So you've heard of your IQ,
your general intelligence,
but what's your Psy-Q?
How much do you know about what makes you tick,
and how good are you at predicting other peoples' behavior
or even your own?
And how much about what you think you know about psychology is wrong?
So let's find out by counting down the top 10 myths of psychology.
So you've probably heard it said that when it comes to their psychology,
it's almost as if men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
But how different are men and women really?
So to find out, let's start by looking at something on which men and women
really do differ
and plotting some psychological gender differences on the same scale.
So one thing that men and women
do really differ on is how far they can throw a ball.
So if we look at the data for men here,
we see what is called a normal distribution curve.
A few men can throw a ball really far,
and a few men not far at all,
but most a kind of average difference.
And women share the same distribution as well,
but actually there's quite a big difference.
In fact, the average man can throw a ball further
than about 98 percent of all women.
So now let's look at what some psychological gender differences
look like on the same standardized scale.
So any psychologist will tell you that men are better
at spacial awareness than women,
so things like map-reading, for example,
and it's true,
but let's have a look at the size of this difference.
It's tiny: the lines are so close together that they almost overlap.
In fact, the average woman is better than 33 percent of all men,
and of course, if that was 50 percent,
then the two genders would be exactly equal.
And it's worth bearing in mind that this difference
and the next one I'm going to show you
are pretty much the biggest psychological gender differences
ever discovered in psychology.
So here's the next one.
Any psychologist will tell you that women are better
with language and grammar than men.
So here's performance on the standardized grammar test.
There go the women. There go to the men.
Again, yes, women are better on average,
but the lines are so close
that 33 percent of men
are better than the average woman,
and again, if it was 50 percent,
that would represent complete gender equality.
So it's not really a case of Mars and Venus.
It's more a case of, if anything, Mars and Snickers:
basically the same, but, you know,
one's maybe slightly nuttier than the other.
I won't say which.
Right. Now we've got you warmed up.
Let's psychoanalyze you using the famous Rorschach inkblot test.
So you can probably see two, I dunno, two bears or two people or something.
But what do you think they're doing?
Put your hand up if you think they're saying hello.
Not many people. Okay.
Put your hands up if you think they are high-fiving.
Okay. What if you think they're fighting?
Only a few people there.
Okay, so if you think they're saying hello or high-fiving,
then that means you're a friendly person.
If you think they're fighting, that means you're a bit more
of a nasty, aggressive person.
Are you a lover or a fighter, basically.
All right, what about this one?
This isn't really a voting one,
so on three, everyone shout out what you see.
One, two, three.
I heard hamster. Who said hamster?
That was very worrying.
A guy there said hamster.
Well, you should see some kind of two-legged animal here,
and then the mirror image of them there.
If you didn't, then this means that you have difficulty
processing complex situations
where there's a lot going on.
Except, of course, it doesn't mean that at all.
Rorschach inkblot tests have basically no validity
when it comes to diagnosing people's personality
and are not used by modern-day psychologists.
In fact, one recent study found
that when you do try to diagnose people's personality
using Rorschach inkblot tests,
schizophrenia was diagnosed
in about one sixth of apparently perfectly normal participants.
So if you didn't do that well on this,
maybe you are not a very visual type of person.
So let's do another quick quiz to find out.
When making a cake, do you prefer to
-- so hands up for each one again --
do you prefer to use a recipe book with pictures?
Yeah, a few people.
Have a friend talk you through?
Or have a go, making it up as you go along?
Quite a few people there.
Okay, so if you said a,
then this means that you are a visual learner
and you learn best when information
is presented in a visual style.
If you said b, it means you're an auditory learner,
that you learn best when information is presented to you in an auditory format,
and if you said c,
it means that you're a kinesthetic learner,
that you learn best when you get stuck in
and do things with your hands.
Except, of course, as you've probably guessed,
that it doesn't, because the whole thing is a complete myth.
Learning styles are made up
and are not supported by scientific evidence.
So we know this because in tightly controlled experimental studies,
when learners are given material to learn
either in their preferred style or an opposite style,
it makes no difference at all
to the amount of information that they retain.
And if you think about it for just a second,
it's just obvious that this has to be true.
It's obvious that the best presentation format
depends not on you,
but on what you're trying to learn.
