Debunking psychology myths and misconceptions, with Erin Smith, PhD

From the idea that we only use 10% of our brains to the belief that each of us has an optimal learning style that helps us learn best, many popular “facts” about human behavior aren’t actually true. Yet they persist, even among students who have studied psychology. Erin Smith, PhD, explores why misconceptions about the mind are so widespread and how repetition and social influences reinforce false beliefs; discusses the role of psychology education in debunking myths and shaping critical thinking; and offers advice on how all of us can become more thoughtful consumers -- and sharers -- of psychological science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 0:59Kim Mills?

  Left-brained people are logical and analytical, while right-brained people are intuitive and creative. Hypnosis can help you retrieve forgotten childhood memories. Most people only use 10% of their brain capacity. Sugar makes kids hyper. Do these all sound familiar? They are all commonly held beliefs about human behavior, psychology, and the brain. But they're all wrong. One recent study found that even college students who had just finished taking an introductory psychology class still held many of these mistaken beliefs. So where do myths like these come from and why are they so widespread? Should psychology educators be spending more time trying to debunk them in the classroom? And if so, what are the most effective ways to do so?

• 1:44Kim Mills?

  What's the best way to correct a misconception for yourself or for others? And how do you get more accurate information out into the world? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

• 2:07Kim Mills?

  My guest today is Dr. Erin Smith, the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Research and a Professor of Psychology at California Baptist University. She is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on the psychology of religion, including how children develop religious beliefs and the church as a place of social support. She's also interested in the psychology of teaching and learning and how psychology is taught in introductory college courses. Together with nine co-authors, she recently published a paper that looked at college students' misconceptions about psychology, which is what we'll talk about today. Dr. Smith, thank you for joining me.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:46Kim Mills?

  So let's start with the research I just mentioned. You and your co-authors surveyed college students who had taken an intro psych class that covered common psychology misperceptions. Can you tell us more about the project? How did it originate? How'd you get involved? And what did you find?

• 3:02Speaker 03

  This is, to me, a project that is the best of what science can be because it came out of a conference organized by the lead author on this particular paper, Doug Bernstein, who brought together scholars really from many North American universities, as well as European and other Western European contexts, to just talk about how do we teach psychology better? And there is a small group of us that sort of coalesced around this question, specifically of intro to psychology, which of course is a gateway class for psychology majors, but also often the only point of contact with psychology for non-majors.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  And so this question of how do we educate students, especially those who we won't see again, to go out into the world to reason and live according to the best that science can offer, that was really the origins of this particular project back in 2018. And so we endured and persisted really through the pandemic, figuring out how do we actually approach these questions in a really broad way. In this particular project, there were about 900 students across eight different college campuses.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  ranging from small, private, religious, nonreligious, to large state universities as well. And at the end of this intro to psychology class, we asked them to complete a quiz about people is what we called it. And we gave them 40 different misconceptions about human psychology and behavior and just asked, what do they think? And did we actually dislodge any of these misconceptions after this course? As you already alluded to, many of these misconceptions persisted, which in many ways is what we expected because that's what previous research had showed, although we always might go into it thinking, we are going to do different and find different.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  And yet we found that a high number of misconceptions persisted even after the introduction to psychology course.

• 5:06Kim Mills?

  And what were the kinds of things that you found? I mean, what did people tend to believe even after you had tried to explicate that, no, this isn't really true?

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, one of the things that makes studying misconceptions, which we can just say is a statement that is not true, a statement that doesn't have empirical support behind it. You alluded to some at the top of the episode. One of the things that makes it difficult to study misconceptions is that they are not this neatly packaged set of beliefs that any one person will kind of take or reject wholesale. And so you'll have misconceptions like people are left brained or right brained that appear in some people and not in others. But across this large sample, you might see 50% of the sample continuing to endorse that. But it's not a consistent kind of package of beliefs.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  So knowing that one person endorses one misconception doesn't actually tell you what they're going to say about another misconception. And so it's almost like we have to take each misconception sort of on its own. And that makes it really difficult to debunk. But one of the things that we do find in this paper is that when professors report spending particular time and energy on a misconception, the students in their class were more likely to identify it indeed as a misconception. So despite the sprawling nature and the potential for misconceptions, there is some evidence that when we dedicate time and energy to correcting those misconceptions, that can be effective.

• 6:43Kim Mills?

  How did you decide on the 40 that you asked about?

