Freakonomics Radio - 5 Psychology Terms You’re Probably Misusing (Replay)

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

We all like to throw around terms that describe human behavior — “bystander apathy” and “steep learning curve” and “hard-wired.” Most of the time, they don’t actually mean what we think they mean. But don’t worry — the experts are getting it wrong, too. SOURCES:Sharon Begley, senior science writer for Stat at The Boston Globe.Jerome Kagan, emeritus professor of psychology at Harvard University.Bibb Latané, social psychologist and senior fellow at the Center for Human Science.Scott Lilienfeld, professor of psychology at Emory University.James Solomon, director and producer of The Witness. RESOURCES:“Tech Metaphors Are Holding Back Brain Research,” by Anna Vlasits (Wired, 2017).Can’t Just Stop: An Investigation of Compulsions, by Sharon Begley (2017).The Witness, film by James Solomon (2016).“Fifty Psychological and Psychiatric Terms to Avoid: a List of Inaccurate, Misleading, Misused, Ambiguous, and Logically Confused Words and Phrases,” by Scott Lilienfeld, Katheryn Sauvigne, Steven Jay Lynn, Robin Cautin, Robert Latzman, and Irwin Waldman (Frontiers in Psychology, 2015).SuperFreakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (2011).Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology, by Scott Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry Beyerstein (2009).Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, by Sharon Begley (2007).“Kitty, 40 Years Later,” by Jim Rasenberger (The New York Times, 2004).“37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police,” by Martin Gansberg (The New York Times, 1964). EXTRAS:"Academic Fraud," series by Freakonomics Radio (2024).“This Idea Must Die,”Freakonomics Radio (2015).

Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. We have popped into your Freakonomics Radio feed today with a bonus episode. You may have heard the recent two-part series we made on academic fraud. Well, it reminded me of an episode we made several years ago that I thought you might like to hear now. It is called Five Psychology Terms You Are Probably Misusing. The version you're about to hear has been updated as necessary. A few of the people we interviewed have since died, including Scott Lilienfeld, the Emory University psychology

professor whose work inspired this episode. He died in 2020 at age 59 from pancreatic cancer. His New York Times obituary noted that he spent much of his career trying to, quote, expose the many faces of pseudoscience in psychology. The difference between what we think we know and what we actually know, that's coming up on today's bonus episode, Five Psychology Terms You Are Probably Misusing. What prompted us to write this article was that many of us felt, I felt, that there was a lot of confusion about psychiatric psychological terminology, both in the popular media, pop psychology, and also even in academic circles. Scott Lilienfeld was a professor of psychology at Emory for more than 25 years.

I'm a clinical psychologist by training, and I also have a real interest in the application of scientific thinking to psychology and also how thinking sometimes goes wrong and can lead even the best of the brightest to embrace ideas that are sometimes questionable, maybe even pseudoscientific. You are an author on a paper called 50 Psychological and Psychiatric Terms to Avoid, a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases. But you're also the author of an earlier book called 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology. So this book is incredibly fun. I love it.

It's hugely enjoyable on the one hand, but also hugely sobering on the other, because it's kind of like looking at a table of contents of the New York Times over the past 20 years. And I mean that not in a complimentary way to the New York Times, because basically you're saying that all these things, all these ideas that people love to embrace and talk about and pass on are somewhere between bogus and trumped up. For instance, here are your chapter titles. Playing Mozart's music to infants boosts their intelligence, which you argue it does not. Some people are left-brained, others are right-brained, which you argue and we've argued on this show they are not. Some people are left-brained. Others are right-brained, which you argue and we've argued on this show. They are not.

Intelligence tests are biased against certain groups of people, which you argue they are not. So, my question is a very rude one, I have to say, and I ask your forgiveness in advance. If most of the pop or modern psychology that most of us know are essentially mythical or anecdotal stories that you're saying are mostly not true and that so many of the terms are abused or misused or exaggerated, what are you people good for? Yeah. That's not a bad question, actually. Yeah. Psychology is a bit of a double-edged sword because it is so intuitively interesting to all of us. And the positive side is that we're all psychologists in everyday life. We all know or at least think we know something about love and memory and friendships and dreams and things like that.