Could you learn to drive a car, for example,
just by listening to someone telling you what to do
with no kinesthetic experience?
Could you solve simultaneous equations
by talking them through in your head and without writing them down?
Could you ?? for your architecture exams
using interpretive dance if you're a kinesthetic learner?
No. What you need to do is match
the material to be learned to the presentation format,
not you.
So, I know many of you are A-level students
that will have recently gotten your ???? results.
And if you didn't quite get what you were hoping for,
then you can't really blame your learning style,
but one thing that you might want to think about blaming is your genes.
So what this is all about
is a recent study at University College London
found that 58 percent of the variation
between different students and their ??? results
was down to genetic factors.
So that sounds a very precise figure,
so how can we tell?
Well, when we want to unpack the relative contributions
of genes and the environment,
what we can do is do a twin study.
So identical twins share 100 percent of their environment
and 100 percent of their genes,
whereas non-identical twins share 100 percent of their environment,
but just like any brother and sister,
share only 50 percent of their genes.
So by comparing how similar ??? results are in identical twins
versus non-identical twins,
and doing some clever math,
we can an idea of how much variation and performance is due to the environment
and how much is due to genes.
And it turns out that it's about 58 percent due to genes.
So this isn't to undermine the hard work that you and your teachers here put in.
If you didn't quite get the ??? results that you were hoping for,
then you can always try blaming your parents, or at least their genes.
One thing that you shouldn't blame
is being a left brained or right brained learner,
because again, this is a myth.
So the myth here is that the left brain is logical,
it's good with equations like this,
and the right brain is more creative,
so the right brain is better at music.
But again, this is a myth because nearly everything that you do
involves nearly all parts of your brain talking together,
even just the most mundane thing like having a normal conversation.
However, perhaps one reason why this myth has survived
is that there is a slight grain of truth to it.
So a related version of the myth
is that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people,
which kind of makes sense because your brain controls the opposite hands,
so left-handed people,
the right side of the brain is slightly more active
than the left hand side of the brain,
and the idea is the right-hand side is more creative.
Now, it isn't true per se
that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people.
What is true that ambidextrous people,
or people who use both hands for different tasks,
are more creative thinkers than one-handed people,
because being ambidextrous involves
having both sides of the brain talk to each other a lot,
which seems to be involved in creating flexible thinking.
The myth of the creative left-hander
arises from the fact that being ambidextrous
is more common amongst left-handers
than right handers,
so a grain of truth in the idea of the creative left-hander,
but not much.
A related myth that you've probably heard of
is that we only use 10 percent of our brains.
This is, again, a complete myth.
Nearly everything that we do, even the most mundane thing,
uses nearly all of our brains.
That said, it is of course true
that most of us don't use our brainpower
quite as well as we could.
So what could we do to boost our brain power?
Maybe we could listen to a nice bit of Mozart.
So have you heard of the idea of the Mozart effect?
So the idea is that listening to Mozart
makes you smarter and improves your performance on IQ tests.
Now again, what's interesting about this myth
is that although it's basically a myth,
there is a grain of truth to it.
So the original study found that
participants who were played Mozart music for a few minutes
did better on a subsequent IQ test
than participants who simply sat in silence.
But a follow-up study recruited some people who liked Mozart music
and then another group of people
who were fans of the horror stories of Stephen King.
And they played the people the music or the stories.
The people who preferred Mozart music to the stories
got a bigger IQ boost from the Mozart than the stories,
but the people who preferred the stories to the Mozart music
got a bigger IQ boost
from listening to the Stephen King stories than the Mozart music.
So the truth is that listening to something that you enjoy
perks you up a bit and gives you a temporary IQ boost
on a narrow range of tasks.
There's no suggestion that listening to Mozart
or indeed Stephen King stories
is going to make you any smarter in the long run.
So another version of the Mozart myth
is that listening to Mozart can make you not only cleverer but healthier, too.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be true
of someone who listened to the music of Mozart almost every day,
Mozart himself,
who suffered from gonorrhea, smallpox, arthritis,
and what most people think eventually killed him in the end,
syphilis.
This suggests that Mozart should have bit more careful, perhaps,
when choosing his sexual partners.
But how do we choose a partner?
So a myth, but I have to say is sometimes spread a bit by sociologists
is that our preferences in a romantic partner
are a product of our culture,
that they're very culturally specific,
but in fact, the data don't back this up.
