The top 10 myths of psychology | Ben Ambridge | TEDxYouth@Manchester

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.
How much of what you think about your brain is actually wrong? In this whistlestop tour of dis-proved science, Ben Ambridge walks through 10 popular ideas about psychology that have been proven wrong — and uncovers a few surprising truths about how our brains really work.

So you've heard of your IQ,

your general intelligence,

but what's your Psy-Q?

How much do you knowabout what makes you tick,

and how good are youat predicting other peoples' behavior

or even your own?

And how much about what you thinkyou know about psychology is wrong?

So let's find out by counting downthe top 10 myths of psychology.

So you've probably heard it saidthat when it comes to their psychology,

it's almost as if men are from Marsand women are from Venus.

But how differentare men and women really?

So to find out, let's start by lookingat something on which men and women

really do differ

and plotting some psychologicalgender differences on the same scale.

So one thing that men and women

do really differ on is how farthey can throw a ball.

So if we look at the data for men here,

we see what is calleda 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 distance.

And women sharethe same distribution as well,

but actually there'squite a big difference.

In fact, the average mancan throw a ball further

than about 98 percent of all women.

So now let's look at whatsome psychological gender differences

look like on the same standardized scale.

So any psychologist will tell youthat men are better

at spacial awareness than women,

so things like map-reading, for example,

and it's true,

but let's have a lookat the size of this difference.

It's tiny: the lines are so close togetherthat they almost overlap.

In fact, the average woman is betterthan 33 percent of all men,

and of course, if that was 50 percent,

then the two genderswould be exactly equal.

And it's worth bearing in mindthat this difference

and the next one I'm going to show you

are pretty much the biggestpsychological gender differences

ever discovered in psychology.

So here's the next one.

Any psychologist will tell youthat women are better

with language and grammar than men.

So here's performanceon 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 representcomplete gender equality.

So it's not reallya 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 slightlynuttier than the other.

I won't say which.

Right. Now we've got you warmed up.

Let's psychoanalyze you usingthe 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 thinkthey're saying hello.

Not many people. Okay.

Put your hands up if you thinkthey are high-fiving.

Okay. What if you think they're fighting?

Only a few people there.

Okay, so if you think they'resaying 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.

What about this one?This isn't really a voting one,

so on three, everyoneshout 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 seesome kind of two-legged animal here,

and then the mirror image of them there.

If you didn't, then this meansthat 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 testshave basically no validity

when it comes to diagnosingpeople's personality

and are not usedby modern-day psychologists.

In fact, one recent study found

that when you do tryto diagnose people's personality

using Rorschach inkblot tests,

schizophrenia was diagnosed

in about one sixth of apparentlyperfectly normal participants.

So if you didn't do that well on this,

maybe you are nota very visual type of person.

So let's do anotherquick quiz to find out.

When making a cake, do you prefer to

-- so hands up for each one again --

do you prefer to usea recipe book with pictures?

Yeah, a few people.

Have a friend talk you through?

Or have a go, making it upas you go along?

Quite a few people there.

Okay, so if you said a,

then this means that youare a visual learner

and you learn best when information

is presented in a visual style.

If you said b, it meansyou're an auditory learner,

that you learn best when informationis presented to you in an auditory format,

and if you said c,

it means that you'rea 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, becausethe whole thing is a complete myth.

Learning styles are made up

and are not supportedby scientific evidence.

So we know this because intightly controlled experimental studies,

when learners are given material to learn

either in their preferred styleor an opposite style,

it makes no difference at all

to the amount of informationthat they retain.

And if you think about itfor just a second,

it's just obviousthat this has to be true.

It's obvious thatthe 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 someonetelling you what to do

with no kinesthetic experience?

Could you solve simultaneous equations

by talking them through in your headand without writing them down?

Could you ?? for your architecture exams

using interpretive danceif you're a kinesthetic learner?

No. What you need to do is match

the material to be learnedto the presentation format,

not you.

So, I know many of youare A-level students

that will have recently gottenyour ???? results.

And if you didn't quite getwhat you were hoping for,

then you can't really blameyour learning style,

but one thing that you might wantto think about blaming is your genes.

So what this is all about

is a recent studyat University College London

found that 58 percent of the variation

between different studentsand their ??? results

was down to genetic factors.

So that sounds a very precise figure,

so how can we tell?

Well, when we want to unpackthe relative contributions

of genes and the environment,

what we can do is do a twin study.

So identical twins share100 percent of their environment

and 100 percent of their genes,

whereas non-identical twinsshare 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 variationand performance is due to the environment

and how much is due to genes.

And it turns out that it'sabout 58 percent due to genes.

So this isn't to undermine the hard workthat you and your teachers here put in.

If you didn't quite get the ??? resultsthat you were hoping for,

then you can always try blamingyour parents, or at least their genes.

One thing that you shouldn't blame

is being a left brainedor right brained learner,

because again, this is a myth.

So the myth here is thatthe 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 mythbecause nearly everything that you do

involves nearly all partsof your brain talking together,

even just the most mundane thinglike having a normal conversation.

However, perhaps one reasonwhy this myth has survived

is that there isa slight grain of truth to it.

So a related version of the myth

is that left-handed people aremore creative than right-handed people,

which kind of makes sense becauseyour brain controls the opposite hands,

so left-handed people,

the right side of the brainis slightly more active

than the left hand side of the brain,

and the idea is the right-hand sideis more creative.

