This “article” is merely more fear mongering. You make no arguments, besides “If we focus on only the scary statistics, taken completely out of context, we are rightfully scared”. It seems to me that you are simply attempting to justify (your?) cowardice.
You are missing the very point. The point is not that psychologists may be “arguing that people are wrong to find a global pandemic frightening”. The point is that they are perfectly capable of ,maintaining perspective and not becoming frightened – indeed that such behaviour is much more useful.
Fear mongering…a bit harsh, read the Groan and watch the BBC for Fear mongering.
Agree that we are perfectly capable of maintaining perspective and not becoming frightened…however, the BBC and the MSM actively encourage fear, division and misinformation…subsequently leading to what we see in the UK right now in regard to CV – confusion and ignorance. Just how they like it…
Spot on. The BBC continue to plumb the negative aspect of most issues. Now after Brexit they have found a new crisis to distort and pervert information. The Derbyshire police trying to do a good job becomes world news. Really? Give the government and the Frontline troops a break. Alternatively give a chance to rebut the misinformation been spewed out by the usual celebrity/personalities reading their scripts. Or just switch off.
The Beeb ‘Gender and Identity’ reporting brigade has taken about three seconds to redefine the global pandemic of Coronavirus as really being all about domestic abuse -citing one case of a woman in India and one in the states. I don’t wish at all to belittle these women’s plights but for christ’s sake BBC can’t we have a break from feminist sermonizing for at least the duration of a global pandemic?!
The police were going way beyond their powers, and condemning perfectly reasonable and lawful behaviour because it made their job easier, not because it was law. It would make their job easier if we all stayed at home all the time. It would also make it easier if they didn’t exceed their lawful authority.
Robert Forde
4 years ago
As a psychologist (albeit retired now) I would have to agree with much of this. Many psychologists are indeed so eager to be “relevant” that they are inclined to overstretch the findings of experiments, especially lab studies. I even wrote a book about it: Bad Psychology, which concentrated on my own field of forensic psychology.
However, Ritchie fails to acknowledge that the so-called “replication crisis” is not especially a feature of psychology. Failures to replicate are widespread in other fields too. He also doesn’t mention that patient compliance (eg, with taking medications) is one of the greatest problems in medicine, and that it is health psychologists who have found ways to increase compliance. Encouraging handwashing is just a current application of this. Yes, the actions are often “commonsense” (whatever that is) but that doesn’t mean people readily carry them out.
There is also no doubt that human judgment is prone to many flaws, and failure to understand the statistical nature of much information is a prime example. These flaws genuinely do cause us to draw false conclusions and misinterpret evidence. That is one reason for the whole Roy Meadows sudden infant death fiasco a few years back. It also affects psychologists as much as other people, though: that is why Ministry of Justice psychologists persisted for years with “risk reduction” programmes for sex offenders which in fact made them worse.
And as for denial, it is psychologists who have illuminated the way this causes overenthusiastic pronouncements about major countries being finished with this virus in three weeks. Such trumpery.
thank you for the comment . Please could you let me have a source for your very interesting comment about risk reduction . Certainly I have been unconvinced by some of the programmes of which I heard but this was more gut feeling . ( Occasionally some of the people that I dealt with professionally had been the victims of CSA )
Some very salutary lessons for the discipline no doubt. However, I think the author may be overreaching here when he argues that psychology does not have much to say about issues relating to the pandemic. Why, for example, did panic-buying set in so quickly, and why did people buy so much, of all things, loo roll? What were people thinking and why? Why do some people, in the face of such repeated and consistent warnings to social-distance, flagrantly disregard them, and yet others observe stringently? How could they be better encouraged, without the use of blanket force? How do people cope with social isolation, and how could they cope better (or worse)? Why have some police forces gone overboard with enforcing the regulations, whilst others have been more lax, and how successful are the approaches in terms of enforcing outcomes such as social distancing?