So a famous study surveyed people from 32 different cultures across the globe,
from Americans to Zulus,
on what they look for in a partner.
And in every single culture across the globe,
men placed more value on physical attractiveness in a partner
than did women,
and in every single culture, too,
women placed more importance than did men
on ambition and high earning power.
In every culture, too,
men preferred women who were younger than themselves,
an average of I think it was 2.66 years,
and in every culture, too,
women preferred men who were older than them,
so an average of 3.42 years,
which is why we've got here "Everybody Needs A Sugar Daddy."
So moving on from trying to score with a partner
to trying to score in basketball or football or whatever your sport is.
So the myth here is that sportsmen
go through hot hand streaks, Americans call them,
or purple patches, we sometimes say in England,
where they just can't miss,
like this guy here.
But in fact, what happens is that if you analyze the pattern
of hits and misses statistically,
it turns out that it's nearly always at random.
Your brain creates patterns from the randomness.
So if you toss a coin, you know,
a streak of heads or tails is going to come out somewhere in randomness,
and becomes the brain likes to see patterns where there are none,
we look at these streaks and attribute meanings to them
and say, "Yeah he's really on form today,"
whereas actually you would get the same pattern
if you were just getting hits and misses at random.
So an exception to this, however, is penalty shootouts.
A recent study looking at penalty shootouts in football
shows that players who represent countries
with a very bad record in penalty shootouts,
like, for example, England,
tend to be quicker to take their shots than countries with a better record,
and presumably as a result, they're more likely to miss.
Which raises the question
of if there's any way that we could improve people's performance,
and one thing you might think about doing
is punishing people for their misses
and seeing if that improves things.
This idea, the effect that punishment can improve performance,
is what participants thought they were testing
in Milgram's famous learning and punishment experiment
that you've probably heard about if you're a psychology student.
The story goes that participants were prepared to give
what they believed to be fatal electric shocks to a fellow participant
when they got a question wrong,
just because someone in a white coat told them too.
But this story is a myth for three reasons.
Firstly and most crucially, the lab coat wasn't white.
It was, in fact, grey.
Secondly, the participants were told before the study
and reminded any time they raised a concern,
that although the shocks were painful, they were not fatal
and indeed caused no permanent damage whatsoever.
And thirdly, participants didn't give the shocks
just because someone in the coat told them to.
When they were interviewed after the study,
all the participants said that they firmly believed
that the learning and punishment study served a worthy scientific purpose
which would have enduring gains for science
as opposed to the momentary non-fatal discomfort
caused to the participants.
Okay, so I've been talking for about 12 minutes now,
and you've probably been sitting there
listening to me, analyzing my speech patterns and body language
and trying to work out if you should take any notice of what I'm saying,
whether I'm telling the truth or whether I'm lying,
but if so you've probably completely failed,
because although we all think we can catch a liar
from their body language and speech patterns,
hundreds of psychological tests over the years have shown
that all of us, including police officers and detectives,
are basically at chance when it comes to detecting lies from body language
and verbal patterns.
Interestingly, there is one exception:
TV appeals for missing relatives.
It's quite easy to predict when the relatives are missing
and when the appealers have in fact murdered the relatives themselves.
So hoax appealers are more likely to shake their heads, to look away,
and to make errors in their speech,
whereas genuine appealers are more likely
to express hope that the person will return safely
and to avoid brutal language.
So, for example, they might say "taken from us" rather than "killed."
Speaking of which,
it's about time I killed this talk,
but before I do, I just want to give you
in 30 seconds
the overarching myth of psychology.
So the myth is that psychology
is just a collection of interesting theories,
all of which say something useful
and all of which have something to offer.
What I hope to have shown you in the past few minutes
is that this isn't true.
What we need to do is assess psychological theories
by seeing what predictions they make,
whether that is that listening to Mozart makes you smarter,
that you learn better when information
is presented in your preferred learning style,
or whatever it is, all of these are testable empirical predictions,
and the only way we can make progress
is to test these predictions against the data
in tightly controlled experimental studies,
and it's only by doing so that we can hope to discover
which of these theories are well-supported,
and which, like all the ones I've told you about today, are myths.
Thank you.
(Applause)