Now, it isn't true per se

that left-handed people are more creativethan right-handed people.

What is true that ambidextrous people,

or people who use both handsfor different tasks,

are more creative thinkersthan one-handed people,

because being ambidextrous involves

having both sides of the braintalk to each other a lot,

which seems to be involvedin creating flexible thinking.

The myth of the creative left-hander

arises from the factthat being ambidextrous

is more common amongst left-handers

than right handers,

so a grain of truth in the ideaof the creative left-hander,

but not much.

A related myth that you'veprobably heard of

is that we only use10 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 doto boost our brain power?

Maybe we could listento a nice bit of Mozart.

So have you heard of the ideaof the Mozart effect?

So the idea is that listening to Mozart

makes you smarter and improvesyour performance on IQ tests.

Now again, what's interestingabout 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 playedMozart music for a few minutes

did better on a subsequent IQ test

than participants who simplysat in silence.

But a follow-up study recruitedsome people who liked Mozart music

and then another group of people

who were fans of the horror storiesof Stephen King.

And they played the peoplethe music or the stories.

The people who preferredMozart music to the stories

got a bigger IQ boostfrom the Mozart than the stories,

but the people who preferredthe stories to the Mozart music

got a bigger IQ boost

from listening to the Stephen King storiesthan the Mozart music.

So the truth is that listeningto something that you enjoy

perks you up a bitand gives you a temporary IQ boost

on a narrow range of tasks.

There's no suggestion thatlistening to Mozart

or indeed Stephen King stories

is going to make you any smarterin the long run.

So another version of the Mozart myth

is that listening to Mozart can make younot only cleverer but healthier, too.

Unfortunately, this doesn'tseem to be true

of someone who listenedto the music of Mozart almost every day,

Mozart himself,

who suffered from gonorrhea,smallpox, arthritis,

and what most people thinkeventually killed him in the end,

syphilis.

This suggests that Mozartshould have bit more careful, perhaps,

when choosing his sexual partners.

But how do we choose a partner?

So a myth, but I have to sayis sometimes spread a bit by sociologists

is that our preferencesin 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 from32 different cultures across the globe,

from Americans to Zulus,

on what they look for in a partner.

And in every single cultureacross the globe,

men placed more valueon 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 womenwho were younger than themselves,

an average of I think it was 2.66 years,

and in every culture, too,

women preferred menwho 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 tryingto score with a partner

to trying to score in basketballor 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 thatif you analyze the pattern

of hits and misses statistically,

it turns out that it'snearly always at random.

Your brain creates patternsfrom the randomness.

So if you toss a coin, you know,

a streak of heads or tails is goingto come out somewhere in randomness,

and becomes the brain likesto see patterns where there are none,

we look at these streaksand attribute meanings to them

and say, "Yeah he's really on form today,"

whereas actually you wouldget the same pattern

if you were just gettinghits and misses at random.

So an exception to this, however,is penalty shootouts.

A recent study lookingat penalty shootouts in football

shows that players who represent countries

with a very bad recordin penalty shootouts,

like, for example, England,

tend to be quicker to take their shotsthan 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 wecould 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 punishmentcan improve performance,

is what participantsthought they were testing

in Milgram's famous learningand punishment experiment

that you've probably heard aboutif you're a psychology student.

The story goes that participantswere prepared to give

what they believed to be fatalelectric shocks to a fellow participant

when they got a question wrong,

just because someonein a white coat told them too.

But this story is a mythfor three reasons.

Firstly and most crucially,the lab coat wasn't white.

It was, in fact, grey.

Secondly, the participantswere told before the study

and reminded any timethey raised a concern,

that although the shocks were painful,they were not fatal

and indeed causedno permanent damage whatsoever.

And thirdly, participantsdidn't give the shocks

just because someonein the coat told them to.

When they were interviewedafter the study,

all the participants saidthat they firmly believed

that the learning and punishment studyserved a worthy scientific purpose

which would haveenduring gains for science

as opposed to the momentarynon-fatal discomfort

caused to the participants.

Okay, so I've been talkingfor about 12 minutes now,

and you've probably been sitting there

listening to me, analyzingmy speech patterns and body language

and trying to work out if you shouldtake any notice of what I'm saying,

whether I'm telling the truthor whether I'm lying,

but if so you'veprobably completely failed,

because although we all thinkwe can catch a liar

from their body languageand speech patterns,

hundreds of psychological testsover the years have shown

that all of us, includingpolice officers and detectives,

are basically at chance when it comesto detecting lies from body language

and verbal patterns.

Interestingly, there is one exception:

TV appeals for missing relatives.

It's quite easy to predictwhen the relatives are missing

and when the appealers have in factmurdered the relatives themselves.

So hoax appealers are more likelyto shake their heads, to look away,

and to make errors in their speech,

whereas genuine appealers are more likely

to express hope that the personwill 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 collectionof interesting theories,

all of which say something useful

and all of which have something to offer.

What I hope to have shown youin the past few minutes

is that this isn't true.

What we need to do is assesspsychological theories

by seeing what predictions they make,

whether that is that listening to Mozartmakes you smarter,

that you learn better when information

is presented in yourpreferred learning style,

or whatever it is, all of theseare testable empirical predictions,

and the only way we can make progress

is to test these predictionsagainst the data

in tightly controlledexperimental studies,

and it's only by doing sothat we can hope to discover

which of these theoriesare well-supported,

and which, like all the onesI've told you about today, are myths.

Thank you.

(Applause)