 Continuing! My gosh we're just rolling right along. Our next subject is a junk science, neuroscience, and psychological science. We've got Scott, Sally, Carol, Robert, and Sheldon. All right here's the limitic. Some science is neuro, some junk, and some of it's hard to debunk. Psychology too has its own woo, especially when the protocols stunk. Please welcome Scott Lillienfeld, Sally Satel, Carol Tavris, Robert Kurzban, and our moderator Sheldon Helms. Come on out! Good afternoon everyone and thank you for coming to our panel discussion on junk science, neuroscience, and psychological science. And I am certainly psyched to be up here before all of you, hardy-hard. I am also particularly honored to have with us four panelists whom I admire, and I'd like to begin by introducing them to you, although I'm sure they need no introduction. Down at the end there in the lovely blue we have my close personal friend, Dr. Carol Tavris. Can we hear it for Carol? And in addition to a social psychologist, we also have a psychiatrist on the panel. Her name is Sally Satel. Let's hear it for Sally. And to her right, someone I admire because he wrote a book that I've been using for years to teach my abnormal psychology students to be critical thinkers. It's called Science and Pseudo-Science in Clinical Psychology, which Sally also wrote, and his name is Dr. Scott Lillienfeld Scott. And I'm so relieved to have an evolutionary psychologist here with us today, because Epsych is really getting kicked around even in the skeptical community. So this is Robert Kurzban. It's here for a while. So let me just start out by stating the goals of our panel today. The goal here is to tease out the junk science from the good stuff in the field of psychology. And there's certainly an awful lot of good stuff in the field of psychology. But there's also a lot that probably doesn't belong there, and some stuff we need to take a close look at. So although our purpose isn't to debate, it's always interesting to touch upon controversies and also to talk about areas of disagreement. So to that end, why don't we start with a rather broad question? There are many quack therapies and areas of pop psychology that regularly bombard the public. I'd like to ask our panelists, what would each of you say is the most pernicious, the most insidious form of junk science in the field of psychology today? What do we start with you, Scott? Psychology or therapy? Do we want to make it just psychology overall? Psychology? That's a tough one. It's hard to know where to begin. I do think it's first important to emphasize, which I'm glad you did, which is that psychotherapy works, no matter how you cut it, whether you compare it with a weightless control condition or placebo condition. So that's the good news. There's a lot of great technology out there. Psychotherapy is often quite effective. It can help people with mood disorders, anxiety disorders, some forms of sexual dysfunction, bulimia nervosa, which is a eating disorder. So that's the good news. I think we often forget that because we often do focus so much on the bad stuff. On the other hand, there is some bad stuff out there. And just to toot my own horn, which I hate to do, but I did write a... I'll just go for it, yeah. In 2007, I wrote a paper, which I actually would modify a bit today, but I think someone should probably revise it. But I wrote a paper arguing we need to focus a lot more on the very small subset of treatments that do harm. And here's an example of where you have to be careful, by the way, just as a small aside in dealing with the media. At that time, Newsweek magazine, Sharon Begley wrote a piece covering this article and actually went over and over again with her saying, this is a small subset of treatments, but they get a lot of attention. Most of psychotherapy works. Most of psychotherapy does really well, blah, blah. Make sure you emphasize that. And Newsweek had a big article saying, get shrunk at your own risk. So with almost an assumption, as soon as you walk into a therapist's office, you're in big trouble and so on. So my feeling is we should be focusing on that small subset of treatments that unfortunately do adversely affect a large number of people's lives, however, that in fact do have the potential to do harm. And there is increasing evidence, I would argue from the psychotherapy literature, that this old assumption that many of us hell, I think I probably held as a grad student, which is that doing something is always better than doing nothing when it comes to psychological treatment, is not all that well supported. And when it comes to many of you saw Beth Loftus's wonderful talk, I think when it comes, for example, to recovered memory techniques in psychotherapy, I think there's increasing evidence that those techniques can be quite damaging, have damaged people's lives, have damaged people's families, facilitated communication for autism, which I can talk more about if people want, which by the way, is making, writing an article on this right now is making a big comeback in many quarters. Those of you who have heard of it think it is dead or defunct, no, it is still around. In fact, it's coming back because I think we've been too complacent. Some treatments for adolescents with conduct problems like scared straight programs, boot camp programs, for example, which are politically popular because they involve getting tough with adolescents, probably don't do very well and do harm. And I think quite tragically, crisis debriefing or critical incident stress debriefing, which is administered to people post trauma, for example, in the wake of 9-11 or other traumatic events, again, very well intention, there is increasing evidence that crisis debriefing, critical incident stress debriefing, is ineffective and may actually be harmful in a number of cases. So, short answer is that good intentions are not enough. And we have to focus on well intention therapists who are delivering treatments that can inadvertently do harm. I would add to this, I was on a panel with Scott recently. I said the natural history of debunking junk psychology is first there's the bunk, then there's the debunk, and then there's the re-debunk because you think it's gone and you can never quite drive a stake through the heart of some of these kinds of therapies that make fortunes for their promoters and so forth. I would add to this, although it's not exactly in psychology, but it's in Sally's playpen of psychiatry and in the general world related to what the two of you said yesterday about neuroscience, and that is the medicalizing of psychological problems. And when you both talked yesterday about the problem of reductionism and looking at all problems such as addiction or anything else solely as a problem of brain dysfunction or brain disease, it blinds us to the need for and benefits of