The downside, though, I think that you're getting at is that because something seems familiar, it may sometimes seem understandable. There's a very hungry, very receptive audience for books on positive psychology, emotions, love, relationships, infidelity, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. That's all good, but the danger, I think, is that we can very easily push our wonder buttons and push our interest buttons using pseudoscience rather than science. We here at Freakonomics Radio are totally in favor of people pushing their wonder buttons, but we're also in favor of real science. So today on the show, what are some of these misleading, misused, and abused ideas from psychology?

One that comes to mind is bystander apathy. And? The biggest error is to assume that these personality traits are unitary, they only have one cause, and that they're inherited. And? One of the most important discoveries in neuroscience of the last few years has been that all that hardwired stuff is completely wrong. And a lot of people will say, oh, this job has a really steep learning curve. In fact, they're getting it backward. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of fellow academics Catherine Sauvine, Stephen J. Lynn,

Robin Cotton, Robert Latzman, and Irvin Waldman, published a paper in Frontiers in Psychology listing 50 terms in their field that are inaccurate, misleading, and so on. It begins with an epigraph from Confucius. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. Now, I'm curious, when you write a paper that basically tells your peers and the public, these are all the ways that we're screwing up, does that make you kind of unpopular in the field? Are you thought of as a scold? Yeah. I always remind my colleagues when they give me a hard time about this, I tell them I've probably misused virtually every single one of those terms at some point myself. I'm as guilty

of a lot of these misuses as anybody else. So, the summary of the article says that the goal is to, quote, promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion. And then you give 50 commonly used terms that fall into five categories. And I'd love you to walk me through the categories. Yeah, so those are inaccurate or misleading, frequently misused, ambiguous terms, oxymorons, and pleonasms. So, category one, inaccurate or misleading. Describe the problem and maybe give an example. Those are terms that can often lead people into erroneous conclusions. So, one that comes to mind is bystander apathy. Can you tell us what it means, what it represents, and then where it came from? Absolutely. So, what we're referring to here is a fairly well-demonstrated psychological phenomenon

that in emergencies, when people are observing someone being robbed or stabbed or raped. What we sometimes see is a very peculiar and sometimes very tragic phenomenon where people freeze and don't do anything. And back in the 1960s, there was a classic series of studies in this regard that was inspired by a real-life tragedy. Early in the morning of March 13, 1964, a 28-year-old woman named Catherine Kitty Genovese was brutally attacked in Kew Gardens, Queens, which is a relatively quiet community in New York City. That's James Solomon, the director and producer of a documentary film about that real-life tragedy. Two weeks later, the New York Times published a story that had originated with the New York police commissioner and a conversation

with a then metropolitan editor of the New York Times, Abe Rosenthal. The police commissioner mentioned many witnesses had watched and heard what had taken place and reportedly had not called the police. Solomon's film is called The Witness. It follows Bill Genovese, Kitty's brother, as he tries to make sense of the killing many years after the fact. How could so many people have failed to intervene? The New York Times reported on its front page that 38 law-abiding citizens had watched for more than a half hour

as this woman, 28-year-old, was attacked and murdered. Apathy. Apathy was the tagline that Rosenthal gave to the story. That's Bibb Latine, a social psychologist and senior fellow at the Center for Human Science. For years after the murder and the headline, 38 Watch and No One Calls the Police, this has been the subject of different movies, lots of television episodes, and countless magazine articles, books, and most of all, I think, in terms of its impact on the country, sermons. It spoke to the time. President Kennedy had been assassinated. The country was asking, who are we?

We're also not many years from the Holocaust, and it was a story that spoke to the thoughts that many had, that there had been many silent, complicit witnesses to what had taken place in Europe in the 40s. People thought big cities were part of the problem or that television was part of the problem or that, you know, all kinds of things were part of the problem. That was leading us to lose our moral bearings and become almost bestial. Indeed, how could people just stand by as a woman was brutally attacked over a significant period of time, ultimately ending in her death? True, the attack happened in the dark middle of the night. People were safe inside their homes, asleep, perhaps scared to venture out.

