Pop-Psychology

One of the great pleasures in life is shallow pop-psychology, partly because it's so useful for understanding and interpreting people and their interactions, and partly because talking about it annoys those people who've actually spent years studying the science. At this point of confrontation between the experts and the amateurs, we the amateurs chortle merrily and say, "but these are the most interesting aspects of psychology, and I can learn about them from the Internet! Why would I want to waste years scratching any further beneath the surface of this science and bore myself with facts about the efficacy of barbiturates?" I appreciate the commitment of psychologists who've done the legwork in researching and verifying experiments, but virtually no one cares about anything beyond the headline.

That's why I, and all my lazily pseudo-intellectual kind, can appreciate the genius of a website like YouAreNotSoSmart.com, a handy synthesis of psychological phenomena both well-established and recondite. Each phenomenon is packed into a web post the size of a small chapter for comprehensive but digestible consumption. What I've learnt from these brief forays into psychology is that most of the brain's pop-psychology functions are concerned with self-delusion and self-preservation.

Confirmation bias? Fanboyism? The Benjamin Franklin effect? (Look them all up. I wouldn't do them justice). All of these are concerned with keeping the brain from frying in its own contradictions as we battle through life lying to ourselves and each other. The Benjamin Franklin effect especially brings home this truth.* When confronted with a reality which seems bizarre or incomprehensible to us, do we adjust our realities and expectations in order that we may better understand our surroundings and attain an awareness of the objective "truth"? Ha, no. We delude ourselves. We retroactively adjust our goals. We even go so far as to distort the things we've actually experienced and warp our own memories, because, for some reason, this is an altogether more agreeable solution to the contradictions than, say, confronting our own fallibility.

In many ways this is unsurprising. We're idiots. We're easily led. That's not an immense revelation.

Still, that's the real beauty of pop-psychology. It tells us things we already know, but in mock-authoritative fashion.

*http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/10/05/the-benjamin-franklin-effect/