looking at that problem in a social and cultural way. What are the social and cultural and learning experiences that affect problems that people have and solutions that we might look to? My friends and colleagues in the field of sexology have watched slowly as their field has been taken over by medicine. And for those of us in social psychology, most people don't have a sexual problem sitting by themselves on a sofa. The problem starts when someone else walks into the room suggesting that maybe it's a social or an reactive problem that people have. We could shock yourself. So I think it might be interesting to talk about, well, the fact that even some disorders that are biomedical in origin may have psychotherapeutic interventions that work best. So they're not exactly the same. Anyway, I just wanted to raise that thought. Okay. Yeah, actually, my first notes was to the notion of chemical imbalance. It's almost sounds like alchemy these days. I've got a chemical imbalance. Well, clearly, if you have something we what we consider medical psychiatric condition, sure, you have a medical imbalance, but that doesn't that's absolutely has no information inherent in that at all. And again, it doesn't mean that the therapy needs to be biological in nature. But what I'm gonna my contribution here is what I would what I think is pernicious in psychology. In psychiatry, I should say in clinical psychology is what I would call the presumption of fragility, which is to say that when people experience such a traumatic event, that they're going to fall apart, and they're going to need professional help. And some people do, they will be in the minority. There are certain kinds of traumatic genetic conditions that are more pathological, more pathology inducing than others. For example, it's a rape has a higher incidence of post traumatic stress disorder associated with it natural disasters less so doesn't even mean that doesn't need to say every woman needs to get professional help if she's been assaulted. But just from an epidemiologic standpoint, you are going to see higher rates of post traumatic stress disorder. All things equal, depending on what the nature of the trauma is. But the general fact of humanity is that people are resilient. And I was especially struck by this after 9 11, where there was a, I used to live in New York, I'm in DC, but you know, these coast was everyone was transfixed. But the closer you were to, you know, to New York, the more obsessed. And it was the mental health crisis that wasn't. The psychiatric profession went mad. I mean, millions, billions of dollars were allocated for therapy that was kind of frankly not needed. And what most people do need in these situations is structure and information. That's what everyone craves and community. But some of the therapies that were funded were, as Scott described, not particularly effective, possibly even Iatrogenic. And one has to wonder also about the power of expectation and suggestion when people are told that this is the experts, you know, expect this sort of response that they are more likely to, that's where attribution biases come in, where anything that goes wrong then in their lives, because things do go wrong in people's lives, now it gets attributed to that event. And it's not helpful for healing at all. And it's a classic example, as Carol said, of medicalizing a terrible human catastrophe, but that one that the average person and the average community can metabolize well. This is part of the general notion that for any problem of depression or anxiety or worry that you have, medication is the best approach as opposed to the notion that anxiety and worry and sort of our normal reactions to the transitions and challenges and problems of life. And if you try to medicate them away, you never acquire the mastery of dealing with these problems, you know, which psychotherapy, by the way, is often beneficial in helping. Yeah, well, I'm going to surprisingly enough take a heterodox position here. So if you think about everything you've just heard from the panelists, you've heard about bad assumptions, you've heard about what conclusions the data do and don't support, these are all features of a normal healthy science. Yes, we're going to be wrong a lot. I would take the position that in my area, which is the experimental side, not the clinical side. Yeah, there's some stuff that's bad. There are cases of fraud. We have the replication crisis. But just think about that, the replication crisis, right? That's not something you hear about in the alien abduction literature. You can replicate the Andromedians coming down and taking my body. The reason that you hear about this crisis is because it's a mature science. It's not a perfect science. Assumptions are wrong. Data are poorly supported, right? That's the signal of something that's going just fine. So I resist the assumption, the question that there's any junk science out there, super science, at least on the experimental side. We have our difficulties, or at least there are difficulties. And a lot of those things, however, have to do with the way we're doing science. Sample sizes that are small, statistics which are potentially insufficient. Again, occasionally you have cases of fraud. But these are not symptoms of pseudoscience. These are not symptoms of junk science. This is symptoms of what happens when people have self-correcting epistemological perspectives. And I'm usually the last person to defend psychology. But the kinds of things that are going wrong in psychology are not the kinds of things that communities like this really should be worrying about. Yeah, my take's a little different. I think that, no, I'm going to have some sympathy for what you're saying in terms of the laboratory. I think my difference of opinion with you, Rob, is that I would argue a lot of these techniques that we've talked about arose in the absence of any prior scientific investigation. So crisis debriefing, for example, is a good example of a technique that became popular not because it was every test in the laboratory, but because it seemed right. It seemed intuitively to be correct. It often, it may have even accorded with this idea that something terrible has happened to you. There's this toxin inside of you. You've got to get it out of your system or else it's going to eat you alive. A lot of that came from old psychodynamic ideas. So I would argue a lot of this really doesn't reflect adequate science, kind of hashing things out, but reflects a failure to even subject things to scientific inquiry before they're subjected, in many cases, to an unwilling, unwitting public. Don't get me wrong. So my area is on the experimental side. I know very little about the clinical side. All I was reflecting was that even on the points you were making on the clinical side, there was still the ambiance of