All of these questions are relevant to effective management of the pandemic and all of them, arguably, are within the remit of psychology. Indeed, as one of the posters above has mentioned, there are many real-world health psychology studies that have demonstrated compliance with behavioural outcomes in real-world settings. Whilst I am very critical of the discipline as a whole, especially its (lack of) scientific credentials and efficacy, there are clearly many issues where the discipline could speak meaningfully to. Perhaps the issue here has been which theories and research psychologists and their advisors have paid heed to – studies with low ecological validity, small sample sizes, poor generalisability etc. – as the author here as rightfully pointed out.
Jean Fothers
4 years ago
I used to work in hospitals and the opinion I formed from observation was this. In most hospitals, psychologists and psychiatrists usually wear a white coat when ‘treating’ or consulting with patients, most often those with mental health problems. My opinion is that the purpose of the white coat is simply to allow onlookers to know which is the patient and which is not.
Joe Smith
4 years ago
Whatever the failings of psychologists I think the cognitive biases they identify do skew people’s perception of risk. It would be interesting to see how availability bias played out if we had saturation TV and media coverage of the annual flu season, daily cases and deaths and hospitals overstretched. Would people stop descending en masse to shopping centres and attending Christmas parties if they knew that during their lifetime they may unknowingly cause a flu death by not social distancing?
pulkit35taneja
4 years ago
As a budding psychologist I percieve that making an extreme judgement about a field or discipline is absolutely wrong when your judgement is based on the few people practicing it in way not appreciated by all and having a higher position name and representing the whole community of psychologist as everyone is a human and can have their baises and different schemas and perspectives about a particular siuation. Considering what the article said, I agree that the psychologist mentioned above may have speculated while forming their judgements and should have focused on a more scientific way of approaching a global situation as it can’t be give single conclusion from past experiment on people. But that doesn’t mean that the discipline has nothing to contribute, on very basic note you contradicting their point is because of high meta cognitive abilities and ability to make sense out things in a better way than other as a human (as psychology explains), and indeed people should worry in such pandemic situation but their is a certain line to it because the way all the world is worried, such prolonged stress can lead to mental problems. So I think not completely but in a way you and those psychologists as well are right but not completely.
saswata
4 years ago
The article makes certain sweeping statements based on a few studies that fail to represent the discipline in its entirety. Framing may lead to cognitive biases, which may distort our risk perception. However, individuals will react differently to varying levels of risk perception. Governments have responded differently based on their risk perception and resource endowment – the ability to contain the spread of the disease. Lastly, viewing a two per cent death rate as small or large is based on how much one values life.
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago
I suspect that most of us don’t trust the psychologists on coronavirus or, indeed, anything else.
Psychologists have shown that they can be trusted so long as they stick to the evidence. Behaviour exists, and like anything else that exists it can be studied scientifically. Where psychologists go wrong, IMO, (and I say this as a member of the profession since 1971) is when they depart from the evidence, and start giving “professional” opinions which are little more than personal biases or folklore presented as truths. Arguably, one could say the same of all scientists. One problem is that there are many therapists, pundits, etc, who are understood to be psychologists but who actually aren’t.
James Billot
4 years ago
A statement from the British Psychological Society:
“We were disappointed to read the ‘Don’t trust the psychologists on coronavirus’ piece, and have written a response on what psychologists are doing to positively contribute to the UK government response. This is published on our website here (https://www.bps.org.uk/news…, and we would ask that you consider including it alongside the original article.”
robagnew
4 years ago
Bang on.
But in addition to the various crises in psychology, I think this whole awful event is also highlighting the often poor sense of professional boundary/limit of competence that psychologists can tend towards. And it is in those circumstances that the effect of the crises in psychology cannot be identified and accommodated for in the forming of an opinion.
