The Psychologist March 2022 by The Psychologist

the

psychologist march 2022

Confidence, wisdom, and the crowd The Dunning-Kruger Effect and Groupthink examined

also

We need to talk about Long-Covid…

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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www.thepsychologist.org.uk 07/02/2022 20:44

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psychologist march 2022

contact The British Psychological Society 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR 0116 254 9568 info@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk the psychologist and research digest www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.bps.org.uk/digest www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk Twitter: @psychmag Download our iOS/Android apps advertising Display: Engage with 50,000+ psychologists across BPS communication channels 020 7880 6213 bps-sales@redactive.co.uk Recruitment: Promote your campaign to the largest audience of qualiﬁed psychologists 020 7880 6224 jobsinpsychology@redactive.co.uk february 2022 issue 61,130 dispatched cover Marcelina Amelia environment Printed by PCPLtd

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Confidence, wisdom, and the crowd The Dunning-Kruger Effect and Groupthink examined

also

We need to talk about Long-Covid…

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

The Psychologist is the magazine of The British Psychological Society It provides a forum for communication, discussion and controversy among all members of the Society, and aims to fulﬁl the main object of the Royal Charter, ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied’

The Psychologist needs you! We rely on your submissions throughout the publication, and in return we help you to get your message across to a large and diverse audience. For details of all the available options, plus our policies and what to do if you feel these have not been followed, see www.thepsychologist.org.uk/contribute The main message, though, is simply to engage with us. Contact the editor Dr Jon Sutton on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, or tweet us on @psychmag.

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Deputy Editor Annie Brookman-Byrne, Shaoni Bhattacharya (job share) Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Matthew Warren (Editor), Emily Reynolds, Emma Young

Associate Editors Articles Paul Curran, Michelle Hunter, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Peter Olusoga, Blanca Poveda, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson History of Psychology Vacant Culture Kate Johnstone, Chrissie Fitch Books Emily Hutchinson Voices in Psychology Madeleine Pownall Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Richard Stephens (Chair), Dawn Branley-Bell, Kimberley Hill, Sue Holttum, Deborah Husbands, Miles Thomas, Layne Whittaker

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psychologist march 2022

We need to talk about Long-Covid Andy Siddaway on the key role of psychologists in research, service design and interventions

The persistent irony of the Dunning-Kruger effect Robert D. McIntosh and Sergio Della Sala

The Commandos, mental mutiny and mindset Jonathan Rhodes on using imagery to enhance resilience

Groupthink – a monument to truthiness? Ramon Aldag

‘Educational psychology is inherently political’ We meet Victoria Lewis

‘We are all involved in this false information universe’ We meet Tom Buchanan

Jobs in psychology

Books William Todd Schultz on creativity and the chaos rainbow; Divine Charura and Colin Lago; and much more

Culture Procession, Couples Therapy, Encanto and more

One on one Raj Gnanaiah

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

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The original paper outlining the DunningKruger Effect – ‘Unskilled and unaware of it’ – is a good example of the scientific storytelling we considered last month. It opens with McArthur Wheeler, having walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight with no visible attempt at disguise, baffled that the police had captured him. ‘But I wore the juice,’ he mumbled. Apparently, Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras. We all have our ‘I wore the juice’ moments, and see Wheelers in our daily life. So the effect feels real. But what’s really behind it? Similarly, what’s the true story behind groupthink? Elsewhere, there’s misinformation (p.42; also listen to our latest Research Digest podcast), and Long-Covid (p.24). With the virus circulating at high levels, the vaccine will not fully protect us from its lasting effects. So why aren’t we talking about Long-Covid, and psychologists’ role in it?

Letters Neurodiverse psychs write

Obituaries Peter Saville

News European Congress; child mental health; member conduct; events; and more

Digest Dark triad

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‘This hid my shadow, my own uncertainty’ Sharon O’Driscoll on feeling pressure to ‘make the known unknown’ Magic, gangs and prison Richard Wiseman interviews Darren Way and Gareth Foreman

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Tim Sanders

Neurodiversity is not just for those we work with ‘On my first day of training, our course director told us, “Each of you is probably waiting for me to take you aside and say we’ve made a mistake – you’re not meant to be here”. That had not crossed my mind. “Don’t worry”, she went on, “it’s not as tough as you think. You’ve chosen a career based on having conversations with people”. Suddenly my anxiety went through the roof.’