science. But I take the point that that might not be pervasive and all accorded with discipline. I think we agree with that. And I would also add that even when we're using good scientific methods, that doesn't always translate well to the public. We have things like gay conversion therapy going on, which is completely unsupported by the science. My favorite is affluenza. I don't know if any of you have heard this term. The idea that because you are well bred, have money and haven't had any consequences for your behavior, then you can be to some degree relieved of your responsibility for any bad things you might do. And it's ridiculous. To my knowledge, there's no published studies on this whatsoever. It's just, you know, it's, well, and there's a lot of money to be made sometimes too in writing about this stuff. I actually have a term I'm going to share with you all that I made up. So don't try to take it because I put it on the urban dictionary and it has my name on it. And it's anyone, a professional in the field of psychology who does things just for the money. And I refer to them as psychostitudes. It's the only good idea I've ever had in 47 years. So enjoy. And probably ever will have. So we've been talking about throughout the weekend, these common themes keep coming up. And one of my favorites is talking about neuroimaging. And of course, no one would argue that there's no use whatsoever to neuroimaging brain scans and fMRIs. They're fascinating things. But although some of you have touched upon this in your other talks, I wonder if we could maybe revisit that topic and talk about what does it tell us? What are the limitations? And where did we go wrong? I would like to add to that question by commenting also on something that the speaker said yesterday. Scott, for example, when you were doing that, that adorable description of love as the heart and love as molecules and oxytocin you said and kind of went on. And that's actually a very interesting example because oxytocin, which quickly became known as the love hormone or the cuddle hormone and so forth. Until it turned out that it made you want to cuddle people who are like you or related to you and made you actually more hostile to people not like you. So it's really the cuddle your own kind hormone and the hell with the rest of you hormone. And so, which is a wonderful example of how there was a kind of oversimplification of the role of oxytocin. But more important an understanding of how learning and culture affect brain mechanisms and behavior, which both of you spoke about but without many examples and I would love to hear from you about this. In the first book that I wrote on anger in those days back in 1841 or whenever the hell that was. The amygdala was thought to be the anger center. If you stimulated the amygdala of men, it made them more angry and aggressive. Until then somebody noticed no, that was only if you stimulated the amygdala of men with a previous history of violence. Everybody else just said oh, could I have a hamburger or something? I mean it didn't make them angry at all. And so now of course the amygdala is the fear center and it's associated with other reactions and so forth. But yet again, as we're learning, it's your social history, the way culture affects the brain and areas of the brain and how people perceive the world in the most fundamental biological ways. So would the panel care to talk a little about the missing role of culture and neuroimaging? Yeah, it's a great idea. No, it's a fine answer. No, I mean yes. Yeah, when you were talking about culture and you were talking about brain imaging, I was actually thinking of the courtroom as one of the most fertile venues for looking at the way imaging is abused and even thought about. And when one example that has an interesting background to it is the juvenile death penalty, which we don't have anymore and I think that's a good idea. But the reason I think it's a good idea has nothing to do with the nature of the adolescent brain. And in 2005, the famous Supreme Court case of Simmons versus the roper and this was the case that in which the court decided five to four that it was cruel and unusual to execute people who were 18 and younger for murder. And the specific young man who was the stimulus for this case was a guy named, I forgot his first name, but anyway, his last name was Simmons and he had grown up in an abusive, sadly, abusive household, frankly not outside the realm, was locked in a closet for the first 13 years of his life, but his father was quite brutish and it sounded like it was less than happy childhood. So he was in high school and he and a friend who was 15 at the time, he was 17, this was Missouri where it was still, you could still execute minors. And so he was 17 at the time and his co-conspirator was like 15 and he even reassured his conspirator as he planned to commit this crime that don't worry, we're underage so we couldn't face a death penalty anyway, wrong on that. But basically, they intended to, so they robbed, their initial goal was to rob someone, but they ended up murdering the woman. And they murdered her in a way, they kidnapped her and drove her to a state, nearby state park and then had her climb with them. They all went up on a train trellis and then they bound her hands and blindfolded her and threw her into the water. And so you think of, oh my, if you're robbing a house and someone discovers you can imagine the panic that ensues and the gun goes off and this sort of thing, but not only was this sort of a thoughtful sort of execution, I suppose, they had talked about it before. If we got caught, this is what I would do. I would take this person and drive him to this state park and so he got the death penalty in Missouri. And through various appeals, it ended up in the Supreme Court where the question was, is this a violation of the Eighth Amendment? And ultimately they decided no, and as I said, for what it's worth, as a matter of policy, I agree that we shouldn't execute people, children. But a huge part of the, it's not called the defense, but the argument in the petition was that he had an undeveloped brain. And not that, look, my client is different from everyone else. Everyone else has a brain that's officially developed, but my client is developmentally defective in some way. It would throw to an entire, the entire class of adolescents have brains that are not fully mature. And technically that is true. There's still what's called pruning of the synaptic organization of the frontal lobes and the myelinization of the tracts that run from the frontal lobe to the amygdala are not mature. All that is true. But when it comes to a question of morality, and in this case, a question of having planned in his case, it was clearly planful, that kind of logic, to me, is pretty unpersuasive. But there were brain scans