Psychobabble and Biobunk

by Carol Tavris

This selection of opinion essays and book reviews by Carol Tavris--written for The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Scientific American, and other publications--applies psychological research and principles of scientific and critical thinking to issues in the news. As readers work their way interactively through the essays--thinking through the author's position and their own on the various issues, they engage and strengthen their critical thinking skills--e.g., asking questions and wondering; defining terms; examining the evidence; analyzing assumptions and biases--one's own and those of others; avoiding emotional reasoning; not oversimplifying; considering other interpretations; and tolerating uncertainty. Focuses on important areas such as Science vs. Pseudoscience, Controversies in Child Development, The Politics and Science of Gender Research, Applying Psychology to Social Issues, and Mental Disorder and Treatment. Individual essay topics include, for example, The Popularity of Predictions; Thinking Critically About Alternative Medicine; Thinking Critically About Mystical Messages; The Working Mother Debate; How Much Influence Do Mothers Have?; How Much Influence Do Parents Have?; How Critical Are the First Years of Life?; The Interpretation of Differences; The Paradox of Gender; Biological Politics and the Study of Gender; Emotional Epidemics and Their Consequences; The Daycare Sex-abuse Scandals; Adolescent Violence; The Limits of Medication; and Thinking Critically About Psychotherapy. For anyone who wants to explore the psychological basis of current popular culture issues and to engage in, and strengthen, the critical thinking skills.

Genres: Psychology, Science, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 28, 1997

About the author

Carol Tavris earned her Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary program in social psychology at the University of Michigan, and ever since has sought to bring research from the many fields of psychology to the public. She is author of The Mismeasure of Woman, which won the Distinguished Media Contribution Award from the American Association from Applied and Preventive Psychology, and the Heritage Publications Award from Division 35 of the APA. Dr. Tavris is also the author of Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion and coauthor with Carole Wade of Invitation to Psychology; Psychology in Perspective; Critical and Creative Thinking: The case of love and war; and The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective. She has written on psychological topics for many different magazines, journals, edited books, and newspapers, notably the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. She has given keynote addresses and workshops on, among other topics, critical thinking, pseudoscience in psychology, anger, gender, and psychology and the media. She has taught in the psychology department at UCLA and at the Human Relations Center of the New School for Social Research in New York. Dr. Tavris is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a charter Fellow of the American Psychological Society; and, for fun, a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. When she isn't writing or lecturing, she can be found walking the trails of the Santa Monica mountains with her border collie, Sophie.

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tend to hold books that profess to expose poor thinking to a higher standard than most other books. On this level, Psychobabble and Biobunk had its problems. There are a few places where the author overstates her case to make a point, but in the very act of doing so engages in psychobabble, as when she says specifically that there is "zero" correlation between personality traits of adoptive children and the adoptive parent..."if home environment had a strong influence." She surely knows that "zero correlation" is a very specific statistical term. Zero correlation would mean that one characteristic changed while another does not. If it were indeed zero correlation then the statement about "strong" influence would be incorrect since there would be 'no' influence. Surely she meant to say weak correlation or something along those lines.

This kind of mistep early in the book almost had me tossing it aside, but I did continue reading it and I found several of the later essays in the book interesting and thought provoking. I think the book is worthwhile and enjoyed much of it, but it is to be taken with a grain of salt, as are the books the author points out as weak themselves.

[Fred · Rating 2 out of 5]

Carol Tavris is a smart and engaging writer, but this collection of essays – book reviews, actually – is too scatter-shot, despite being broken down into four loosely connected sections, and moreover too dated to really be of great lasting value. Some of the titles she references or critiques are of interest, particularly to those already with an interest in psychotherapy and related fields, and she delves into some genuinely intriguing topics, like the FBI’s behavioral science unit or the so-called Nobel Prize sperm bank. But there’s little that’s new here, and quite a few of the essays date back ten years or more. Tavris’ dissection of the DSM – or, rather, her analysis of Kutchins and Kirk’s 1999 dissection – can’t help but feel a little dated, now that we’re one instead of fourteen years away from the upcoming 5th edition. We’ve seen a bevy of articles and reports on the debate over what constitutes a mental illness, the contentious debates through which diagnoses are defined and the Manual is put together. It’s easy to see why Tavris might have wanted to save some of these intriguing (if not always compelling) thoughts for posterity and why, despite the book’s thinness, it survives into a third edition. But, more than anything else, I think her collection illustrates the fact that book reviews – perhaps like blog posts or op-ed pieces or other of-the-moment ephemera – often can’t survive outside their original context.