Last night I watched a developmental (research) psychologist, when asked why it was so hard to stay indoors, tell the nation that it was because ‘we need human contact’ and that we should ‘breathe’. My phone blew up with non-psychologist friends asking me if I was watching it. What that psychologist could have said when asked to comment was “Hmmm… not really the area of expertise of a developmental psychologist… what you need is a health psychologist…they specialise in the psychology of health related behaviour…oh you don’t know one…here, let me help you find one”.
But this is not new. In medico-legal work I frequently come across psychologists undertaking assessments for conditions in which they seem to have no particular expertise. In addition between the different professional disciplines of psychology, we seem to really enjoy stepping into other roles. Educational and forensic psychologists doing general diagnostic assessments, clinical psychologists doing highly specialist risk assessment and capacity assessment that should be done by another profession entirely, counselling psychologists undertaking neuropsychological assessments…. all fine if you work in a service where you are supported or supervised by someone who has been qualified in a discipline where that activity forms part of their core professional training. But actually there seem to me to be many psychologists acting as independent experts in areas where they have acquired their knowledge and skills through osmosis. Not through a programme of education and examination that has been ratified by the BPS.
It seems that there is no real requisite for role specificity in psychology and as a result, because there is crossover in some areas, and because you can have a ‘psychological opinion’ on anything, we get psychologists undertaking activities and opining on matters for which they really have no particular knowledge base or skillset. They might do an OK job. But I wonder how many psychologists would be happy to pay a professional, for a professional service, only to find out that actually they were relying on transferable skills and general knowledge.
‘Media’ psychologists do fantastically well from the lack of regulation and consequence for operating outside of their expertise. The public do not generally differentiate between the different expertise of the different types of psychologist; that should be our ethical undertaking as professionals.
The public are not stupid. They know when we are talking rubbish. And I think it is to the detriment of the psychological professions and not in the public interest.
This “article” is merely more fear mongering. You make no arguments, besides “If we focus on only the scary statistics, taken completely out of context, we are rightfully scared”. It seems to me that you are simply attempting to justify (your?) cowardice.
You are missing the very point. The point is not that psychologists may be “arguing that people are wrong to find a global pandemic frightening”. The point is that they are perfectly capable of ,maintaining perspective and not becoming frightened – indeed that such behaviour is much more useful.
Fear mongering…a bit harsh, read the Groan and watch the BBC for Fear mongering.
Agree that we are perfectly capable of maintaining perspective and not becoming frightened…however, the BBC and the MSM actively encourage fear, division and misinformation…subsequently leading to what we see in the UK right now in regard to CV – confusion and ignorance. Just how they like it…
Spot on. The BBC continue to plumb the negative aspect of most issues. Now after Brexit they have found a new crisis to distort and pervert information. The Derbyshire police trying to do a good job becomes world news. Really? Give the government and the Frontline troops a break. Alternatively give a chance to rebut the misinformation been spewed out by the usual celebrity/personalities reading their scripts. Or just switch off.
The Beeb ‘Gender and Identity’ reporting brigade has taken about three seconds to redefine the global pandemic of Coronavirus as really being all about domestic abuse -citing one case of a woman in India and one in the states. I don’t wish at all to belittle these women’s plights but for christ’s sake BBC can’t we have a break from feminist sermonizing for at least the duration of a global pandemic?!
Serminising…not sermonizing. This is Britain not Texas!
The police were going way beyond their powers, and condemning perfectly reasonable and lawful behaviour because it made their job easier, not because it was law. It would make their job easier if we all stayed at home all the time. It would also make it easier if they didn’t exceed their lawful authority.
As a psychologist (albeit retired now) I would have to agree with much of this. Many psychologists are indeed so eager to be “relevant” that they are inclined to overstretch the findings of experiments, especially lab studies. I even wrote a book about it: Bad Psychology, which concentrated on my own field of forensic psychology.