and there were amicus briefs and was focused heavily on the neuroscience. The judges actually did not cite it very heavily in subsequent cases that have to do with other penalties that adolescents should or should not be subject to. They did cite it more. But that was problematic to me because even though they came to the right answer, as far as I was concerned, from, again, a social standpoint, clearly there was an effort to use science in a rhetorical, I would argue, a rhetorical way in that setting. And that's problematic. And when you put, again, brain scans there, as Scott was saying yesterday, studies are a little bit mixed about how compelling the scans are in terms of getting people to believe explanations that are flawed. But what is consistent across the literature is that when behavior is described in biological terms, people are less likely to ascribe responsibility to the actor. And sometimes that makes sense. Sometimes the actor has very little responsibility because of things wrong in their brain. No question. But again, our brain scans at this time are not very good at distinguishing those two groups of people. So a couple points to make. I think I don't have any problem with brain imaging in contrast to some other people. I think obviously they're methodological limitations that have to be kept in mind. They're conceptual limitations. I think it's a potentially wonderful tool, and we should use it. I'm doing a bit of imaging work myself. I do think, though, we have to be a bit careful about valorizing any one method. I think one hard lesson we've learned in psychology is that if we focus too much just on one single method and ask too much of that one method, we can get in trouble. So I think so long as imaging is part of a general armamentarium of tools that psychologists use, I have no problem with it. I do, like Carol, though, worry a bit more broadly. This is less about imaging itself, but more broadly about what Sally and I talk about as neurocentrism. And again, I think there's a bit of a pushback here that's healthy, which is focusing too much on a purely biological level of explanation. Look, when I was in grad school, I saw the opposite problem. I saw a lot of resistance in the 1980s when I was in grad school to any biological explanations of psychopathology. Certainly anything genetic. Anything genetic was considered heretical. So in some ways, what we're seeing now maybe is a healthy swing of the pendulum in the other direction. I'm delighted we're looking at biological influences on psychopathology because there are clearly genetic contributions to almost every mental illness that's been studied. And but understanding the biological substrates are important. But as Carol pointed out, the cultural factors are very important. Two quick examples. Sally knows this literature real well and we talk about it in our book. Heroin Addiction is a classic example. So in our book, we talk a bit about this during the Vietnam War. There was a safe to say epidemic, a virtual epidemic of heroin addiction among US soldiers in Southeast Asia. There were confident predictions that when these soldiers came back to the US there would be a similar epidemic here in the US. It never happened. And a lot of people were shocked to see that most of the vast majority of the soldiers went right off heroin as soon as they got here. Some of that is cultural. Some of that is what we call classic addition. Some of the stimulus cues were broken as soon as they got here. But it highlights the important role of the situation and perhaps the important role of culture in shaping addiction. Second, there's been a lot of interest in psychology in the extent to which we, and I may have called bomb guilty this too, we have focused too much on the proverbial college sophomore. I mean, 80% of papers in personality sort of psychology focus on college sophomores. And they may be representative in some ways, but they may be markedly unrepresentative in other ways. And Joe Heinrich and others have argued that a lot of Western societies are actually weird, they actually have an acronym called Weird Cultures. I always forget, what is it? Western educated, intelligent, rich, democratic, I think it's just- Yeah, I thought the white was in there. White, okay, yeah. But, and actually, I think their conclusions are a bit overdrawn. On the other hand, I think that they raise some important questions, which is, it's really important for us to examine the generalizability of our findings across cultures. And in some domains, I think we're finding that generalizability is actually better than we thought. But in other domains, in say, visual perception, which is actually one I would not have expected, like in the domain of visual illusions, for example, there's clear evidence that there are substantial cultural differences in the extent to which people perceive illusions. And I think that actually has some relevance to evolutionary psychology, too. It may tell us a bit about the boundary conditions under which some of these evolutionary models hold. I'm personally optimistic they're gonna hold more than Heinrich and others think, but I might be wrong. It's a good segue into the upside. Well, we can talk about that, but I thought I'd answer your question briefly, which is, again, reject the hypothetical. I am not convinced that neuroscience has gone wrong. There is plenty of neuroscience, which I think is gonna turn out to be wrong, where there were errors made methodologically, statistically, and anyone can always make a claim about a shift in focus. This has been over-emphasized, under-emphasized. This is, in my view, a coward's critique. This is always true, because there's no, there's no objective facts of the matter, and there's always a certain amount of attention that can be had. Don't get me wrong, again, I find myself in the funny position of defending psychology, which I rarely do, and defending neuroscience, which in my department, I'm usually the guy who's usually whining about it. But these guys, these guys, they haven't gone wrong exactly. They've made mistakes, but that's what science does. We make mistakes, we realize that there's been some problem with a method, there's been some problem with an inference, there's some problem with maybe an emphasis, but I resist, and so far I have not been persuaded that at least the kind of neuroscience that I'm familiar with, that is the primary scientific literature has anything like a crisis. It might be used wrong. That's true of every, it's always been true. Bad ideas are used wrong, true ideas are used wrong. They get used wrong in the course, they get used in arguments, in conferences. So I resist the notion that neuroimaging has gone wrong. I think any new technique needs some growing room. And the nature of science is to be self-corrective, and the reason it's