Selling Pseudoscience in Psychology

How Pseudoscience becomes mainstream overtime

Wherever there is science, there will be pseudoscience coming along on the bandwagon. During the Enlightenment in the Western world, science became the mainstream source of knowledge. Science and its knowledge had become mainstream.

As people started accepting science more widely across the globe, pseudosciences started popping up as well trying to enjoy the prestige and acceptedness of science, without any of its burdens of evidence, systematic reduction of bias, and reproducibility.

Pseudoscience is in a league of its own that way. It claims to be scientific, it wants to be scientific but it doesn’t want to prove itself through scientific methods.

For all intents and purposes, you can think of pseudoscience as a counterfeit science. It looks like the real thing and acts like the real thing, but it is not.

Psychology, in its endeavors to be a scientific field, has had its fair share of pseudoscientific practices as well eg. graphology, subliminal self-help tapes, parapsychology, etc. There is no shortage of pseudoscience sellers in India and across the globe.

Interestingly, I have noticed a similar pattern in how all these false theories are sold, and how they become mainstream.

It’s a simple three-stage process but it’s brilliantly effective. You can use them to create and sell your own pseudoscience too! (I would strongly urge you to not)

Stage 1: Of course, It Is Scientific!

Pseudoscience always starts by claiming it is scientific. It regularly uses terms like “based on latest research”, “scientifically backed”, “approved by scientists”, or in the case of psychology, “backed by world’s leading psychologists”.

This is also the time when some people get attracted to a pseudoscience due to its novelty and promise. Certificate courses are launched, products are created and a lot of money is made right in the first step itself.

But, this doesn’t last forever. When you claim something is scientific, scientists have the pesky habit of testing it for themselves. The evidence doesn’t match the claims made. Doubt starts to creep in. You are about to be debunked.

That’s where stage 2 comes in!

Stage 2: Can Anything Be Scientific?

Science is not perfect. Psychological science is even less so. In psychology, there is very little that we can prove with 100% certainty and every pseudoscience peddler absolutely loves this about us.

I had a conversation last week about graphology with one of my followers on Instagram. Graphology, as a “science” has been convincingly debunked over and over again but it continues to be popular in Indian Psychology UG students due to the multiple courses run on it by businesses. The person I was talking to claimed that personality is constantly changing (it is not) and no science can ever measure it with complete accuracy.

This is a common trope in pseudosciences. There are models of personality out there which are stable, reliable, and valid eg. the OCEAN model, the HEXICO model. But even these models don’t guarantee a 100% explanation of an individual’s personality over time. This lack of certainty gets mistaken for no certainty and pseudoscience, especially in personality psychology, continues to thrive.

If the scientific nature of your pseudoscience is in question, start questioning science itself. Can we know anything for sure? Is knowledge real? What is the sound of a one-handed clap?

Stage 3: Ok, It’s not Scientific, But It’s Okay.

The last stage is the final stage for any and all pseudosciences. After they have been debunked they fall back on public support and usage.

The MBTI test is a great example of the same. It started off as a scientific assessment of a person’s personality but has since been shown to be unreliable and unstable over large samples. But now, who cares?

MBTI has become quite popular in recent years and it no longer needs a scientific basis to be used. Companies use it during their interview rounds, people choose their dates based on the MBTI configuration and communities are created over each particular configuration.

Something that became mainstream claiming to be scientific, has now grown beyond it. People like it. People use it. So what’s the harm?

That sentence is the end goal for all pseudosciences. What is the harm? The goal is not to usurp scientific methods but to position pseudoscience as a harmless alternative to evidence-based ideas.

So, What Is The Harm?

Practices like graphology and MBTI can seem harmless until they don’t. First of all, practices that are not backed by evidence paint a false image of a discipline.

Talk to a layman about psychology and they will probably know Freud, MBTI, and face-reading as the top 3 things on their mind. Instead of talking about the advances made in cognitive science, brain mapping, and psychopathology, we have to convince people that we cannot read their minds/faces.

Secondly, these pseudosciences sometimes become so popular that they are used to filter job applications and college applications. Imagine if, during a job interview, the HR asked for your date and location of birth to ensure you were an astrological match with the company. You would naturally be perplexed.

Using MBTI or graphological techniques to ensure team-employee fit is no different. The US actually made it illegal to analyze someone’s handwriting while reviewing job applications.

Most importantly, pseudoscience comes with an opportunity cost. The time that could have been spent learning a useful and applicable skill gets lost in learning something with little to no credible use.

In clinical settings, people have lost their lives because they sought therapeutic interventions with no evidence. So the harm is quite apparent.

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As I said earlier, wherever there is science, there will be pseudoscience. What we must do, as students and professionals, is be mindful of potential activities that might not have evidence behind them. A new pseudoscience is born every other year, and its followers are born every minute.

We must remain vigilant about the scientific nature of our discipline and do our best to follow the evidence. Psychology is a science, not because we claim it is, but because we use scientific methods to study the human mind. It’s imperative that we continue to use these methods in our education and our practice as well.

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How do you feel about pseudoscience in Psychology? Have you ever come across something you were uncertain about but gave in anyway because what is the harm?

You can let me know in the comments or by replying to this email!

Until next time,

Arjun