Transcript Toward The Science of Psychology: Early Experimentalists

Reading for today’s lecture
B. M Thorne & T. B. Henley, Connections in the
History and Systems of Psychology:
Pages 156-158, 422-426
Dr. Paul Dockree, History of Psychology: PS1203, 2009
Pseudoscience and Psychology
Dr. Paul Dockree, History of Psychology: PS1203, 2009
What is Pseudoscience?
• Pseudoscience is defined as a body of knowledge, methodology, belief,
or practice that is claimed to be scientific or made to appear scientific,
but does not adhere to the scientific method
• Pseudoscientific beliefs are remarkably common even among welleducated individuals (Gallop Poll, 2001; NSF, 2002).
• Pseudoscientific beliefs are resistant to change. Even people with
degrees in the sciences often hold such beliefs.
Identifying pseudoscience
• Use of vague, exaggerated or untestable claims
• Lack of clear definitions of variables and methods to
measure these variables
• Unexplained technical jargon alert!
• Lack of boundary conditions: Assertions that cannot be
falsified by observation or physical experiment
• Lack of effective controls, such as placebo and doubleblind, in experimental design
Identifying pseudoscience
• Lack of openness to testing by other experts and
lack of progress
• Evasion of peer review before publicising results.
• Lack of openness. Failure to provide adequate.
information for other researchers to reproduce the
claims.
• Lack of self correction in view of contradictory
evidence.
Mesmer and “Animal Magnetism”
• Franz Anton Mesmer (17341815)
• Mesmer received a doctorate
in medicine from the
University of Vienna and listed
other ‘unaccounted for’
degrees
• After graduating he married
an older wealthy widow,
became a socialite, befriended
musical celebrities
Mesmer and “Animal Magnetism”
• Mesmer’s ideas on magnetism
influenced by local Jesuit priest –
Father Maximillian Hell
• Mesmer believed that many
maladies were caused by animal
magnetism, magnetic fluids running
through all humans & animals
• Treated patients suffering from
“hysterical fever” by requiring
patients to swallow medicine
contain iron particles and then
applied magnets to parts of the
body
• Patient enters a ‘crisis state’, then
symptoms subside
Mesmer and “Animal Magnetism”
• In subsequent patients,
Mesmer suggested what they
should expect (ie., crisis state
upon application of the
magnets).
• He then tried treatments
without magnets, just passing
his hands over patients’
bodies. This worked too.
Mesmer’s Demise
• Mesmer became embroiled in scandal over the
treatment of Maria-Theresia Paradis – a psychogenically
blind teenaged piano prodigy.
• Mesmer took to the Parisian stage charging massive fees
for mass-produced magnetic cures.
• Eventually, Mesmer’s practice was investigated by the
blue-ribbon scientific commission and animal magnetism
was deemed unscientific and without proof or
foundation.
Magnetism Today!
• The pure wooden magnetic therapy health
care shoes, adopting traditional Chinese
medicine acupuncture treatment principle
and physical magnetic field principle, making
the permanent magnet produce line of
magnetic force, stimulating the meridian
point of feet, and accelerating blood
circulation of feet and balancing the yin
yang. Range of applicability: soft tissue injury,
neuralgia, inflammation pain; improving
sleep, remitting muscle cramp, relieving
facial tic.
Franz Joseph Gall
• Franz Joseph Gall (17581828) – a Austrian
physician and anatomist
• Gall made some
important contributions
to science linking higher
mental functions to the
volume of cortex
• He proposed a new
version of the medical
doctrine of localisation of
function
From Physiognomy to Phrenology
Physiognomy is a theory
based on the idea that by
looking at a person's facial
features, we can determine
the inner trait, personality
and characteristics of that
person
•
In 1806, Charles Le Brun created a series of comparative
drawings of human and animal faces depicting the
physiognomy theory.
•
He believed that if a human's face resembled an animal,
he or she would have the same character traits of that
type of animal. For example, one who looked like a lion
would have that fierce quality.
•
Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1741-1801 believed could reveal
the often disguised secrets of one's moral nature.
Phrenology
• Gall assumed that well-
developed mental faculties
would correspond to welldeveloped parts of the brain
• The organs corresponding to
well-developed faculties of the
brain would be larger than
organs corresponding to lessdeveloped faculties
• There relative size would be
registered on the skull as bumps
overlying the developed organ
Phrenology
• Methodology: matching psychological traits with ‘size of
bump’ on the skull.
• Gall drew up a long list of faculties – destructiveness,
friendship, and language, for example.
• Gall’s conception pointed in two directions: one
scientific and one pseudoscientfic (Johann Spurzheim)
Phrenology
• Phrenology gave rise to the invention of the
psycograph by Lavery and White
• This device netted its owners about
$200,000 at the 1934 Century of Progress
Exhibition in Chicago
Pseudoscience & “Brain Exercises”
• Brain Gym (see Ben Goldacre’s book “Bad
Science”)
• A series of pseudoscientific exercises to ‘enhance the
experience of whole brain learning’
• “ ‘Drink a glass of water before Brain Gym activities’, the say.
‘As it is a major component of blood, water is vital from
transporting oxygen to the brain.’ Heaven forbid that your
blood should dry out. This water should be held in your
mouth, they say, because then it can be absorbed directly from
there into your brain.” (Goldacre, Pg 13)
Pseudoscience & “Brain Exercises”
• ‘Hook-up’ exercises: “…(where you press your fingers against
each other in odd contorted patterns) this would ‘connect the
electrical circuits in the body, containing and thus focusing
both attention and disorganised energy’” (Goldacre, Pg 14-15)
• “if they wiggled their ears with their fingers as per the Brain
Gym textbook it would ‘stimulate the reticular formation of
the brain to tune out distracting, irrelevant sounds and tune
into language’” (Goldacre, Pg 15)
• The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. Deena Skolnick
Weisberg, Frank C. Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson,
Jeremy R. Gray. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience March 2008,
Vol. 20, No. 3: 470–477.
Science and the Media
• Public belief of an association between the MMR vaccine
and autism
• Large range of epidemiological surveys do not support the link.
The adverse effects of not taking the vaccine argue against its
withdrawal.
Pseudoscience and Therapy
• Arthur Janov created primal therapy as the means of
eliciting repressed pain and trauma. Janov claims that
therapeutic progress can only be made through direct
emotional experience, which allows access to the source
of psychological pain in the lower brain and nervous
system. Janov believes that psychological therapies which
involve only talking about the problem (referred to as
"Talking Therapies") are of limited effectiveness because
the cortex, or higher reasoning area of the brain has no
ability to affect the real source of psychological pain in
other areas of the brain.
• http://smashingtelly.com/category/pseudo-science/