self-corrective is because mistakes, mistakes were made to borrow price. Another perfect segue. Not by me, by Boris. By whom? Not you. Okay. You guys are talking about that, so you guys go for it. No, no, no. I wanna add one major, I completely agree, but I would add one huge major elephant that's in the room, and it's follow the money. The money for funding of research in this country is all going to biology, genetics, the brain, medication, and industry funding of research. Industry funding of research. When the firewall between research and commerce began to crumble after deregulation, in the 80s and 90s, there was just a tumble to make sure that your research had some pragmatic and financial payoff. Something that was once considered scandalous among scientists. And so what we see now, it's not, I think, Robert, everything that's been said is true in terms of the self-correcting nature of things, but there is now a tremendous conflict of interest among many researchers in biology, and medicine, and science to tilt their findings toward the findings the funder wants. And that is a danger for science, it's a danger for the researchers, it's certainly a danger for the public. Well, my next question, I don't think Rob will resist in any way. It has to do with evolutionary psychology. An area that gets a lot more criticism than some of you might be aware within the field of psychology itself. I mean, sometimes dismissed as a nascent science, people say things like, well, behaviors don't fossilize, so how could we possibly know what happened in the past? So what are your thoughts? We'll start with you, Rob, on evolutionary psychology's place in the field, its limitations, how are you making progress in getting people to accept the findings? That's a big question, it's sort of difficult to answer. So, I mean, as you can imagine, I have a very different perspective. So, you know, my view is that the basic idea that the mind has evolved is and or at least shouldn't be controversial. And then the question is, what inferences follow from that? And at that point, we're just in the details. So in many ways, you know, using an evolutionary approach to understanding human behavior is just using the tools that we get from evolutionary biology and from people like Joe Hendrick and anthropology and so on to make better inferences about human nature. So I'm always baffled by the resistance, particularly, again, I find it particularly baffling in communities like this one, which in every other context would be very excited about the introduction of evolution into the study of science. But then once you get above the neck, there's this kind of gut reaction, like, you know, no creationism up here, Darwin down here. I find this mystified. And I feel quite justified in making that claim. I mean, the one panel that I saw at a skeptics conference with P. Z. Myers and I think it was Amanda Marcotte, I mean, again, you know, the criticisms that we get are just completely ignorant of the basic principles of the field and certainly the details of the research. And so they're not ones that we take very seriously. Now there is, of course, controversy within the discipline. Most of that has to do with things like what you heard from Scott. So details about, for example, cross-cultural variability are the usual things scientists sort of argue about, which is which hypothesis is more likely to be right and which one is more likely to be wrong. So I guess I would say I don't, to my way of thinking, the issue with obelisk psychology is not, has nothing to do with the kinds of issues again that these sorts of communities ought to be engaging with. As the editor of the main journal for the main society on the planet, I can tell you that the kinds of science that's being done is not only equally good as the other people are studying human behavior, but oftentimes is much better, including we don't study the undergraduates in major Western institutions. Our examples come from the Hadza in Africa. They come from the Fiji. So we are going out into the field and we're gathering a bigger picture of human nature. And so again, we find it puzzling that this is a kind of critique that adheres to us because we feel as if this is something that we advance in fact are doing quite a bit better than our friends over in personality and social psychology. So my view is if you look around the country, you see more classes in evolutionary psychology. You see more textbooks in evolutionary psychology. The impact factor of my journal is higher than any in social psychology, with the exception of one journal that's been around for 85 years. And that's not a coincidence is because our science is a creative. We're building knowledge that other people are using and is building the knowledge of our understanding of human social behavior in a way that in many ways surpasses those of our colleagues. So I make no apology for my discipline. And in fact, again, I would say the same thing about my discipline as I would say about neuroscience, which is that the issue here is not pseudoscience. The issue here is that all scientists are gonna make mistakes and that the field of self-corrective and as long as we use the tools, the epistemological tools of the enlightenment and the best practice in terms of scientific methodology, the kinds of things you should be worrying about are not the kinds of things that I think communities like this typically are engaged in. Can I, I wanna play off a word that you used or a phrase that you used, which is we went into the field and that is so important. And unfortunately one of the, and now I'm not, I'm off the evolutionary thing. Because I think either of us wanted to pursue that. Okay, then you go and then we'll. Yeah, I'm torn with what Rob says. I think that I mostly agree with what you say. And I'm actually a strong defender of evolutionary psychology. I think it has a lot of potential and I, like you, I vehemently reject the idea that natural selection stops at the neck. I think the only caveat I would make to that is I do think, I do see this as part of normal science and the healthy debates. But I do think that sometimes, and you may have a disagreement here, I do think sometimes evolutionary psychologists have been a little too, some of them, have been a little too cavalier with some difficult questions like the basic question of what an adaptation is. I mean, George Williams famously outlines some criteria for what an adaptation is in biology. I think it's hard, and thoughtfully, evolutionary psychologists, I think grapple with that question. I think, again, that's really healthy. But I think it's difficult to ascertain a priori what actually counts as a biological adaptation. What was directly selected? Is human jealousy, for example, or is the ability to detect deception? Are those things directly selected or are