This is good stuff: A book review of "The Mythbusters of Psychology" by Harriet Hall

[howard112211]

Karl Popper said “Science must begin with myths and with the criticism of myths.” Popular psychology is a prolific source of myths. It has produced widely held beliefs that “everyone knows are true” but that are contradicted by psychological research. A new book does an excellent job of mythbusting: 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and the late, great skeptic Barry L. Beyerstein.
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Full Text: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2463

The book debunks popular myths.

Out of the points raised in the review this one is my favorite


"Individual efforts produce better quality ideas than group brainstorming sessions."


I hate group brainstorming sessions. Finally I get scientific confirmation that
it is justified.

[Odin2005]

1. Group brainstorming sessions are evil.

[Fumesucker]

3. A committee is the only known form of life with multiple assholes

And no brain..

[Odin2005]

4. Especially in a business setting!

[silverlib]

9. The best comittee is made up of 3 people

Two of whom are absent.

[LeftishBrit]

2. I shall have to get hold of this book!

The one that sends me furthest up the wall is the one about right-brained vs left-brained people with sharply differenet personalities! And the related one that the right hemisphere is 'the creative hemisphere' and that one can become more creative by 'releasing the right hemisphere from the inhibitions of the left hemisphere. If that were so, then the right hemispheres of 'split brain patients', who had the corpus callosum cut to control severe epilepsy, should all have been highly creative - and there is no evidence for this.

[Odin2005]

5. Yeah, that stuff is really annoying.

There are very important differences between the hemispheres, but the differences are very general ones, the left hemisphere has more "local" connections while the right hemisphere has more widespread connections. If you, say, hear the word "cow" the left hemisphere generally will come up with associations like "milk", "beef", "moo" "manure", while the right hemisphere will come up with associations like "farmyard smell" and "Aunt Mabel's old farm".

[antigone382]

7. ditto n/t

[antigone382]

6. Here's my least favorite one:

"*Men and women communicate in completely different ways.*"

"There are differences, but they are very slight, probably not enough to be meaningful, and definitely not enough to suggest that they are from different planets as claimed in the book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Women don’t talk more than men: a study of college students carrying recorders showed that both sexes talked about 16,000 words a day."

[truedelphi]

8. My husband disagrees.

According to him, women talk far more, due to the vast number of instructions that they are continually offering up.

I say, that is just the price men pay to be with the Superior Sex!

I mean, it ain't women = X chromosome
Men = Y chromosome

My theory is that men = three fourths an X chromosome, but since back in the day, the scientists we4re almost all men, they didn't want to label the male chromosome correctly.

[antigone382]

10. did you know it was a woman scientist who discovered the function of x and y chromosomes?!

(not agreeing or disagreeing with you, just remembered something interesting and pretty off-topic). I don't remember her name off the top of my head :(, but when my environmental science class took a trip to Oak Ridge, she was just down the hall from one of the labs we visited. I didn't get to meet her, but it seemed pretty awesome to be in the building where such an important discovery was made, just down the hall from the person who made it. Oak Ridge was a fascinating place to visit, but also a bit creepy...we had to get clearance way in advance to go. :)


I found her! Liane B. Russell is her name:

"Dr. Russell's scientific contributions have been chiefly in the areas of basic mammalian genetics, mammalian mutagenesis, and teratogenesis.

(snip)

In the late 1950s, she and her co-workers established that the mammalian Y chromosome was male-determining and that XO, as well as XX, was female. Her subsequent discovery and analysis of variegated phenotypes produced by autosomal genes located in X-autosome translocations, led her to propose the single-active-X-chromosome hypothesis, published in 1961, simultaneously with (and differing slightly from) Lyon's inactive-X hypothesis."

http://mouse.ornl.gov/people/russell.html

[truedelphi]

12. Oh shoot, I'm wrong.

Great to hear about it being a woman who discovered the chromosome gender thing-ee.

And pls feel free to disagree whenever you need to.

I did sleep through most of the Witches/Warlock seminar on hexing, so it probably cannot hurt you (much)

[truedelphi]

13. Oh and something else:

I had never heard of XO.

I had no idea.

BTW Antigone was my favorite required play back in HS days.

Had to read it in French, but still loved it.

[eridani]

11. I think that's wrong--it depends on the nature of the task.

This has actually been tested. Turns out if the task is composing a crossword puzzle, individuals do better. If the task is solving one, committees do better. Basic common sense provides an obvious explanation. When assigning a task to a group or an individual, first figure out if the task is more like composing a crossword puzzle or more like solving one.

[howard112211]

14. I never heard it framed like that. That is really interesting actually.

I guess part of why I hate group activity is because I was usually assigned to composing a crossword puzzle in a group and it was frustrating.