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The feeling that you shouldn’t really be here, that you’re going to be found out, seems to be a pretty common experience among psychologists. Thankfully, most of us have colleagues we can confide in, who remind us we all feel like that sometimes, and that we are actually good enough. But for many of us who are neurodiverse, imposter syndrome and the fear of discovery are very real. As autistic psychologists, we keep meeting strange assumptions which put unnecessary barriers in our way: that autistic people cannot hold down a job; that we should not (or should only) work with autistic people, or that we can fill only specific roles; that we couldn’t possibly be an applied psychologist. Here we deal mainly with that final assumption: should the aspiring neurodivergent psychologists among us disclose our diagnoses, on application forms for jobs or training, or in our work or study? Supportive colleagues often reluctantly advise us not to, and divert many of us from the tortuous path to qualification. What about the qualified among us? How will colleagues, managers, and networks react to our diagnoses? Can we ask for reasonable

adjustments without our competence being questioned or becoming known as ‘the autistic psychologist’? We write as autistic psychologists, but neurodiversity is far broader than autism, and caring professions broader than applied psychology. Whilst we can only write about our own experiences – and some of us share individual personal reflections throughout this letter – we hear these echoed by other neurodivergent health professionals. We therefore also consider neurodiversity in healthcare more broadly, hoping to extend the conversation. ‘When I turn around and tell staff teams that actually “I am autistic” it feels like their heads will explode. Initially they can’t handle it but then I explain and demonstrate how I meet the various diagnostic criteria (mainly hidden in my office or away from work) and then they get it.’ Not all our experiences are bad. Not all neurotypical colleagues hold mythical views about neurodiversity. Most of us have given our names to this letter because we are in roles where our neurodiversity is understood, supported, and valued for what it can bring to our teams. Indeed, many of us who are ‘out’ have had colleagues come to us to confidentially discuss how they relate to some or all of autism. But we recall our past experiences, and continue to hear from others (both pre- and postqualification) who do not yet feel able to make their neurodivergence public, for fears of how others will react, and how it will affect their career. ‘Due to a lack of understanding and support I had

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the psychologist march 2022 letters significant mental health difficulties as a teenager, including self-harm and hospitalisation. When I was accepted onto the training course an occupational health consultant told me that, “People with your history do not do well on the course”, and, “I am strongly advising you not to do the course”. This made me feel unable to ask for support or reasonable adjustments throughout my training.’ Why does there seem to be this view that an autistic person can’t be a psychologist? First, there may be a conflation of autism and neurodiversity with comorbid mental health difficulties, which are more prevalent in the autistic community (Lugo-Marin et al., 2019). But the stigma of mental health problems need not be a barrier to applied psychology work, as psychologists with lived experience have argued (see the BPS statement from 2020, via tinyurl.com/bpslivedexp). Second, autism remains something colleagues joke about. ‘I was having lunch with a couple of colleagues and they were discussing someone whose communication had seemed odd to them. There was a negative comment made amongst a bit of giggling, suggesting, “She must’ve been on the spectrum or something”, implying that there was something wrong with being on the autistic spectrum.’ For some, being autistic seems to be synonymous with being socially awkward, which seems incompatible with the idea of an insightful, understanding and empathetic psychologist. Although there is no substance to the myth that autistic people cannot be empathic (Fletcher-Watson & Bird, 2019), when others make this assumption, make a joke out of autism, or speak about autism in a derogatory way, it feels unsafe for us to disclose. But third – there is a more fundamental problem. Most applied psychologists need excellent social communication skills: by definition, these do not come easily to autistic people. Regardless of how one might reframe the language of diagnostic criteria, it is selfevident that joining most applied psychology professions is a challenge for many autistic people. Would we be better suited to careers which limit our interaction with people? As autistic psychologists we think we have something valuable to offer. It starts with our interest and motivation. Psychology is a natural field for many autistic people. Many of us have been studying people since we were at school to try and work out how people think and behave. ‘After pre-teen bullying by so-called friends, I became fascinated by observing the outsiders in whichever social group I found. That drove me into psychology, into research on children’s peer relationships, and finally into clinical psychology. It was only later in life that I realised that I and many of the other outsiders were probably autistic.’ How can motivation turn into competence? Skills are learned. Struggling with social communication does not

