A Top 10 of Psychological Myths

In which Ben Ambridge takes 15 minutes out of his very busy life (probably. I’m speculating. I don’t actually know. He might just have had nothing to do on a wet Tuesday) to both identify and – here’s the kicker – sadly disabuse your belief in any or indeed all of the following psychological phenomena:

Man are from Mars, Women are from Venus: How different are men and women actually? Well, it’s “not so much a case of Mars and Venus, more a case of Mars and Snickers”. I.e. not really very different at all.

Rorschach (Ink Blot) test: “No validity when it comes to diagnosing people’s personality…”. Although if you’re in two minds about whether or not to believe Ben you’re apparently in good company because if you do use the Ink Blot tests in such a way you’re likely to be over-diagnosing schizophrenia, for reasons that are well above my pay-grade and level of psychological maturity.

Learning Styles: If you need to think about whether you’re a visual, audio or kinaesthetic learner the Bad News is that “learning styles are made up”. If you think that’s a bit harsh, you’ll probably be disappointed to learn they also have “no scientific validity whatsoever”. And if you’re finding that a bit difficult to understand it’s not because I’ve presented the information in a Read / Write style that doesn’t match your visual-audio preference. It’s because you’re Quite Gullible (and probably desperate for some Magic Bullet technique that will turn your average students into world beaters).

Left Brain, Right Brain: The Left is more logical. The Right is more creative.  Which is “sort-of” true. The right side of your brain is, for example, more geared towards creativity and the left towards logic. But the thing is, these two halves talk to each other. A lot. It’s how human brains work. Which, if you stop for just a second to think about it, is blindingly obvious. The idea originates from experiments by Roger Sperry in the 1960s that showed the two brain hemispheres could function independently.

Could being the operative word.

But only if you suffered fairly catastrophic brain damage that severed the corpus callosums – the structure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Which is not, thankfully, the case for the vast majority of us.

Just because they can, doesn’t mean they do…

You Only Use 10% of Your Brain: And speaking of brain damage, while it might seem that most people, most of the time, don’t use any of their brain, any of the time, it’s probably because they’re addicted to social media. There is, unfortunately, no hidden reserve of untapped brain power (despite what daft films like “Lucy” would have you beleive) sitting unloved and unused somewhere in the depths of your psyche. We all use all of our brain, all of the time.

Which, for most of us, is probably not something we really want to hear.

The Mozart Effect (1): Does listening to Mozart before you take an IQ Test (or, indeed, any sort of test, although probably not something like a Driving Test. That would be daft) improve your performance?

That’s a very hard “Yes”.

But only if you really like Mozart.

You get the same effect if you’re a Stephen King fan and you read his books before the test. There’s a moral in there somewhere, but I’m not sure where. Either way, the “effect” is temporary.

The Mozart Effect (2): So, if listening to Mozart won’t make you cleverer, surely it will do something brilliant like improve your health? Well, the Bad News is that “someone who listened to Mozart everyday” (Spoiler: It was Mozart) was found to be really, really unhealthy. And I mean “how the hell did he manage to live that long?” unhealthy. So the answer is a hard “No”.

Choosing a Partner: Are these choices culturally-specific? By this point you should be well aware that whenever you read a question in this list you just know it’s rhetorical (probably because you’re using more than 10% of your brain). Ben suggests this “myth” is one spread by unnamed “sociologists” but I’d suggest it’s not actually a myth in the way he seems to think it is. Either way, he has some statistics and I don’t.

Purple Patches: This is a sports-related myth that holds people sometimes go on hot streaks of sporting prowess where they can do no wrong and that defy all logical explanation. Except it’s more in the perception of the observer than anything rooted in reality. Our desire to impose patterns on the behaviour we observe leads us to see “streaks” (or patterns) where none actually exist outside our head. Bit like when you look at the moon and see a great big face. Or is that just me?

Punishment Improves Performance: While this is one I’d like to believe is true, the title is a bit misleading. It’s more a convenient link from the previous point and so I’ve renamed it:

Obedience to Authority, mainly because he’s talking about Milgram’s obedience experiments and the myth that people will simply obey because they are told to do so by “authority figures”. As Alex Halam and Steve Reicher have demonstrated, people obey because they think it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re afraid or “simply following orders” (the Agentic State explanation favoured by Milgram as it happens). If people believe in the cause they will obey. If they don’t, they won’t.

Liars give themselves away through their speech and body language: As is well-known, you can tell if someone is lying to you because they avoid eye contact. Or is it because they hold eye contact? Or maybe it’s because they scratch their nose. Or shift their weight continually from one foot to the other. Whatever they do, it’s definitely easy to spot a liar. Except if you think about this for just a nanosecond you’d realise it couldn’t possibly be true. If it were, we’d be able to train police officers as lie-detectors and do away with the need for things like expensive forensics, detailed, labour-intensive investigations and the like.

But it’s not. Trained police officers are no better at detecting liars than you or me. And while I can’t speak for myself, I know you’re hopeless at detecting liars.

And the reason I know this is because although I called this list “A top 10 of psychological myths”, I’ve actually listed 11.

Or did I?

You’re probably going to have to count them, aren’t you?