• 6:47Speaker 03

  That's a really great question. So as I said, we're not the first group of researchers to ask this question, but one of the things that we wanted to do was broaden the scope of what previous research had done. So previous research looking at misconception often had small sample sizes, or they used inconsistent measures like across these different studies, which makes it really hard as a researcher to look at these findings and make comparisons across papers. And so this paper, one of the first of this group, our research is active and ongoing, and we've actually expanded our misconceptions that we've asked about in more recent projects. We looked at previous research on misconceptions and tried to bring

• 7:31Speaker 03

  together as many as we could into this quiz about people, this test of misconceptions, and doing that in a way that allowed us to look at both the endorsement of these misconceptions and also their confidence level. We gave them some additional questions around where they thought they learned this information, just to try to bring together and bridge what we know about misconceptions, either coming into the intro class, that's not in this paper, but it's been in some other work that we've done, what persists after it, and what can we do to dislodge them. So we were going for a broad, rather than a deep dive into the prevalence of these misconceptions.

• 8:11Kim Mills?

  Was there one that was the most common, or one that almost all the students believed?

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Among the top are things like subliminal messages, that we can be persuaded to buy things with exposure to information that we're unaware of. And then, of course, near and dear to my heart, as an instructor, is this endorsement of learning styles, that I learn best when I'm taught in a way that matches my particular learning styles and learning strengths. These appear near the top, and they're actually pretty hard to dislodge.

• 8:46Kim Mills?

  What makes these myths so widespread? Do we know where they come from, and what makes them so sticky and hard to debunk?

• 8:53Speaker 03

  There is something just about normal human psychology that makes misconceptions so sticky, that the way our memory works, for example, when we hear things over and over and over again, even when it's not true, even if we're told this is not true, repeated exposure increases our belief that that thing is true. And this matters when we kind of go down the line and want to reason out of it. This is also a little bit of foreshadowing. What makes debunking so difficult is that sometimes when you are attempting to debunk something by stating very clearly this misconception that you're trying to debunk, you actually might be reinforcing that misconception because now you're increasing exposure to

• 9:38Speaker 03

  it. That's normal. If we think about when we raise children and we tell them over and over again, "Don't touch that hot stove," it's good that they walk away with that memory, with that piece of information. So that's normal human psychology. That's actually quite adaptive. But when the information is wrong, and especially in these complicated information ecosystems, our echo chambers online, or our kind of biased exposure to our friend groups, that kind of exposure can really solidify even wrong information. So I think there's a lot of different interactions. But I will say that believing misconceptions happens for the same reason we believe true information as well.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  And so we shouldn't be ashamed that we hold misconceptions. We should be ashamed if we know they are misconceptions and don't do the work to correct them. As humans, we grow in our understanding as individuals, but also as a scientific community. So revising our beliefs and our understanding is actually part of a mature cognitive process. And so when we come up against information that ends up, "Oh, I thought something other," right? That's not an opportunity to dig in our heels and say, "Oh, I'm such a bad person. I believed this wrong thing." But rather, "Oh, this is normal cognitive development, even into adulthood, that I once believed this thing, but now I have better information. I can revise that belief."

• 11:04Kim Mills?

  Is the internet and social media making it worse? I mean, all of these things get repeated over and over again. And then sometimes by sources that you think are maybe correct. Or Wikipedia, you know, which has all kinds of information in it, a lot of which is wrong.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I hate to jump on the bandwagon of just bashing social media, but it certainly doesn't help us in this context. And there's some really lovely research that points at how social media interactions really create these ideological echo chambers that serve to increase our moral outrage and our emotional experience, which is another influence on solidifying some of these beliefs, kind of charting out what do people in my group believe, and sending some of these signals, which we can, of course, overinterpret. But when we have exposure to information in these increasingly isolated communities of conversation,

• 12:02Speaker 03

  that, of course, can exacerbate our misbeliefs if what is being discussed and engaged in that community is wrong. And it's really quite difficult to break outside of those echo chambers. Because even if you have, you know, five, 10 people telling you, "Oh, I read this thing," they actually might all be citing the exact same root source. And so what feels like 10 pieces of information actually is just one, modified through 10 different mouths. And it takes a lot of work to really dig to the end of those kinds of claims. And so it's actually quite laborious to unearth some of these misconceptions. We say it like it's easy, but it takes a lot of work.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  And when people are busy, sometimes that's work that they don't have the bandwidth to pursue.

