In this eye-opening TED Talk, psychologist Ben Ambridge dives into 10 psychology myths that have been proven wrong and something called our Psy-Q. Ambridge describes Psy-Q as how well we know our own brains and how well we understand behavior in ourselves and others.
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I definitely recommend watching the talk, but in case you’re not able to stream the video, here are the psychology myths that Ambridge outlines.
10 Psychology Myths
1. Men and women excel at different types of tasks. He debunks this myth by looking at two common misconceptions about men and women. First, he debunks the idea that men have better spatial awareness than women. Ambridge explains that yes, men do score better than women on things like reading maps, but the difference is almost insignificantly small. A large number of women are better than men at spatial awareness tasks. His other example is the incorrect idea that women are better than men at language and grammar. The problem here is how small the difference is. Thirty three percent of men are actually better than the average woman at language and grammar, so saying that this applies to all men and women is pretty misleading.
2. Ink blots are a window into how our minds work. Nope. Ambridge says that the Rorschach Test has been pretty much debunked and isn’t used at all in modern psychology.
3. There are three types of learning: visual, auditory, and Kinaesthetic. According to Ambridge, learning styles don’t have any scientific support. The best way to present material depends on what you’re learning, not how you learn. One example he gives is learning to drive. Could you learn to drive by having someone explain it to you? Probably not.
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4. Some people are left-brained and some are right-brained. For even the more boring task, you use sections from all parts of your brain. He says that this myth has a grain of truth, because there is evidence that people who are ambidextrous are more creative, because the two sides of their brains talk to each other, and this leads to more creative thinking.
5. We only use 10 percent of our brains. Like he mentioned earlier, everything we do uses nearly all of our brains.
6. Listening to Mozart makes you smart. This is another myth that has a bit of truth. Listening to Mozart right before taking an IQ test did improve performance in one study. But a subsequent study found that really it’s about listening to something that you enjoy before taking a test, not Mozart specifically. If you like listening to podcasts, then playing your favorite podcast before an IQ test would probably serve you better than listening to The Magic Flute. But even that IQ boost is only short term. He says there’s no evidence that either of these things boosts long-term intelligence.
7. We choose our mates based on our culture. A huge study found that men across cultures valued physical traits and women preferred mates with high ambition and learning power. In the same survey, men overwhelmingly reported that they also preferred younger women while women tended to go for men who were older than they are.
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8. Athletes have periods where they’re so confident that they can’t lose. The “hot hand” or “purple patch” streak is a myth. If you really follow any athlete’s “streaks,” the pattern of hits and misses is random. He says that penalty shots are an exception.
9. Milgram’s experiment showed that people are evil. The Milgram experiment is the famous study where participants gave electric shocks to people who got wrong answers on tests. Ambridge gets into several problems with the study. One major problem is that participants did express concern and were assured repeatedly that the shocks weren’t deadly and wouldn’t cause any lasting harm. Participants also said that they didn’t just give the shocks because they were told to. They said they did it because they were led to believe that the gains in science overrode the brief discomfort they were administering.
10. You can detect lies from body language. With one exception, body language doesn’t tell us much — if anything — about whether someone is lying. The one exception is when people get on TV to ask for the return of a missing relative. People who are being honest behave differently than people who were responsible for that relative going missing.
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