inside your head whatever you see in the papers of pictures of brains that are lighting up we can't tell how you're feeling so we ask them questions and sometimes we ask them lots and lots of questions and we pretend that all of their answers from the question one two question eighty have all been considered with the same amount of care and I don't know if you've ever filled in one of those forms that the hotel sends you after a stay and they ask you to rate the cleanliness of the public areas on a scale of one to seven you're clicking through that to get to the end so and again most of these people are studying psychology they want to learn how the experiment works they're not just sitting there being subjects they're trying to help you although occasionally they're trying to hinder you there are lots of reasons why your study might not be a perfect reflection of reality but people love to tell stories the academic journals love to hear them the popular media love to put these stories in this is the believed to be the ultimate headline in the English language Man Bites Dog when your study appears in the newspaper it doesn't say psychology undergraduates at the University of wherever were four percent more likely to say that they preferred chocolate to sex after they watched a video of polar bears it's going to say official scientists show that people prefer chocolate to sex and this is not just tabloids and lifestyle magazines the University Press departments are happy to send these stories to very reputable news outlets here's a report showing that if you cut a centimeter off one of your chair legs and you're sitting there wobbling you are apparently going to perceive your romantic relationships are less stable than if you are sitting on a normal chair or here's a nice one people some people sat inside a giant cardboard cube in the laboratory and some other people sat next to the giant cardboard cube and they were asked to come up with creative ideas and the ones who were sitting inside the cube had fewer creative ideas because the other people were thinking outside the box or lonely people take hotter baths and shower to compensate for the lack of warmth in their life now these studies are almost certainly wrong they don't tell us how people really behave they tell us about how some kind of pretend people behaved or said that they thought that they felt in a laboratory but you can buy a whole bunch of books full of gee whiz stories like this almost all of them very positive Airy possibly not true last week a story came out you may have seen it in the newspaper that a group of researchers took a hundred studies in psychology and tried to get the same results as the original researchers and in sick over 60% of the cases they didn't they failed they weren't so much Man Bites Dog as Man Bites hot dog and psychologists are running around at the moment trying to explain why this happened but I'm interested actually in the ones that did they did manage to replicate because we still don't know if they mean anything useful all we know is that under the same conditions which is to say in a laboratory full of psychology students people did mostly the same things we still don't know what that tells us about real life so what can you do when you come across these kind of claims you can start by asking yourself if it even sounds remotely plausible if it does then maybe it's true but it's also possible the researchers haven't discovered anything very special at all here is a very distinguished gentleman a norwegian psychologist called Younce madland he argues that a lot of things psychologists say are true simply because of what the words mean and then if the study seems to show they're right they haven't shown anything for example if a study tells you that people try to do or to get things that will increase their happiness maybe this just reflects the fact that happiness is what we call the state of when we got what we wanted we're back to philosophy again maybe we should never have left it behind if the result doesn't sound plausible well be prepared not to believe everything you read even if it's brought to you by scientists they're people too they have ambitions they have grants to find they have budgets to run ask yourself what the evidence is ask yourself why if this is such a big deal Plato and Shakespeare didn't already write about it what you can do practically you can actually go and read the research it's usually not hard to find the paper have a look at it did they play games in a lab or did they actually test real people even better contact the author of the study send them an email it's very easy to find their email address academics are always amazed when anyone takes an interest in their work it's been estimated that each paper is read about seven times by seven people only and one of them is your mother so I want to conclude by going back to the question of the nonstick frying pan at the end of that article the author quotes gives this quote from former president of the American Psychological Association George Miller I believe the real impact of psychology will be felt not through the technological products it places in the hands of powerful man of people but through its effects on the public at large through a new and different public conception of what is humanly possible and humanly desirable that was said in 1969 nearly 50 years ago we haven't really been making much progress in that direction ever since so maybe we need to rethink what we want from psychology we could ask for fewer studies we could ask for psychologists to spend more time in real settings with people from more backgrounds and cultures instead of what they currently do which is really party tricks in the laboratory and this is mostly funded almost all psychological research is funded by taxpayers money so we're entitled to ask for that to be done better thank you

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Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Greece, Social Science, Behavior, Behavorial economics, Cognitive science, Curiosity, Education reform, Happiness, Mental health, Neuroscience, Personal growth, Positive Thinking, Pseudoscience, Psychology, Public health, Research, Science, Self improvement, Self-help, Sociology

Id: SPtWPBapyF0

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2015