• 12:51Kim Mills?

  Are some people more prone to believe these types of myths than others? For instance, did you find differences by gender or grade point average or other factors?

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, so our students reported their grade point average, which of course that could be incorrect. But let's just assume over all of these students, if there is an error in the reporting of their grade point average, they're all just slightly inflating their grade point average. But we would expect that it probably is trending in that direction. Even still, those who reported the highest grade point averages were the most likely to correctly identify a misconception and reject it. And that makes sense. These are the students that are more engaged in the information, not just the headline, this is a misconception, but why is it a misconception? How do psychologists and researchers arrive at these conclusions?

• 13:46Speaker 03

  The students that are better able to follow the train of reasoning from question to conclusion are more likely to have a certain strength of belief that leads them to this place of rejecting a misconception. In some of our other work where we've asked them about their confidence, some of the members in my team have expressed a little bit of dismay that there's not a stronger confidence in rejecting these misconceptions. They know this, just believe it. But to some extent, understanding the scientific process that leads researchers to a place of this is a false belief also builds in students a certain sense of skepticism

• 14:30Speaker 03

  and a certain sense of humility around how we hold knowledge. So they can say, I think this is a misconception, but also hold that in a way that acknowledges there are limits to certain things that we know in science or depending on how we want to phrase it, and we're going to be able to think a little bit more nuanced. So this kind of rejection and kind of early indicators of humility around the nature of knowledge seems to be more common in our higher performing students. On the other thing you asked about gender, and consistently in these really large data sets that we have, we find that our female students are more prone to endorse misconceptions.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  We don't, we don't know why. Our data don't speak to that yet. One of the things that I'm particularly interested is in the role of science identity in young girls, in developmentally speaking, and how this might relate to even thinking scientifically, approaching it that way. Not that women don't have these skills, but rather there are certain biases that change the way they are activated in certain kinds of contexts. But this is something that is speculative by me at this point. But I hope that our future research can really dig that out to understand why, because there are real consequences to holding misconceptions.

• 15:57Kim Mills?

  We're going to take a short break. When we return, I'll talk with Dr. Smith about some of the real world consequences of these myths and misconceptions.

• 16:08Speaker 00

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• 16:38Speaker 04

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• 17:08Kim Mills?

  Well, speaking of consequences, I mean, let's talk about why does this really matter? I mean, if people think that you only use 10% of your brain, or that sugar makes children hyper, so what?

• 17:18Speaker 03

  And on one level, I commiserate with that conclusion, because there do seem to be some misbeliefs, where we can just say, all right, Uncle Johnny just believes something crazy. That's just, okay, that's fine, don't touch that. But on another level, if we accepted that and really thought about the societal implications of faulty thinking, there are potentially really significant consequences. Some of them are direct, and some of them are indirect. So, for example, if we believe that we only use 10% of our brain, oftentimes, this is

• 17:59Speaker 03

  couched in a sense of, I have untapped potential. This 90% of my brain, if I can just figure out how to unleash it, right? I've unlocked some beast inside of me, then I'll be able to X, Y, Z, right? Whatever it is, I think I might be able to do with this untapped potential. If I hold that belief, that might make me more likely to try certain kinds of drugs or medications to unlock this potential. I think this makes a really nice Hollywood plot in the movies. But also, it might change the way in which I engage in the actual means of engaging my potential, right?

• 18:42Speaker 03

  So if I think that I only have access to 10% of my brain, that might change the way that I interact in class, that might change the way that I interact in my job, or the way that I take advantage of my own agency to actually grow my skills and capacity, because I think, well, I only have 10%, that's just what I'm going to be stuck with. And so, these consequences, if we think about them at an individual level, but then if we think about them at a societal level, this is going to matter for the kinds of policies that we take, or the way that we approach even reasoning through what to think about policies. Any one person can't be expert in all of these things, but if we are so certain, this

• 19:26Speaker 03

  is my understanding, my understanding is accurate, then there can be really significant ripple effects from both a systems level, but also at an individual level.

• 19:36Kim Mills?

  What do you think psychology educators should take away from this research? I mean, given all that there is to cover in an introductory course, is this something that teachers, professors need to place more emphasis on?