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stop you developing good skills. Many of us find social interaction challenging, and at times come across as awkward, but we have worked hard to understand how to communicate and socialise in a neurotypical way. The path to qualification is hard for neurotypical psychologists too. However, when there are rigorous and fair admission and training standards, by definition anyone qualified as an applied psychologist has acquired core competencies, and anyone on a training course has a good chance of acquiring them. It follows then that any autistic person in either position will have developed sufficient social communication skills to work in applied psychology. ‘By the time I had gained a training place, I knew how to build rapport and communicate with service users, and the written elements of the course were a breeze. While fellow trainees worked hard to brush up their academic and research skills, I put efforts into improving my spoken and non-verbal communication with colleagues and other professionals.’ Applied psychologists are not Mary Poppins – practically perfect in every way – nor do we need to be. Applied psychologists are trained to function in multi-disciplinary teams, or to fill specific roles in a system (e.g. healthcare, education, or business). Functioning systems require the right skill mix, with different people contributing complementary skills to meet the task demands. Autistic psychologists working within systems may add value through our (perhaps more unusual) skills, with other team members bringing skills we may be less proficient in. Furthermore, within all teams and systems there are toxic relationships and poor communication, which are not caused by autism. Sometimes, attributing some poor communication to miscommunication between neurotypes, rather than to hostile intent, can defuse anger and help teams function well. Equally, whilst autistic people are very diverse, we may naturally have greater strengths than neurotypical colleagues in all sorts of areas – for instance attention to detail, precise written communication, understanding statistics, following correct procedures, integrity, reliability and straight talking. Do we add anything unique? Consider the service user’s perspective. We find that many autistic service users value autistic professionals who they feel understand them. It is not only our lived experience that counts though. The Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012) suggests that empathising across neurotypes is challenging for both autistic and neurotypical people, rather than autistic people lacking empathy. We may therefore be better than neurotypicals at empathising with other autistic people (Crompton et al., 2020). We may also be more alert to autistic symptoms among the people we work with, and (where appropriate) may be able to use self-disclosure to destigmatise autism. ‘I was recently working with a new client, who, at the start of the assessment, almost immediately apologised for being neurodivergent. It made me sad that he felt the need to apologise for this.

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I asked him not to apologise and explained I was also neurodivergent, to which he seemed surprised, but relieved.’ To show it can be done, several of us have described our experiences of working as applied psychologists (e.g. Muggleton & Johnston, 2016; Hawker, 2017; Radev, 2020; Welsh, 2020). But it sometimes feels as if we are very few. Many of us earlier in our careers are exhausted by doubts about our practice, working in systems that make our jobs harder, and having to mask our autism. Psychologists who are neurodivergent in other ways (for example, ADHD, dyscalculia, dyslexia, and dyspraxia) report similar experiences. So do neurodiverse colleagues in related professions (including health professionals, teachers, and support workers). As a discipline that prides itself on understanding individual differences, on formulation over diagnosis, and on understanding the mind and behaviour, applied psychology needs to catch up with medicine (c.f. Doherty et al., 2021) in including and valuing neurodiversity within teams. To come together, two groups need a shared goal to complete (think Sherif’s Robbers Cave), which the pressures on services provide. We therefore need to create an environment where our neurodiverse colleagues feel safe to disclose, raising awareness of their presence, and beginning dialogues about how to mobilise their generic, specific, and unique skills. Acceptance of neurodiverse colleagues is key. Neurodiversity is more than a subject for research, assessment and intervention. It is part of your team and your profession. The BPS best-practice guidelines on working with autism, in many ways excellent, rightly guide psychologists on advising employers about autistic people with significant intellectual impairments or other difficulties. It is largely silent on how to talk to or be a good colleague to an autistic person; how to ask an autistic employee about what adaptations they might find helpful; how to manage them and make best use of their neurodivergence; what an autistic-friendly workplace might look like; or how to supervise or be supervised by an autistic psychologist. It is a document about ‘doing to’ autistic people rather than ‘working with’ autistic people. Being accepted as an autistic psychologist means neither feeling judged for being autistic, nor being embarrassed by our autism. It means neither having to Letters online: Find more letters at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/debates, including: New therapist, new hope Fran Stalley on a perhaps unusual relationship with her psychologist David Pike, plus his own thoughts.

Deadline for letters for the April edition is Friday 25 February. Letters received after this date will be considered for the following month and/or for publication online. Email letters to psychologist@bps.org.uk with the subject line ‘Letter to the editor’.