Some who heard the victims shouting thought it was a lover's quarrel. But still, was any of that an excuse for such profound apathy for not a single person calling the police? One of the results of the Kitty Genovese murder and the uproar that came out about it is the adoption of the 9-11 system, which is now all through the U.S. Before the event, it wasn't all that easy to report a crime in process. The Genovese murder reverberated

through many realms of life for many years. It came to define New York as a place of apathy, violence. It defined human behavior generally. In 1994, on the murder's 30th anniversary, President Bill Clinton spoke about it during a public safety forum in New York. Well, that story shocked us all 30 years ago, not just because of what happened to that woman, as tragic as it was,

but also because of what had happened to her neighbors. It sent a chilling message about what had happened at that time in a society, suggesting that we were, each of us, not simply endangered, but fundamentally alone. Mr. Speaker, 38 neighbors heard her cries, but out of fear or irresponsibility, not one went to her aid. The next morning, she was found dead. That's Congressman Steny Hoyer of Maryland in 1995, referencing the Genovese murder while urging his peers

to pull out of a U.N. arms embargo against Bosnia. Today, Bosnia cries out for help. Kitty Genovese is not in Bosnia, but genocide resides there now. Let us act today to lift the arms embargo to give beleaguered Bosnia a chance. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pointed to Kitty Genovese's murder as having an enormous influence on his thinking about international policy. It stuck with me as just a terrible example of disengagement. And then when I started dealing with decisions

about putting American soldiers into harm's way, the simple clarity of it to me said, you don't want to be one of the 38. And as a country, we don't want to be one of the 38. And he said, it's not the cost of action, it's the cost of inaction. International affairs, public safety, the image of New York City, and there's one more realm where the Kitty Genovese murder lived on. That's coming up.

After the break, I'm Stephen Dubner and you are listening to Freakonomics Radio. As we heard before the break, Kitty Genovese was murdered in 1964, and the New York Times reported that 38 bystanders watched it happen and didn't take action. Nowhere was it more impactful than in the field of psychology, behavioral psychology, as a question as to how do we remain silent. Bibb Latine was one psychologist who began asking that question. A few years after the murder, he embarked on a series of studies with fellow psychologist John Darley.

John Darley and I were both newly-minted tenure-track professors in New York City. He at New York University, me at Columbia University. They'd met at a cocktail party. We discovered that we both, in some degree, resented the fact that every time we met somebody from outside the university, they would say, oh, you're a social psychologist. So how do you explain this apathy that people in New York seem to have? Latine wasn't convinced that apathy was necessarily the operative explanation. One part of the puzzle? There weren't just one or two witnesses, but 38.

Durley and I thought, well, maybe that's part of the explanation. Maybe the fact that it was 38 people led them to behave differently than if it had just been one or two. One of the experiments they ran came to be known as the Lady in Distress. Judy Roden, who was then a graduate student at Columbia University, played the role of an experimenter who recruited Columbia students to come up to the mathematics building to fill out some questionnaires. And while they were doing that, she went through a folding curtain into her office next door. Before she went, the students could see that there was a desk with books piled high in a bookcase and a rolling chair. There were three experimental conditions, one in which a student was alone, one with a friend, and one with a stranger.

Over and over again, they could hear Judy say something about having to get that book down. They could hear the noise of her pulling the rolling office chair up to the desk and trying to climb up on the chair, they heard the crash and the cry as the chair went out from under her feet and she fell on the floor. She didn't actually fall. She jumped down. But... It was a pretty effective simulation of somebody possibly having a serious accident in the room next door. So what'd the students do? And was their response influenced by whether they were alone? Whether they were alone or with other people made a major difference in what they did.

With Judy being rescued, far more likely, if there's only one person hearing her, than if there were two. All things equal, the more people who are present at an emergency, the less likely the likelihood of help. That, again, is Scott Lilienfeld. The beauty of this was they took pains to try to replicate the findings fairly well, and they observed quite similar effects across different experimental paradigms.