• 19:49Speaker 03

  I think yes. One of the things I learned early as a professor, teaching intro to psychology, is the more I spoke, didn't actually change the way that my students learned. If I just tried to cram as much as I could into our class time, they actually, it didn't increase their learning by any significant amount. And so as a professor, I really had to grapple with the truth that just because I've said it, doesn't mean they're going to now have it in their head and walk out the door. This is something any parent in your audience, or even any, any person with a close friendship has realized. Just because you've said it, doesn't mean that it has now been accepted and is going to be acted upon.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  And so as professors, as educators, we really need to think about what is it that we want to be different about our students when they walk out the door? Do we want them to be able to pass a test? Which in many ways, is what our classes are kind of preparing them for. And we see in our end of semester quiz about people, they're not actually doing that well on that. So if, if that's the case, that we're not actually training them to pass this test, how can we think about ways that we want their beliefs and their representation of reality to influence the way that they reason and then ultimately engage in the world as hopefully educated citizens? So spending time debunking these beliefs

• 21:18Speaker 03

  is actually part of just helping our students, and us as individuals, think about how does our knowledge and information about the world hang together in more accurate ways?

• 21:30Kim Mills?

  Are there some more effective ways to correct misconceptions? I mean, you have to sort of introduce it as now I'm going to tell you something really important, so pay attention. I mean, the sorts of things that you learn when you're trying to speak persuasively to other people.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  There's some research on this, and of course, various members of this group are working on this exact question. Because time is so limited in the classroom, we actually want to be really judicious about how we spend it to really make sure that there is impact relative to the time invested. And so there are some of these more successful methods are ones that actively engage students. And of course, active engagement is a little bit of a loose term. It can mean a lot of different things. But one of the things that memory research shows is that when we self-generate memory links, they're more likely to stick. And so thinking about how do we engage students in the debunking process so that they are

• 22:28Speaker 03

  not just receiving from on high, this is not a true statement, in which case they might not actually remember it that way, but that they reason through that process of how did we arrive at this conclusion? And what do you infer from what these data show? And then really helping them generate some of these conclusions on their own. I will say there's a member on our team who's also doing some really interesting work with having students evaluate what artificial intelligence is saying. So using artificial intelligence both as a tool to say, okay, so what does artificial intelligence say about this thing?

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Now go read some research and have a conversation with artificial intelligence to see where is it maybe correct and where is it maybe missing some critical nuance that will be really important to thinking through the bottom line that artificial intelligence is giving you. So I think that that's another form of active engagement.

• 23:28Kim Mills?

  Given that science is iterative, are we sure that the beliefs we're talking about are truly misperceptions? I mean, isn't it possible that more research will prove some of these misperceptions are not misperceptions?

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Kim, that's the million dollar question. This is actually, one of the things that we talk about a lot on our team is, how do we even approach these conversations in a way that does not replace a misconception with an arrogant belief that is immutable to revision? We really want, when we are correcting misconceptions, according to our best available data now, that we have not somehow fortified them to be immune to additional scientific evidence. Now, I feel pretty confident about these misconceptions, but I have to have a little bit of intellectual humility and say,

• 24:26Speaker 03

  in the time of Copernicus and Galileo, there was lots of confidence about where the Earth was in the solar system, and that was not accurate. So, being able to reason from the best available evidence and also having some sense of, what would it take for me to change my mind? So, if we have all of this evidence that learning styles isn't actually a really effective construct, what would it take for me to revise that belief? Is one study that makes this new claim, is that going to be enough? Probably not, because it doesn't, we need to weigh it in the context of the strength of our belief. And this requires really teaching students and then practicing ourselves, both intellectual humility and some honesty around,

• 25:10Speaker 03

  what is the status of what we know? And what would it take to change that? It's one of my fears, and I share this with several of the members of our research group, that we will, in correcting misconceptions, that our students will leave and say, "I can't know anything. Everything is probably false." And that's also not the appropriate response to this. So, there are some, quote, "common" Sense beliefs that are not accurate, we should correct those. And there are also some things that are commonly believed that are correct. And so what it means to be an ongoing citizen of learning, an educated citizen,

• 25:53Speaker 03

  is that we are consistently evaluating and being open to both the possibility that we're wrong without throwing some sense that I can know anything out of the window. That is not an appropriate, what we might call epistemological stance or a stance of understanding knowledge.

• 26:11Kim Mills?

  Do you have any advice for those of us who are long past college and psychology courses, but would like to make sure that the information that we're putting out into the world is correct? I mean, how can we keep from perpetuating these myths when we don't have the benefit of you as our professor?

