Psychology Myths and Misconceptions: Part 1
- Yana Lozovaya
- Mar 8, 2024
- 3 min read
Psychology is a very interesting science, as it is aimed to explain the causes and reasons why people behave a certain way, and it is very popular nowadays. However, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions about it that are being spread by popular films, literature and mass media that can influence our beliefs and daily life decisions. This article is aimed to reveal some of the most popular and surprising myths related to psychology.
Opposites attract
Despite being a popular claim, it has in fact no evidence that proves its veracity. However, there are many studies showing the opposite: especially in platonic relationships, similarity is a positive factor. Experimental research shows that if people have twice as many shared opinions about topics like religion and politics they will tend to like each other twice as much. Quite the contrary, we even tend to dislike people who are dissimilar to us.
Traumatic childhood memories are often repressed
The idea of existence of a psychological mechanism that actively suppresses traumatic experiences to protect against the potentially damaging consequences of the memory is very widely spread not only among non-professionals in this field, but also among psychologists themselves. The author of this concept is Sigmund Freud, who suggested it in the late 1890s. But the recent evidence shows quite the opposite: both people with psychological disorders and healthy people remember and in some cases even over-remember details of traumatic events. However it does not mean they remember it accurately, which links to another myth that our memory is like a recording of what happened, when in fact even if the event was very emotional and we are sure of accuracy of our memories, there is a high possibility of memories being distorted. A particularly interesting and a little bit ironic fact is that often so-called “repressed memories” are in fact false memories that can be imposed on people with the very same therapeutic methods used to restore supposedly repressed memories.
People only use 10% of their brain
You have probably heard about this idea that we only use a very little percentage of our brain, and to some extent, it is pleasing to believe that our brain is capable of something greater and incredible. But in fact, it would be very evolutionarily unprofitable for an organism to have an organ that is used inefficiently, but consumes a large amount of resources (20% of the oxygen we breathe for example). Furthermore, electrical stimulation during
neurosurgery hasn't shown any "silent areas" in the brain, and damage to any part of the brain would have significant consequences. However, it is true that we don't use all the potential of our brain, which means that we can develop new neural connections in the brain by solving challenging problems, for example, which will make us “smarter” in a way. In fact, this is where this myth most likely originated: a psychologist William James wrote a century ago that he doubted that average person achieve more than 10% of their intellectual potential.
People have a “learning style” that suits them most
Many people believe that if they learn via their preferred learning style it will be more effective. Some believe they learn better through visual representation of information like graphs and images, while others believe they are the auditory learner and remember information better when it is presented verbally. However, the evidence from scientific experiments has shown that the learning process is more effective when as much of our senses are engaged, so sticking to only one learning strategy reduces the effectiveness of learning.
Statistics of studies aimed to investigate how many people believe in such misconceptions show that in most cases more than 50% of participants believe in such myths. It is very important to challenge your beliefs and trust the information only from reliable sources that have scientific evidence supporting their claims.
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