they indirect byproducts or other facts? Is religion, for example, a direct adaptation? I'm open to it. Or maybe is it more of a byproduct of the fact that our frontal lobes evolve at the point where we can now understand the future, understand we're gonna die and we're scared shitless, we're all gonna die and need to have some understanding of some higher power. I don't know the answer. So again, I think those are healthy debates. I think all I would say is I think it's important to bear in mind that we're not always sure what an adaptation is. But again, I think evolutionary psychologists making some important inroads in those areas. I just think the question of what is specific versus domain general is a tough problem. And having had debates, friendly debates evolutionary psychologists over the years, I've seen some of them, I feel not always as attuned to that problem as they might be. Show me the data. My view on this is just you show me places in my journal over the last five years, for example, where someone has assumed that something's adaptation as opposed to developed a hypothesis that they were testing in virtue of William's criteria for adaptation. And I'm not saying that you won't find it. All I'm saying is, look, I mean, again, this is a community about evidence and epistemology and so on. And I hear this all the time. Oh, you guys do this, you guys do that. Okay, well, if we do it all the time, it should be easy to show me. But that's not what you show me. What I get is behavior doesn't fossilize or you make these assumptions or you think culture doesn't matter. I mean, all I ask is that these discussions be had in the kind of scientific framework, where if you're gonna make a claim, you show me evidence. But you're not denying what I'm saying, though, that there are cases where every psychologist go beyond the data and make strong claims. There's evidence of every field of people who go beyond the data and part of it has to do with the incentives, I think that we were talking about earlier, so fair enough. We agree. Sally, before you. Mostly. That's okay. No. Before you make your point, I thought I would add something that I don't know that people would be aware of necessarily unless they are teaching. Psychology, which is what I do for a living. I won't say the name, but there is a top-selling Psych 101 textbook author with whom I've been in communication for years trying to encourage inclusion of certain things and fine-tuning and maybe taking out Zimbardo and things like that. And he doesn't listen to me, for the most part. But there are a few things where he's been sort of open-minded and I've said things like, well, why is it that I noticed in your chapters there really is no representation of gay and lesbian people. You've done a wonderful job with people of color, disabilities, et cetera, et cetera, peppered throughout. If you can have photographs in there, that's great. The only place that you mention gays and lesbians is in the area about AIDS. And I thought, you know, that needs to be fixed. And we're in, what is this, the 21st century now? And so his response to me was, well, I'll take that under advisement. It may be of interest to you, however, that when I added the evolutionary psychology chapter, I lost the south, meaning that they no longer buy his textbooks there. Interestingly, the latest edition came out, I just received it, and evolutionary psychology is not in there anymore. Well, real quick, yeah, I'm an intro textbook author. Look, I'm not the same one you've heard, but. No, that was not him. Yeah, and we have, and we have probably a bit more coverage of evolutionary psychology than other books. We have actually been asked by some reviewers to take it our minimize it, because the evolutionary element might alienate some readers. Luckily, our publisher has been supportive of us, so we have not had to do that. That's a dangerous problem. You've never had that? Never had that. We've had it a few times, yeah. Really? So it's not always about, show me the evidence, what are the data say, that's great within the field, but when it comes to communicating the information to the public, we have those kinds of filters, and I just want to make that point. Sally, you want to make. Well, I don't think I'm getting off the theme here too much, although I'm not going to pursue the evolutionary dimension anymore, but in terms of, because we didn't define junk science as much, and none of us have really talked about junk science in the classic sense of snake oil and that sort of thing, but we are talking a lot about incomplete science, in a sense, and so in that capacity I wanted to make two observations, and one is a frustrating, a frustration of mine that it's hard to bridge, it does have to do with the addiction area, which is, actually I would suspect that there's no other field in all of psychology, mental health, where the ratio of people who actually do the research, versus doing the clinical work about approaches infinity, and what I mean by that is so many folks are in the lab and doing very important and sophisticated and work on reward circuitry and dopamine biology, et cetera. One day, hopefully it will have some translational significance right now, when I say translation, I mean into clinical work, right now it doesn't, but it hopefully will, but they never see patients and they don't have an appreciation at all of the clinical universe of really how this condition plays out in the world, and I think that's one of the reasons, there are several reasons I think that again this brain disease concept has gotten such traction, but I think that's one, is that folks in the lab don't deal with people in the real world with this condition, and related to that is something called the clinician's illusion, that was a term coined, I think in the early 90s by two statisticians, were they? Yeah. The Coans? Yeah, take them to Pat Cohen, point it out. And that refers to the fact, very true fact, and I suspect it's true of every reparative enterprise, not just medicine, where clinicians, who do we see? We see the people with the worst cases. That's why when 9-11 happened, so many of the experts in PTSD expected there to be such psychological fallout, because the people they see are that small minority of folks who either had pre-existing psychiatric conditions and were overwhelmed, because they were especially vulnerable to the sort of incident, but had some sort of complicating factor, but that's who they see, and who do you see if you work in an emergency room? You see the very fragile diabetics, and again, in the schizophrenia clinic, you see the folks who often are refractory to the medications or have a very poor response, and these are the people who understandably and rightly take up our attention, but they don't represent the universe of people with these conditions, but