However, Ritchie fails to acknowledge that the so-called “replication crisis” is not especially a feature of psychology. Failures to replicate are widespread in other fields too. He also doesn’t mention that patient compliance (eg, with taking medications) is one of the greatest problems in medicine, and that it is health psychologists who have found ways to increase compliance. Encouraging handwashing is just a current application of this. Yes, the actions are often “commonsense” (whatever that is) but that doesn’t mean people readily carry them out.
There is also no doubt that human judgment is prone to many flaws, and failure to understand the statistical nature of much information is a prime example. These flaws genuinely do cause us to draw false conclusions and misinterpret evidence. That is one reason for the whole Roy Meadows sudden infant death fiasco a few years back. It also affects psychologists as much as other people, though: that is why Ministry of Justice psychologists persisted for years with “risk reduction” programmes for sex offenders which in fact made them worse.
And as for denial, it is psychologists who have illuminated the way this causes overenthusiastic pronouncements about major countries being finished with this virus in three weeks. Such trumpery.
thank you for the comment . Please could you let me have a source for your very interesting comment about risk reduction . Certainly I have been unconvinced by some of the programmes of which I heard but this was more gut feeling .
( Occasionally some of the people that I dealt with professionally had been the victims of CSA )
It’s been in the news quite a bit since the story first broke in 2017. I summarised and referenced in my book “Bad Psychology” some of the main evidence which existed even before the MOJ’s admission of failure. The paper which forced them to admit the problem is available online at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/623876/sotp-report-web-.pdf
Since then there has been a court case taken by one of the researchers who was bullied and intimigated for daring to find the wrong thing: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5d289244ed915d2feaf5f7ff/Ms_K_Hopkins_V_Secretary_of_State_for_Justice-_jdgt__reasons.pdf
I doubt if the legal action is anything like finished yet.
Some very salutary lessons for the discipline no doubt. However, I think the author may be overreaching here when he argues that psychology does not have much to say about issues relating to the pandemic. Why, for example, did panic-buying set in so quickly, and why did people buy so much, of all things, loo roll? What were people thinking and why? Why do some people, in the face of such repeated and consistent warnings to social-distance, flagrantly disregard them, and yet others observe stringently? How could they be better encouraged, without the use of blanket force? How do people cope with social isolation, and how could they cope better (or worse)? Why have some police forces gone overboard with enforcing the regulations, whilst others have been more lax, and how successful are the approaches in terms of enforcing outcomes such as social distancing?
All of these questions are relevant to effective management of the pandemic and all of them, arguably, are within the remit of psychology. Indeed, as one of the posters above has mentioned, there are many real-world health psychology studies that have demonstrated compliance with behavioural outcomes in real-world settings. Whilst I am very critical of the discipline as a whole, especially its (lack of) scientific credentials and efficacy, there are clearly many issues where the discipline could speak meaningfully to. Perhaps the issue here has been which theories and research psychologists and their advisors have paid heed to – studies with low ecological validity, small sample sizes, poor generalisability etc. – as the author here as rightfully pointed out.
I used to work in hospitals and the opinion I formed from observation was this.
In most hospitals, psychologists and psychiatrists usually wear a white coat when ‘treating’ or consulting with patients, most often those with mental health problems. My opinion is that the purpose of the white coat is simply to allow onlookers to know which is the patient and which is not.
Whatever the failings of psychologists I think the cognitive biases they identify do skew people’s perception of risk. It would be interesting to see how availability bias played out if we had saturation TV and media coverage of the annual flu season, daily cases and deaths and hospitals overstretched. Would people stop descending en masse to shopping centres and attending Christmas parties if they knew that during their lifetime they may unknowingly cause a flu death by not social distancing?