So, for example, in another case, there was case, there were people who were in a room, a small little room, filling out questionnaires, and then what appeared to be smoke began filling up the room. Somebody in there alone would typically be working away. They'd smell something first, look up, see that there's smoke coming out of this vent, and then most often they would find the secretary in the office outside and say, hey, something strange is in there. I don't know if it's a problem, but there's smoke.

They were much more likely to run out than when other subjects were there. When two people were in there, they would each maybe look up at it, appear puzzled, but each seeing the other one not doing anything, presumably felt it wasn't really a fire or that the appropriate thing is to stiff it out and stay there. The phenomenon was surprising because the smoke got pretty intense after a while, and people were coughing and having to wave smoke away from their faces with, I think they had a file folder in front of them. They were clearly willing to endure discomfort rather than embarrassment of overreacting.

So, the opposite of safety in numbers, if there are a lot of people around, right? And what was the alleged psychological underpinning of that effect? Why would people be less likely to intervene? So according to Darnall and Lattin, one of them is just pure fear of intervening. Another one is fear of making a fool of oneself and looking stupid. But there are two other malignant processes that often get set into motion. The first is what they call pluralistic ignorance. When you have an emergency in a public situation where people can see and be seen by others,

you have a particular situation where everybody is trying not to flip out, trying not to panic or run screaming. That's particularly likely when the situation is ambiguous, when it's not entirely clear that something is an emergency. We see a couple shouting or arguing or something. We don't know, is this really an emergency or is this just two people having a spat? And what we do is we look around, we see that no one else is intervening, and as a result we figure, oh, I guess this is not an emergency. And so that can lead to people failing to intervene. The second process is what they call diffusion of responsibility.

When there are multiple people around, we feel less responsibility, less personal guilt for the consequences of doing nothing. We can always tell ourselves later, probably it's a rationalization, but we can tell ourselves later, well, I should have intervened, okay, but 10 other people could have done it as well. Now, this idea came into the psychological canon in the, what, late 60s, early 70s? Late 60s were the main studies, that's right. And so, describe for me briefly just how long it held prominence for or how long it was considered legitimate and how strong was the effect? Yes, I would say the effect itself actually is fairly robust. I think what's not robust is the idea that somehow people are apathetic. In most cases, much more likely what's happening is that people feel psychologically frozen. So there's a supposed psychological phenomenon, bystander apathy, that turns out

to be misinterpreted or exaggerated. What about the story that inspired it, the murder of Kitty Genovese? The irony of this, as a number of people have since noted, is that as it was originally described, much of what the New York Times reported was not accurate. There is a saying that many journalists have that some stories are too good to check. And this was one of those kinds of stories where its power almost defied the facts. That, again, is James Solomon, director of The Witness. It took, in many respects, Bill Genovese, Kitty's brother, over the course of 10 years of his life, to unravel the story of his sister's murder for us to begin to understand just how flawed the story was.

Let's go back to the original Times report. It read, quote, In 2004, on the 40th anniversary of the Kitty Genovese murder, the New York Times revisited its own story. A local resident, Joseph DeMay Jr., had begun investigating and found several problems with the original reporting. For starters, there weren't three attacks. There were two attacks, and one attack, yes, that was on the street,

but the other, the second attack, happened in a small vestibule. The greater majority of neighbors were asleep, and the much greater majority only heard, did not see an attack. Nor was it true that no one did anything. One of Kitty's neighbors yelled out to leave the girl alone. And the attacker, Winston Mosley, ran off. Those who were at the window at this point saw Kitty stagger around the corner and then lost sight of her. The attacker returned only after things had quieted down. By that point, she had made her way inside a vestibule,

inside an interior space where she had collapsed. No one on the street could have seen her at this point. So there were many who heard portions of the attack and few who saw even portions and none who saw it beginning to end. Perhaps the most neglected part of the narrative is what happened next, as Kitty Genovese's brother, Bill, discovered during his years-long investigation. It wasn't until Bill started reading the trial transcript decades later that he came across and came to see, well, there was someone there who rushed to Kitty's aid, and her name was Sophia Farrar. She was Kitty's actual next-door neighbor, and when she received a phone call that Kitty was hurt, she rushed outside without hesitating, down her stairs, down a back alley, still in her nightclothes. It was 3 a.m.