we tend to extrapolate from what we see in the clinic to what the real world of addiction, PTSD, or I should say, response to an intense event is like, and again, that's highly problematic too, because we make policy decisions, and funding decisions, and services are created based on understandings of what the most severe cases are like, and that's not always a good guide. So this is very important, we began this whole panel without really defining terms, as Robert has pointed out, that junk science is not the term we're talking about, there's science, and there's junk, I mean, theoretically, science is the self-correcting enterprise, and then there's a whole lot of junky stuff that is pseudo-psychologically pseudo-science-y something that isn't really good psychology or good science or any overlap between them, and that's what you just have pointed out here, which is that one of the problems in psychology has been, as well-known in Scott has written about, so widely the scientist practitioner gap, the scientist practitioner gap in training and in scientific understanding of what it is they do. So this very flaw of assuming that the people you see in therapy are representative of the whole larger world is something no scientifically trained clinician would do, would absolutely understand this. I mean, as you know, of course, it took Evelyn Hooker to dislodge the notion that all gay people were mentally ill because gay people were going into therapy saying, I've got these problems, and what should I do about it? Well, they all must be mentally ill, and she was one of the first, the first perhaps, to do actual control of the studies of gay people in the general population and found no higher rates of mental illness than among straight people. That's the scientific mind at work. So the problem we have is with junky ideas that get out there with a gloss of psychology, but that are neither good science nor good therapy. Great point. So let's talk about some of the good ideas then. Maybe it's, what are they called, Maslow's hammer, but I always see skepticism itself as our playground. Psychology, we have homeopathy, for instance, and we ask doctors, what's this all about? And they tell us, well, it's not medicine. And so the next question, naturally, is, why do people use this shit? What could possibly possess someone to think that water has a memory? They're all kinds of examples. Religious beliefs, creation stories are so seductive. Why is that more impressive than, what we get from physics or from anthropology, et cetera. So my question here is, I challenge you, panelists, is there an area of psychology that you think informs skepticism the most and that holds the most promise for helping people be better skeptics? Carol, you can just say cognitive dissonance will move on. Okay. Thank you. I'll do it. Let's move on. You can elucidate. I go. Go ahead. Of course, I have my biases, but I think it's the psychology bias. I think social cognition and cognitive psychology, I think. Which, by the way, Rob and I may agree on this one. I think evolutionary psychology, I think, has a lot to teach us about biases, as I suspect. I think one mistake we sometimes make in this community, I think I've made it to an early teaching, is to regard biases simply as negative. And I think most of what we call cognitive biases and heuristics are probably outgrowths of basically adaptive, perhaps naturally selected, processes that are being misapplied under particular circumstances. I think a lot of what Kahneman-Deversky discovered, I think they just discovered some very important things in terms of availability, for example. And Kahneman, by the way, made this crystal clear. There's no doubt about this. So when he talks about representatives heuristic, availability heuristic, to the extent to which we estimate the likelihood of an event by how easily it comes to mind. It's a middle shortcut. It's a quick and dirty rule of thumb. It generally works. There's good reason we use availability. A lot of the time it works pretty well. If you ask people who are long-time TAM people, I've asked are there more people this year than the others. Yeah, it seems a little bigger this year. Well, they're not literally counting every person. They just kind of look on the room and yeah, it looks like more people this year. It's probably right. It's quick and dirty heuristic. But in some cases we know, I've heard some people talk about the dangers of airplane crashes during this TAM. People talk about the way people are often irrational about that. There's a great example of a misapplication of the availability heuristic because we hear a lot about it on TV. An airplane crash makes big news. A car crash does not make big news. So there's a case where a misapplication of a basically adaptive, perhaps in part I suspect, naturally selected heuristic can lead us in trouble. I think the psychology of bias has taught us in innumerable ways, and certainly taught me innumerable ways, more about how we think and how to think skeptically than any other field. In my view, I'm increasingly coming around to the view that what skepticism is all about, what organized skepticism is all about, is really a set of tools designed to help us overcome and find ways of getting around some of these biases and help to compensate for them. So that's been my view. I think the psychology of bias, I think, has probably more than any other field influenced, I think increasingly has the potential to influence skepticism in a positive direction. Yeah, I would echo that. So that was what I noted, was the literature and judgment decision making and the heuristics and biases agenda have been very productive. But I would add one, which is that there's a community of researchers who are looking at what we call representational epidemiology, which just means how do beliefs spread from one head to another? And there's different ways to get at this question. And I think some of the most productive approaches have been surprisingly enough from evolutionary psychology. So Joe Henrich, who was the winner of our society's prize a number of years ago, has done some excellent work showing that the probability that person I is going to acquire belief depends on the models that person I has in their environment. So is it a high prestige versus a low prestige individual? And then there's other work, and he's formally modeled this in a way that I find very compelling. And then there's other work that shows norm compliance so that is people are identifying what beliefs are in the heads of people around them by virtue of what they say and do. They're sort of informally polling and they're picking the one that's more common. And these models have turned out to be extremely powerful and compelling and explaining or at least modeling how beliefs are moving. There's additional work by a