Pseudoscience in Psychology

Guide Rating -

If there is any scientific field where pseudoscience is not only common, but has actually become widely accepted by the establishment, it would have to be psychology. Unlike fields such as physics or biology, some of the most ridiculous quackery has taken hold in clinical psychology and has even reached the point where for many lay people, they see more of the quackery than of real science.

For the psychologists who are interested in doing real science, this is an intolerable situation. They don't appreciate the fact pseudoscience is outshining science, nor are they happy that lay people treat the pseudoscience as if it were "real" psychology. What they need to do is to educate others, both the lay public and other scholars, on what genuine, scientific psychology is all about and how many popular forms of clinical psychology fall well short of that.

A new and important contribution to this is the recently published Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology, edited by Steven Jay Lynn, Scott O. Lilienfeld, and Jeffrey M. Lohr. Each of the sixteen different chapters tackles a different controversy - some dealing with assessment and diagnosis, some involving psychotherapy, some involving the treatment of specific adult disorders, some involving the treatment of specific child disorders, and finally some regarding self-help and the media (these sections, addressing the work of people like John Gray and Phil McGraw, are especially interesting).

Specific topics covered include: questionable assessment and testing techniques, the problems with expert testimony, multiple personalities, New Age therapies, recovered memories, treatments for alcoholism, herbal treatments, the self-help industry, and the positioning of psychological help as a form of commercialized entertainment. In all cases, the approach is skeptical and critical in nature.

The authors do a good job at trying to be objective, but there is also no denying the fact that in the final analysis, their work serves to undermine or even totally discredit more than one popular theory. The authors reveal what might be considered the hidden secret of psychology: that there is far too little science in psychology today. I'm sure that quite a few will be upset at this, but that is always the case when popular, if unscientific, ideas are critiqued.

The current situation in psychology is quite depressing:

[W]hen Michael Yapko (1994) surveyed nearly 1,000 members of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, he found that more than half believed that "hypnosis can be used to recover memories from as far back as birth"; one third agreed that "the mind is like a computer, accurately recording events that actually occurred"; and one fourth of them - this is scary - agreed that "someone's feeling certain about a memory means the memory is likely to be correct." None of these statements is true; on the contrary, they are belied by extensive research on the normal processes of memory confabulation, distortion, and error. There was no difference between MAs and PhDs in their endorsement of these items.

These statistics are indeed scary. It's bad enough (although understandable) for the average person to believe such things, but for people who supposedly have an education in science - and in particular, a science that focuses upon human behavior - it is a travesty. For some reason, though, the editors are not pessimistic about the prospects for the field of clinical psychology.

In fact, they are optimistic, but that optimism is conditioned upon the field changing. At the end of the book they offer five things which they hope will improve the state of psychology: training in critical thinking in all clinical psychology programs, education about not only scientific treatments but also unscientific treatments, more education for current psychologists about the nature of proper scientific research, a larger role by the APA in combatting pseudoscience, and finally stiff sanctions from the APA for those psychologists who engage in irresponsible therapies.

These are all very good ideas - so good, in fact, that the reader is left puzzled as to why they *need to be offered as *remedies in the first place. Why don't psychologists already receive training in the fundamentals of proper science and critical thinking? Why doesn't the APA come down hard on members who try to sell the public on unproven, pseudoscientific quackery? After all, isn't that their *job?

It should be noted, though, that this is not a book aimed at a general audience - people without much background in psychology, science, or skepticism will likely have some difficulty in getting through many of the articles. Those who do have the right background, however, should definitely get a copy of this book because there is a lot in here that they can benefit from. Aside from this, my one concern about the book is how quickly it might become dated.

In five or six years, especially if the editors' recommendations are not acted upon, there may be a whole host of new pseudoscience that will of course not be addressed in this book. It is my feeling that while this title is currently the most comprehensive work on science and pseudoscience in clinical psychology, that can change rather quickly. I hope, then, that they will come back to revise and update it on a regular basis so that scholars and researchers will always have access to critical evaluations of what is going on the psychology.