Having no idea what was out in the rear alley and who and what was inside the vestibule, Sophia had to force her way inside the vestibule because Kitty was now laying inside the doorway and her body up against the door. And she cradled Kitty. She cradled Kitty and reassured Kitty and wasn't sure if Kitty, who was at that point

in extraordinary physical duress, realized that she was in a friend's arms. But Kitty did die in the arms of a friend. She was my friend, and I knew she was hurt, and she needed help. That was my reason for flying down those stairs. That is Farrar, in the film, explaining to Bill Genovese that his sister at least hadn't died alone. And then when I came in, I'd never forget the black. Kills me when I think about it.

Black leather gloves and all cuts, all through the gloves on her both hands. I only hope that she knew it was me, that she wasn't alone. As for Kitty Genovese's other neighbors, it appears that at least one of them did knowingly refrain from helping. But for many others, things were much less clear. Some who heard the commotion claimed to have thought it was a drunken brawl or a lovers quarrel. Still others insisted they did call the police after the first attack. The police log, meanwhile, recorded only one call well after the murderer had left the scene. A cynic might wonder if the police were telling the whole truth.

What if witnesses had called and the police failed to respond? Remember, this story got its start when the New York police commissioner told the Times editor Abe Rosenthal about the 38 witnesses who did nothing. This was after the killer had already been caught and had confessed. He also confessed to a second murder, but the police had already gotten a confession from someone else for that one. That's what Rosenthal was asking about when the police commissioner started talking about the 38 witnesses. Did the police have incentive to play up bystander apathy in the Genovese murder? Here's how Steve Levitt and I wrote about this scenario in our book, Super Freakonomics. A story about two men arrested for the same murder clearly had the potential to embarrass the police.

Furthermore, given the prolonged and brutal nature of the Genovese murder, the police may have been touchy about who caught the blame. Why hadn't they been able to stop it? With this kind of a story, especially after so much time, there will always be elusive details. Suffice it to say that the tragic murder of Kitty Genovese had been repackaged to represent something that it probably didn't. The big tea truth is that this probably wasn't

apathy. The psychologist Bibb Latine again. The whole interpretation of the story was probably wrong. It's probably a social inhibition effect. I don't think most psychologists would use the word of apathy. A number of them, and I think it's either misleading or not very descriptive, will call it the bystander effect. But that doesn't tell you whether the bystander effect is to increase or decrease reporting. That's why I like social inhibition or bystander inhibition, because that tells you what the effect is. There's probably a kernel of truth, but it's probably a gross oversimplification. And the psychologist Scott Lilienfeld. So much of what was reported was inaccurate.

To me, the irony is that the psychological idea of bystander apathy was created essentially by one newspaper article that, from my perspective, was just a model of poor journalism that was driven by what we think of as the, you know, if it bleeds, it leads school of thought. But really, even deeper than that, it goes to another psychological concept, which is this seeming attraction to or thirst for the worst version of ourselves. Was this story, in your, I guess, professional opinion, just too bad to not be true? Was that part of what helped establish the myth? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe at some level, we may be drawn to those stories, perhaps, because they may seem to vindicate our own failures to intervene in some cases. We've all had times where maybe we should have done something, and we didn't.

And maybe those stories, in some way, give us a certain amount of reassurance. It's not just me. But it may just also be the fact that we are kind of drawn to the period. We kind of like things that are sensational. And give me a sense of the downside of how robustly the bystander apathy, the notion was embraced. Did it, I don't mean to say it set back the field of psychology, but maybe it did. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if it did. If it set back anyone, it set back the field of psychology, but maybe it did. I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know if it did. If it set back anyone, it was probably a generation of psychology students who may have misunderstood this. What students do need to understand is that most people are, in fact, quite empathic. Yes, there are exceptions, but most of us do have a deep-seated capacity for emotional empathy. And when most of us see emergencies, yes, we want to help. Deep inside of us is the hero. Also deep inside of us is the chicken. And maybe in some ways, recognizing the fact that part of us is kind of chicken is the first step to helping us overcome it. There's a danger, I think, in assuming that anyone who does not intervene in an emergency is a monster