guy named Pascal Boyer who's looked at religion, which is I don't know if that's a name that's familiar in this community, but he's been able to show a kind of a cognitive bias that really helps very nicely explain which of the kinds of supernatural ideas that are gonna stick in people's heads and are likely to get transmitted. So if I were to look for why these things are persisting, I would look in the representational epidemiology literature because it don't get me wrong. This is a very, very hard problem. I think people, and the thing that I think people most misunderstand about experimental psychology is that because the psych majors are not breaking the bank in the IQ department and let's face it in America's universities, everyone thinks that what we do is easy. That's not true. Psychology is hard, right? You've got these brains and they're really complicated and they interact with other really complicated brains and one of the hardest problems is basically cultural change which is part and parcel of this representational epidemiology because it explains why some believe, you wanna explain why some of these moves and some don't. So I actually think that looking to our anthropology friends and to our formal modeling friends, in addition to for sure, our folks over in the heuristics and biases literature, that's where you'd wanna go to start looking at the complete picture of what's going on in terms of some of these beliefs that you're identifying. Great point. I would say in my area of psychiatry that I think an important boon for skepticism is it was actually the debate last year, last May of May of 2013 about over the DSM, the big diagnostic manual and there was starting the 50s and it hadn't been updated for at least 20 years and yet to be honest and many psychiatrists agree with this, there was really no reason to update it. We hadn't discovered anything remarkably new, nothing that really advanced treatment in any way. Talk about an agenda. I guess I can understand the APAs gets enormous revenue from the manual but I think there was also, I think they almost felt, my gosh, for our field to be relevant, also we have to show that we have a new document, we have a new manual to show for it but apart from that, apart from the politics of why there was a new manual, it got I think a pretty healthy debate going about the fact that there's just so much we don't understand about psychiatric illnesses and the brain, everyone's very humble about it, everyone's working their tails off in laboratories but the DSM was, after the first two editions which were Freudian based became what's called an A theoretical, based A theoretical which is to say that that the diagnoses were largely descriptive, there was, I mean they were wholly descriptive, there was, there was good rationale for grouping clusters in the way in which they were but it was never based on the holy grail of the diagnostic enterprise in general which is best described, written away by infectious disease which is by the etiology, we know what's wrong and we give it this label but when we refer to this problem it means this kind of etiology and that leads us then to the therapy, I mean that's clear in pneumococcal pneumonia, you've got this kind of bacteria, we know it responds to these kind of antibiotics, I mean that's the ideal diagnosis, it gives you backwards and forwards information like that but in psychiatry we can't do that and it became, I think the debates were just at a higher level and one where people were conceding, we don't know, the genetics are incredibly complicated, I actually think that's where the money is with the more severe illnesses, schizophrenia, bipolar, et cetera but anyway to me that's not skepticism in terms of thought processes and I know that's what you two have been talking about and Carol but a different kind of skepticism that we shouldn't be so that these diagnoses are placeholders, they're provisional, they give us some information but they're not the last word by any means. Let's have a panel next year on the DSM. We could have a few things to say. Carol, I teased you about cognitive dissonance, did you want to make a comment? Well no, because I completely echo what's been said here in terms of what does psychology have to offer? Suffering as I do from 306.25, mild cognitive aging decline, I can't quite remember the question. It's got a code, it must be real. But I think it was, what does psychology have to contribute to skepticism? Was that the question? Well I think absolutely by identifying why people don't think skeptically, don't think critically, why science is so difficult precisely because the brain is not really designed to want to have its beliefs disconfirmed in the ways that Robert talked about too yesterday. I mean we, by understanding how we think, why we don't think better, why we don't think more clearly by identifying these beneficial biases, cognitive dissonance after all is what lets us sleep at night after we've made a decision except for people who buy a car and then no, you say you can't resolve that dissonance, can you? And you're up for days, I bought the wrong car. Now you understand why being able to reduce dissonance is beneficial, but those are the points. Those, the ability to understand how we think, why we don't think clearly, how we might be able to set up some mechanisms to fool ourselves into thinking better is, I think, among the greatest contributions our field is making now. I think I'll add real quickly, not to monopolize, but I think one, I think that maybe missing from some of the discussions here at TAM and some others is sort of the developmental aspect and I think in fairness that's partly because it's our fault of psychologists, I don't think we've done a very good job with that. I think that we don't really have a good handle on in terms of teaching skepticism, when we can start and how to frame skeptical thinking at different ages. So can we start in kindergarten as one recent study on teaching natural selection seem to suggest maybe? I mean that gave me some, I was a little surprised by that, but there was some recent evidence testing, we might be able to start as always kindergarten and inculcate an understanding of natural selection that then holds on later, but we still have a very poor understanding of when we can begin in childhood and how to differentially frame some of our interventions to get people to think better as adults. Oh, good question. No, good question. Great. Let's hear it for our panelists. It looks like we do have a couple of minutes left, so no, okay, we're gonna have to wrap it up, I'm sorry I tried. This is, I've given many public science talks the first time I've ever moderated a panel, so if anything went wrong, keep two things in mind, it's not their fault and my hair looked great. So thank you for your kind attention.