THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY
In the teachers’ common room, the new recruit struggling with a
boisterous class seeks the advice of an older colleague. “Punish any
trouble-makers and show them who’s boss”, the veteran teacher says.
Anecdotally, such an approach may have seemed effective for this partic-
ular teacher, but is that really what works? Perhaps the novice teacher isn’t
giving enough praise, or doesn’t talk enough to the pupils. A psychologist
won’t just take anyone’s word for it. They’ll directly test the effects of
different teaching styles. They might allocate different kinds of teachers
Isn’t it all just obvious?
When people encounter reports of new psychological research in the
media, a common reaction is to think “I could have told them that”. In
some ways this is understandable. For a start, the subject matter of
psychology is people – something we’re all extremely familiar with.
Research has shown that such familiarity gives people false confi-
dence in a topic: for example, it’s been shown that we overestimate
our understanding of mundane technologies like zips and flush toilets
simply because we encounter them every day.
Secondly, a “folk psychology” has built up over tens of thousands
of years leading to a rich body of cultural wisdom. This can mean
that whatever psychological science uncovers, it’s easy to feel that we
already know about it. But folk psychology is contradictory. On finding
a like-minded romantic interest, for example, we might find it encour-
aging that such unions have a proven history as reflected in the saying
“birds of a feather flock together”. And yet we could just as easily have
fallen for an outlandish character and found the explanation for our
attraction in the adage “opposites attract”. So with some psychology
findings – whatever the result – with the benefit of hindsight it’s easy
to feel that the outcome was obvious and easy to explain.
In reality, some psychological findings turn out just the way we’d
expect while others are truly surprising. And of course, we can’t possibly
know in advance which will be which. Imagine psychological experi-
ments had confirmed the benefits of debriefing people after a trauma,
rather like a form of psychological first aid. That might seem obvious, but
actually it’s wrong. And it’s a good job that such research really has been
conducted because it turns out that routine, immediate psychological
debriefing after a trauma can actually harm victims – interrupting
natural recovery processes, inducing re- traumatization and in some
cases provoking symptoms through the power of suggestion! In fact
it’s possible to dine out on all sorts of surprising psychological findings
(did you know that wiggling your eyes from side to side can boost your
memory performance?), but to do so is to miss the point that the value
of a psychological finding shouldn’t rest on how surprising it is.