or inherently a bad person. But in fact, we're all capable of that. We are such imperfect animals, aren't we? We sure are. Well, my colleague at Emory, Franz DeWaal, likes to call us the bipolar ape. We're capable of great evil in some cases, but we're also capable of great goodness. That's part of what makes us such a fascinating, such a complex, and sometimes such an infuriating species. Coming up after the break, more things about our infuriating species that we're absolutely sure

are true, except they're not. The brain is more like an Etch-a-Sketch. That's coming up right after this. Okay, so the stalwart psychological phenomenon you may know as bystander apathy is mostly a faulty interpretation based on the faulty reporting of a 1964 murder. What other things do we know to be so that in fact are not? How about the notion of being hardwired for a certain behavior? New research on the mind has uncovered the possibility that believing in God may be hardwired in our brains. And the problem for parents is kids don't just like sugar.

They're biologically hardwired for it. In the overwhelming majority of cases in which it's used, hardwired is really misleading and I think sometimes potentially pernicious. Scott Lilienfeld from Emory. Because it can lead people into assuming that certain behaviors cannot be changed. The predisposition toward infidelity is hardwired in the brain. It must mean as a male, I can't resist my inclination toward infidelity. Hogwash, of course you can. We know these things can be resisted, although not always easy. If you say it's hardwired implicitly, or actually not that implicitly, quite explicitly, the message is you can't change that.

Sharon Begley wrote about neuroscience for decades. She died in 2021. Just as you know, if you wanted to go into your computer's hard drive with, you know, a teeny little screwdriver and, you know, start messing around with those integrated circuits to change something, that will not work out very well. But the hardwired idea didn't originate with computing. The history of neuroscience has shown us that, you know, even going back centuries, whatever was the prevailing cool mechanical machine, device, whatever, that was the metaphor that people appealed to. So the brain was compared to a counting machine, to a clock. And then computers burst on the scene.

And so people said, well, then the brain is like a computer. But one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience of the last few years has been, in fact, that all that hardwired stuff is completely wrong in very, very fundamental ways. There are very few, if any, psychological attributes that are strictly genetically determined, strictly hardwired into the brain. This sort of realization has also led to treatments for major depressive disorder because there too there's a clear neurocircuitry underlying it. OCD, which reflects overactivity in a particular circuit and through the form of therapy called cognitive behavior therapy,

the overactivity in that circuit can be quieted just as much as if people take the medications that are prescribed for OCD. The brain can even be trained to control different body parts after a stroke. So when someone has a stroke and the region that controlled, we'll just pick the example of the right hand, is wiped out, obviously you have trouble moving your right hand. But it turns out that there are interventions, rehab techniques, that can teach the brain to turn its right side into the part that controls the right hand. So again, what had been controlled in the left side of the brain, it can move over to the right side and assume a totally new function. This is not to say the brain's flexibility is unlimited.

If you were to ask me, you know, can somebody, oh gosh, think themselves out of schizophrenia or think themselves out of addiction, I would say in those two examples, we do not have evidence that that is possible. But Begley says it may be time to trade in the hardwired metaphor for a less misleading one. The brain is more like an Etch-a-Sketch. You can, you know, seem to incise lines on it, and they look for all the world like they're real. But with a little bit of shaking up, you can make significant changes. Next phrase, if you would, love this one, statistically reliable.

The danger of statistically reliable is it can mislead people into thinking that if a result is statistically significant, if it falls below a particular threshold for statistical significance, psychologists often use 0.05, that is 1 in 20, as a kind of rough guideline. A lot of people think, oh, therefore, it is likely to replicate in other samples. Typically, when psychologists refer to reliability, they mean consistency, consistency over time. That is a misuse of the term because, in fact, most significant results probably don't replicate. So we shouldn't confuse a result that is statistically significant with one that is likely to be reliable, consistent over time, or replicable. They're two very different things. Excellent.

