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The full talk is in the Feifan series on Fanshu, a Chinese audiobook app; this page is only a summary.
What this episode is about
Color astrology, hypnotic mind-reading, unlocking human potential… There’s so much psychology on the market, but how much of it is actually scientific?
A lot of the psychology we know is really pseudoscience. It quietly messes with our minds and blurs our judgment.
How do we debunk claims of ‘extraordinary human abilities’? Is a therapy automatically effective just because it’s been tested? Why do theories so often claim to be ‘too far ahead of their time’? Why are we more willing to believe personal testimonials?
With information coming at us from every direction, this book helps uncover the truth and debunk the nonsense for you.
You’ll learn
- The three key standards for telling real psychology from fake psychology
- The psychological mechanisms that make pseudoscience so easy to spread
- How to see through pseudoscience and develop critical thinking
Quote of the episode
Science’s advantage isn’t that it’s a process that never makes mistakes. It’s that it offers a way to eliminate mistakes—continually removing the errors in our understanding.
Science doesn’t offer absolute truth. It offers the theories that, so far, have been hardest to falsify.
Scientific theories are accepted, and new scientific discoveries are embraced, gradually—not all at once.
In this age of information overload, we’re exposed to a huge amount of information and knowledge every day. The ability to separate truth from falsehood matters more than ever in today’s society.
About the author
[Canada] Keith E. Stanovich Professor Emeritus of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the University of Toronto, Canada, and former Canada Research Chair in Applied Cognitive Science. In 2012, he received the American Psychological Association’s Thorndike Career Achievement Award. He is also the only scholar to have received the International Reading Association’s Albert J. Harris Award twice. His books include How to Think Straight About Psychology, The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin, and Decision Making and Rationality in the Modern World.
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