• 26:27Speaker 03

  There is a librarian, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on her name at the moment, and she published a wonderful acronym, and it's wonderful because it sticks, for assessing knowledge. It's the CRAP test. And so as we look at information, the information that we are receiving, that we are engaging with, we look for features like credibility and reliability and accuracy. We look at these, they're C R A A P. You can, you can Google it and find the original open source peer reviewed paper that she published. But I think that it's just, it's a good practice as we want to make assertions

• 27:11Speaker 03

  about things that we know or things that we believe, to take a pause and say, where did this belief come from? What information sources am I pulling from? Do they pass this CRAP test? And as I say them, what is the strength of my statement? Do I have the appropriate nuance? Do I have the appropriate tentativeness? And sometimes the appropriate tentativeness is very little, that we can speak with great confidence about some things. But sometimes that says, you know, this is something I'm kind of thinking through, and this is where I'm currently landing on it. And realizing that even perhaps especially as adults. In the digital world, we need to be allowed to change our mind. That what I tell my students all the time, I am grateful that I don't believe some of the

• 27:56Speaker 03

  things that I did 20 years ago. And if you were to take this class from me in 20 years, I'll probably believe some different things then, too. That's what it means to be a human in development. And that's okay. But as we are engaging information and putting it out in the world, we really want to do these kind of in the moment assessments of, am I doing the best I can with what's available to me? If I might, I'll add also, one of the reasons why misconceptions stick, I think it's directly related to how do we engage information well, which is one of the reasons why misconceptions stick is because we really want them to be true. I really wish there was a lotion that

• 28:38Speaker 03

  just solved my wrinkles. I wish there was a pill that made me, you know, 50 times smarter and easier to remember, and an exercise routine that made it possible for me not to sleep as much. Wouldn't that all be great? And because I now, I actually don't know if I want those things. But if I did, I might be more willing to accept somebody, even somebody with credentials, saying, this is going to work all of these miracles in your life. And so as we are engaging information, it's really important to evaluate our emotional experience, whether it be a desire, like, I really want this to be true. And sometimes those are hard to access because they are

• 29:22Speaker 03

  implicit, they're kind of under the surface of our thinking. But also assessing our emotional reactions, like if we're really angry about some kind of claim, because anger also works in some of these ways to solidify certain kinds of beliefs. And so as we are engaging with information in the world, and we're concerned with accuracy, which I'm grateful that we're concerned with these kinds of things, to have a sense where we pause and evaluate our own emotional experiences, so that we can bring them appropriately to a rational approach to what the best information and knowledge is.

• 29:59Kim Mills?

  So what are the next steps for this research? You mentioned that some of your colleagues are digging a little bit more. What are you all looking into now?

• 30:08Speaker 03

  One question answered, five new ones pop up. And that's the beauty of this. And of course, our students are always changing and the landscape of possible misconceptions is always changing. So we are currently looking at, we've done some pre, post, intro to psychology. We are currently working on writing up an article that specifically is looking at the number of psychology courses over the course of an undergraduate career. And that's both for majors and non-majors. And we do, kind of, I'll give you a little tidbit here, that we do see that the number of psychology courses, even if they're not a major, as those increase, the number of

• 30:52Speaker 03

  clearly identified misconceptions also increases. So psychology, even as a non-major, that exposure to the way that we think about human behavior and the mental life, that does seem to really help in unearthing and changing some of these misconceptions. A smaller group of us are following up to look at, how does this play out into graduate school, where we might have an increased narrow focus? So that might really be helpful in unearthing and kind of dislodging certain kinds of misconceptions. But what about things that are outside of our area of expertise? Is there a transfer effect in this kind of critical thinking?

• 31:32Speaker 03

  And then also looking at some specific misconceptions around learning and memory and possible connections to studying behavior. Because there's some ongoing debate about how and whether these misconceptions actually impact behavior. Of course, I land on the side of yes, they do, even if it's an indirect path. But so we want to evaluate this specifically in the context of students, that if you believe certain things about memory, does that also change the way you study in ways that might be counterproductive?

• 32:04Kim Mills?

  Well, Dr. Smith, I want to thank you for joining me today. I hope we have dispelled at least a couple of these misperceptions out there in the world.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Yes, thank you so much for having me.

• 32:15Kim Mills?

  You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org, or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at [email protected]. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

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