Okay, the next phrase, personality type. Personality type. You see that a lot in psychology, especially in pop psychology. Typologies of personality have been around with us since the days of Hippocrates and others. So, we like to sort people into different types that is mutually exclusive, discrete categories, introverts versus extroverts, neurotics versus non-neurotics, intuitive people versus non-intuitive people, and so on. But in fact, we know from the personality literature that most and probably all personality traits are continuously distributed, much like

height or weight. They really are dimensions. We want to make a distinction between a personality type and a personality dimension. That is Jerome Kagan. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard and a pioneer of developmental and personality major theorist, of course, was Freud, and Freud did posit types. He said there were anal types, there were oral aggressive types, and although those ideas were appealing in the 1920s and 30s, they turned out to not match good scientific inquiry,

and so no one uses them anymore. What most psychologists study these days are traits, although traits and types are often confused, which leads to fundamental misunderstandings about personality. The biggest error is to assume that these personality traits, agreeableness, conscientiousness, are unitary. They only have one cause and that they're inherited. They're not in your genes. And there's no basic set of personality traits. So assuming that certain people fall into types, I think, can predispose to a lot of misunderstanding because it can make us think that certain groups of people are somehow qualitatively different, different in kind, rather than a degree from the rest of us. Yes, introverts and extroverts do differ in important ways, but in fact, they grade often imperceptibly into each other. Is this related to the kind of broad concept of hardwired and that, you know, and if it

is, is there some comfort in the notion that, oh, I can explain better that person's behavior if I can attribute it to something that was, you know, etched already into the code? So, I think in some cases, not all, but in some cases, this idea of something being dichotomous, yes or no, present or absent, may be tied in our heads to the idea that somehow it is biologically wired or either X or Y. And the last one we'll do right now is steep learning curve. A lot of people will say, oh, I started on a new job where I was having to do something new, and this job has a really steep learning curve. In fact, they're getting it backward. A steep learning curve is easy, because a steep learning curve means that you learn

something quickly, not slowly. So when I read that in your paper, I thought, oh my goodness, that's really interesting that we've all got it backwards. But then I quickly rationalized and said, well, I guess what I always assumed was that the steepness was on the axis referring to difficulty somehow. Right? And that if a task is particularly difficult, then that's the steepness and that's the curve I'm on. Right, yeah. So, really, when we encounter something that's really difficult and we're having a hard time mastering it, we should say we're on a very shallow... A very shallow learning curve, that's right.

All right. So, I think when people say this task has a steep learning curve, sort of what they mean is, man, I feel like I'm going up a... I'm like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill. I'm going up a very steep mountain. But in fact, if something has a steep learning curve, sort of what they mean is, man, I feel like I'm going up a, I'm like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill. I'm going up a very steep mountain. But in fact, if something has a steep learning curve, that means that it's acquired very quickly. Let's take a step back now and talk about the phenomena that you've been describing generally of misuse of language and so on. What would you say are the reasons for this poor usage? I mean, even I, as a total amateur, could imagine a few.

Maybe, you know, the narrower the language is, the more easily that you can claim as a researcher that your research has legitimate and original value, right? If it's getting to something that others hadn't gotten before. Or maybe you're trying to cover up the fact that you don't really know what you're talking about. Or maybe you're trying to impress peers and journal editors and students. I guess the non-academic saying is if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit, right? I think all of the above, actually.

I think some of it's also the fact that a lot of human behavior, a lot of human phenomena are very multiply determined. Even just the way people use terms like OCD or depression or things like that. Depression, I think there's probably some core thing there, but we're talking about a very heterogeneous entity. There are probably a lot of different depressions rather than one pure form of depression out there that's the same across everyone. So, I think it can often mislead us into thinking we're talking about one thing when in fact we're talking about multiple things.

