Beyond Psychobabble

The views of Kay Deaux, professor of psychology at the City University of New York and president of American Psychological Society, on approaches used to assess various aspects of psychology; factors which influence 'babbling' among individuals; details on some of the errors which can evolve when attempting to analyze psychological problems.

By Annie Murphy Paul, published on July 01, 1998 - last reviewed on March 22, 2005

TODAY

If psychology were a song, it would be a crossover hit. Once unfamiliar and even controversial, its language has become our native tongue.

So says Kay Deaux, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the City University of New York and president of the American Psychological Society. She claims that the approaches and insights of psychology have been absorbed so completely by the culture that they are often mistaken for folk wisdom.

"Psychologists are constantly told that their results are 'just common sense' or 'what everybody knows,'" she observes. "Well, everybody knows it because psychology taught it to them."

A prime example is the notion of a slip of the tongue. We all recognize that people may unwittingly say more than they mean -- but Freud was pilloried when he proposed his theories on repression and its little lapses. Far from common sense, such ideas were considered shockingly strange.

Psychology has often, as in this case, given a name to an everyday phenomenon. But it has also introduced utterly new concepts, which have quickly made their way from the lab to real life. intelligence quotient, or I.Q., is one of these. So is the idea of a "learning curve."

Of course, lay people don't always employ these terms correctly. "Sometimes the words are used in a way that the people who developed them would approve of," says Deaux. "Other times, it would make them shudder." But errors of translation are inevitable -- and offer further evidence that the public has taken psychology as its own.

Deaux just wishes psychology would get some of the credit. "Often people don't even recognize that they're using a psychological term," she says. "But I take these words for granted too." --A.M.P.

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