Pop Psychology

25-09-23 00 / episode: 252

Script

"Pop psychology.

What is that? Well, it's a short word for popular psychology.

And that's talking about psychology that people have taken and popularized.

They take an idea that some psychologists have talked about and then they tell the whole world about it.

One example I think is pop psychology is talking about parents.

There's a lot of pop psychology from the seventies and eighties and nineties that talks about parents as hurting their Children, not on purpose, but through some kind of uh consistent problem, like pushing them to study too much or haranguing them to be good or what have you.

I think that there's a lot of um, cases where the Children like that type of pop psychology because they can blame the parents on all their problems.

It takes away a lot of the responsibility from the Children.

Now, that's just one example of pop psychology.

Another example might be the pop bottle theory where if you have some kind of problem in your past and you don't release it, it's like a pop bottle, you shake it and the pressure builds up until the pop bottle goes boom and it explodes.

I don't think that that's exactly true either.

Well, there might be cases like that.

Psychologists aren't totally, um, making up nonsense.

But peop, once it becomes popular psychology, people take these ideas and apply them in situations where they shouldn't be applied.

So we have to be careful with pop psychology, take everything with a grain of salt.

Nowadays, I mistrust a lot of pop psychology because people use it in to explain away all their problems or to push their problems on to other people or push the responsibility onto other people when really a lot of our problems are caused by ourselves and we just have to take more responsibility.

What do you think about pop psychology? Do you have any examples of pop psychology that you've read in the media?"