The Crisis of Pop-Psychology
By: Adit Seth
Tags: Science, Education, Psychology, Facts, Quora

Surfing through Quora I came across a question with over 7 thousand followers and tons of answers with more than a thousand upvotes with some cruising tens of thousands of upvote;

What are some psychological facts that people don’t know?

Going through the answers was not exactly a treat for the mind. Riddled with the same old pop-psychology ‘facts’ you’d find on Instagram or pinterest, the answer thread was disappointing at the least. I was compelled to write a response in form of my own answer -

The fact that Psychology is not a pop “facts” field with handy deepities, casual observations, truisms and, opinions that make for easy likes and sound ‘scientific.’

I might’ve cheated here, this is more a fact about psychology (and by extension — science) than a psychology fact but it needs to be said seeing the rampant misinformation in this question thread.

Which means that a significant portion of the highly upvoted answers here are not psychology facts.

They’re either one of the widely shared but un-backed ‘factoids’ like — If a girl asks you a question, it’s better to just give her the truth. Chances are she’s asking you because she already knows the answer — They are good at this :P

Or yet another deepity / personal philosophy bite like — When people say that they don’t have time, what they really mean is that they have other priorities. Watch them fall in love and see how all of a sudden they managed to get time out of thin air.

Sometimes, these ‘facts’ sound very similar to actual science — for example — If someone makes an eye contact with you for, 60% of conversation they’re bored, 80% they’re attracted to you and if 100% they are threatening you.

These ‘facts’ come in a lot of variety and a lot of these answers actually do include real psychology facts which make the fake ones believable.

I am not implying that (most) of these answers are written by users with a malicious intent to disinform — although it is very likely that they do it because they know it makes for easy upvotes (which is apparent due to the fact that most of the top upvoted answers follow the same format.)

Psychology, as a field, attracts a lot of people. As a result, the demand for psychology communicators arises. A similar thing happens with most other sciences but those demands are quickly fulfilled.

Physics also faces its share of pop-“facts” especially in Quantum Mechanics. It’s a general principle for laymen to disregard most bite sized chunks of information regarding Quantum Mechanics you come across (unless from a reputable source) and it’s a good principle. An overwhelming amount of fun factoid images you’ll find on the internet about Quantum Mechanics are oversimplified BS, conspiracy theories or teenage hypotheses.

XKCD- Quantum

Coming back to Psychology — The demand for psychology communicators hasn’t been adequately filled. Psychology doesn’t have its Neil Degrasse Tyson or Briane Greene (although Steven Pinker comes close, he mostly focuses on linguistics and policing how to use literally) which lets these fun bite sized (but false) ‘facts’ run through the systems of the internet and subsequently our culture with minimal refutation and scientific communication.

Psychology follows the scientific method. Academic research is published in reputable journals (Yes, reproducibility as an issue remains but that doesn’t make psychology a mumbo-jumbo field [1] just how the medical reproducibility crisis didn’t make medicine a pseudo-science) which you can read. There are credible media publications which chunk the research down for laymen.

Arbitrary percentages with quirky personality traits or generalized (and often vague) statements about psychology of humans or specific demographics is NOT psychology.

As a general rule — psychology studies are not about you.

As Jamil Zaiki writes in his Scientific American piece (I recommend reading the whole piece),

My point is that a consumer of psychology, as it’s offered up in blogs, newspapers, and popular books, could be more than forgiven for coming away with the conclusion that our studies are about them. This is because oftentimes, popular psychology is explicitly pitched this way: as information about you-the individual reader-how your mind works, and even what you should do to make it work better. … Findings from psychological studies are a bit like batting averages. Except-and this is critical- you’re not the batter. You’re the at bat. This is because psychology is a science of populations.

Pop-psych is, more often than not, synonymous with fake psych. Don’t let yourself be fooled.