And give me an example, a real world example where there are real serious ramifications? Some people might think that the quick and simple cure for school shootings is mental illness reform. I think that may have to be part of the picture, but it's unlikely to be all of it. And another reason that's the case is many perpetrators of violence are not mentally ill. So, I think the link between mental illness and violence falls in between two extremes. So what we do know is that the substantial majority of the mentally ill, and by the mentally ill I mean people like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, psychotic depression, and the like. The overwhelming majority of people with these disorders are not and never will be violent. The rates are probably well under 5%. And we also know that people with severe mental illness are much more likely to be the victims rather than the perpetrators of violence. At the same time, I think we also have to avoid the error of saying

there's no increased risk at all among the mentally ill. It's probably a modest increased risk among people with schizophrenia, and in particular when severe mental illness is paired with substance use. So, we have to realize the picture's a lot more complicated than it's often portrayed. And let me ask you a ridiculous and impossible question. If, let's say, all of psychological and psychiatric knowledge were a pie, like a blueberry pie, how much of the pie is known now? Pete Yeah, that's a tough one. If I had to come up with a number, I'd guess about 10%, and I think it will vary depending a lot on the area, but I think we tend to overestimate the level and certainty of our knowledge.

I suspect when we look back in 100 years or maybe even 50 years, we'll be astonished at how silly many of the ideas we currently hold near and dear to our hearts are actually wrong. Well, I guess in that regard, psychology and psychiatry are very similar to the rest of medicine. But, you know, one could argue the same for economics and a lot of the other – certainly the social sciences. It's really hard to prove a lot of causality in your field, is it not? It is. And I'm inclined to agree with E.O. Wilson that the real hard sciences are the social sciences, sociology, psychology, and others. And a lot of people think the opposite of hard is easy but you know but I think not to minimize the difficulties of yeah problems in chemistry oh it's tough too but we live in so much more of a probabilistic world when we're dealing with

people there's so many other variables coming into play so many moving parts and sometimes we're criticized perhaps justifiably for how crappy we are at predicting behavior, like predicting violence. But sometimes it amazes me we do even as well as we do that we can do even better than chance, for example, at predicting violence or predicting work performance or predicting happiness or longevity, given all the moving parts. so i even though i teach a course where i call all that stuff into question and try in many cases to debunk it i don't look down on people who have those beliefs because i think they often reflect a kind of thirst for knowledge which i think is actually kind of healthy i think we scientists sometimes make that mistake when we're dealing with claims we don't agree with like creationism we sometimes are inclined to think gee these people are so silly or so stupid but in fact many of us myself included held ideas that we now look back on is not so good and i think the the bottom line here not to get too preachy here but scientific

methods although they're not perfect and they can make their mistakes too because they're practiced by by we humans who are all imperfect. But scientific methods are ultimately our best hope for kind of sorting through and sorting out which of these lay beliefs, intuitive beliefs has some truth and which doesn't. So there you go. A dose of humility along with a plea for good science. Thanks to Scott Lilienfeld for having the humility and the courage to challenge the veracity of his own field and to do so with such grace and nuance. And going back to the Kitty Genovese story, there's one further detail I thought you might find interesting. Her killer, remember, was named Winston Mosley. You'll also remember he wasn't caught at the scene. That's what led to the bystander apathy story. So how was he caught? It happened several days after

the Genovese murder. Here again is James Solomon, director of The Witness. Mosley was in another part of Queens in the middle of day and was stealing the TV from an individual's apartment. And as he went back inside, a neighbor noticed Mosley and knew that the neighbor hadn't given anyone permission to sort of remove things from their house. So he confronted Mosley, and the neighbor chased Mosley and pinned Mosley until the police came. So the ultimate act of sort of a good Samaritan,

and the irony is the sort of story that we only associate with bad Samaritans, had a good Samaritan who led to the apprehension of Mosley. The moral of the story, I guess, is to always be careful of what you think you know. Thanks for listening to this bonus episode. We will be back soon in our regular time slot with a new episode of Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam. Special thanks to James Solomon for letting us use clips from his documentary, The Witness. Thanks also to Andy Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers. All the other music is composed by Luis Guerra. As always, thank you for listening. You know, when I first saw pleonasma, I didn't think that was a real word. I thought it was somehow a play on neoplasm. Oh, I can see that. So I was happy to look it up and find out that it actually has roots that are far older than neoplasm. I think you're probably right, yeah.

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