As a budding psychologist I percieve that making an extreme judgement about a field or discipline is absolutely wrong when your judgement is based on the few people practicing it in way not appreciated by all and having a higher position name and representing the whole community of psychologist as everyone is a human and can have their baises and different schemas and perspectives about a particular siuation. Considering what the article said, I agree that the psychologist mentioned above may have speculated while forming their judgements and should have focused on a more scientific way of approaching a global situation as it can’t be give single conclusion from past experiment on people. But that doesn’t mean that the discipline has nothing to contribute, on very basic note you contradicting their point is because of high meta cognitive abilities and ability to make sense out things in a better way than other as a human (as psychology explains), and indeed people should worry in such pandemic situation but their is a certain line to it because the way all the world is worried, such prolonged stress can lead to mental problems. So I think not completely but in a way you and those psychologists as well are right but not completely.
The article makes certain sweeping statements based on a few studies that fail to represent the discipline in its entirety. Framing may lead to cognitive biases, which may distort our risk perception. However, individuals will react differently to varying levels of risk perception. Governments have responded differently based on their risk perception and resource endowment – the ability to contain the spread of the disease. Lastly, viewing a two per cent death rate as small or large is based on how much one values life.
I suspect that most of us don’t trust the psychologists on coronavirus or, indeed, anything else.
Psychologists have shown that they can be trusted so long as they stick to the evidence. Behaviour exists, and like anything else that exists it can be studied scientifically. Where psychologists go wrong, IMO, (and I say this as a member of the profession since 1971) is when they depart from the evidence, and start giving “professional” opinions which are little more than personal biases or folklore presented as truths. Arguably, one could say the same of all scientists. One problem is that there are many therapists, pundits, etc, who are understood to be psychologists but who actually aren’t.
A statement from the British Psychological Society:
“We were disappointed to read the ‘Don’t trust the psychologists on coronavirus’ piece, and have written a response on what psychologists are doing to positively contribute to the UK government response. This is published on our website here (https://www.bps.org.uk/news…, and we would ask that you consider including it alongside the original article.”
Bang on.
But in addition to the various crises in psychology, I think this whole awful event is also highlighting the often poor sense of professional boundary/limit of competence that psychologists can tend towards. And it is in those circumstances that the effect of the crises in psychology cannot be identified and accommodated for in the forming of an opinion.
Last night I watched a developmental (research) psychologist, when asked why it was so hard to stay indoors, tell the nation that it was because ‘we need human contact’ and that we should ‘breathe’. My phone blew up with non-psychologist friends asking me if I was watching it. What that psychologist could have said when asked to comment was “Hmmm… not really the area of expertise of a developmental psychologist… what you need is a health psychologist…they specialise in the psychology of health related behaviour…oh you don’t know one…here, let me help you find one”.
But this is not new. In medico-legal work I frequently come across psychologists undertaking assessments for conditions in which they seem to have no particular expertise. In addition between the different professional disciplines of psychology, we seem to really enjoy stepping into other roles. Educational and forensic psychologists doing general diagnostic assessments, clinical psychologists doing highly specialist risk assessment and capacity assessment that should be done by another profession entirely, counselling psychologists undertaking neuropsychological assessments…. all fine if you work in a service where you are supported or supervised by someone who has been qualified in a discipline where that activity forms part of their core professional training. But actually there seem to me to be many psychologists acting as independent experts in areas where they have acquired their knowledge and skills through osmosis. Not through a programme of education and examination that has been ratified by the BPS.
It seems that there is no real requisite for role specificity in psychology and as a result, because there is crossover in some areas, and because you can have a ‘psychological opinion’ on anything, we get psychologists undertaking activities and opining on matters for which they really have no particular knowledge base or skillset. They might do an OK job. But I wonder how many psychologists would be happy to pay a professional, for a professional service, only to find out that actually they were relying on transferable skills and general knowledge.
‘Media’ psychologists do fantastically well from the lack of regulation and consequence for operating outside of their expertise. The public do not generally differentiate between the different expertise of the different types of psychologist; that should be our ethical undertaking as professionals.
The public are not stupid. They know when we are talking rubbish. And I think it is to the detriment of the psychological professions and not in the public interest.