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keep proving we are good enough, nor being rolled out as the token autistic psychologist. ‘I applied to join a group writing a guidance document about autism. I talked about being an autistic psychologist in my application, as well as my clinical and research experience in the area, but didn’t make the cut. A few weeks later, the group asked me to join as they wanted an autistic person as an expert by experience. I turned it down. Although I wanted to help, it felt like all they were interested in was my autism, and my years of training and experience weren’t relevant. I wasn’t going to be one of them, I was going to be a subject.’ Acceptance means being invited, included and accepted in informal social interactions between colleagues, whilst recognising these may be harder for us than working with clients. It means providing safe supervision which allows us not only to disclose our autism without automatic questioning of our fitness to practice, but also to reflect on how autism affects our practice, so (like everyone else) we can identify how to build on our strengths and overcome our difficulties. It means local and national leaders valuing diversity in all forms, not tokenism, and making it safer to express and disclose differences. Diversity means everyone is different and best seen as an individual, not a label. Indeed, many psychologists will not have a formal diagnosis, and may not need one. Some of us need reasonable adjustments to work well, but these are diverse too. Even if you are highly experienced, asking is better than believing you understand autism and know best. Some autistic psychologists are better at narrow or specialist roles; others are not. Some work best with expectations about our work made explicit from the start; others do not need that. Some of us find large meetings helpful; others find them difficult, especially in person, preferring virtual attendance, or to be excused when we are not needed and can read the minutes. Some prefer to form social relationships in a busy office; others prefer a quiet room to work in, or at least a consistent desk. Some find it less stressful to have plenty of notice about changes, and clear information about them; others thrive on spontaneity. But reasonable adjustments are ineffective or unusable unless we are accepted as we are. The best way to help us is to make us feel fully included in the workforce, understanding if we need to have lunch by ourselves, seek stimulation, or are quiet or slow to get jokes or join in office banter. In an inclusive environment, we can spend more time and energy on our team’s shared goals, and less on acting neurotypical. We need to think more broadly about neurodiversity. It is easy to think of neurodiversity as a topic of study, or a client group we support, and to forget that neurodiverse psychologists are among us. The consequent sense of ‘othering’ makes it hard for those of us who are neurodivergent to disclose and use our neurodiversity. We are living proof that autistic people can be psychologists. But for each of us who have signed this letter, there are many more psychologists who do not feel safe letting you

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the psychologist march 2022 letters know they see the world differently. They are not just part of a team but your team, in your workplace. All they want is to be able to go to a colleague on those days when they feel like an imposter, and to be reminded that they are good enough, that they are a valued part of the team, and that they are meant to be here. Dr Joshua Muggleton, Clinical Psychologist Dr David Hawker, Clinical Psychologist Elizabeth Henshaw, Trainee Clinical Psychologist Dr Kirsty Horne, Principal Clinical Psychologist Dr Jake Hutchinson, Senior Clinical Psychologist Lydia Little, Senior Service Manager Dr Alice Nicholls, Clinical Psychologist Dr Patrick Welsh, Senior Clinical Psychologist On behalf of others: see online version for full list.

Crompton, C.J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C.V.M. et al. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism: International journal of research and practice, 27(7), 1704-1712. Doherty, M., Johnson, M. & Buckley, C. (2001). Supporting autistic doctors in primary care. British Journal of General Practice, 71, 294-295. Fletcher-Watson, S. & Bird, G. (2019). Autism and empathy: What are the real links? Autism: International journal of research and practice, 24(1), 3-6. Hawker, D. (2017). Practising Clinical Psychology on the Autistic Spectrum. Clinical Psychology Forum 294, 9-13. Lugo-Marin, J., Magan-Maganto, M., Rivero-

Santana, A. et al. (2019). Prevalence of Psychiatric Disorders in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 59, 22-33. Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883-887. Muggleton, J. & Johnston, K. (2017). ‘You’ve hired a psychologist with autism?!’: Reflections on being a trainee clinical psychologist with autism. Clinical Psychology Forum, 288, 5-8. Radev, S. (2020). Strengths and weaknesses of being born a ‘Little Psychologist’. Clinical Psychology Forum, 326, 49-52. Welsh, P. (2020). How do I answer that. Clinical Psychology Forum, 335, 21-24.

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Will the drive for post-pandemic ‘wellness’ make us sicker? The pandemic has created widespread concerns about the mental health of the many who had to endure harsh circumstances – including loss of work and of income, debilitation and bereavement. Whilst most have proven to be resilient as the pandemic has unfolded, especially those blessed with financial security and with communal and family support, up to a quarter of the population has been left struggling with the aftermath. In response, there have been appeals in the national media for more recruitment of psychiatric nurses, doctors and psychotherapists to ‘restore the equilibrium of tens of thousands of adults and children […] tipped over the edge into mental illness’. Many leading psychologists in the UK have joined this call for better resourcing of mental health services – all of which is understandable.

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But it is vital to ask whether a ‘more of the same’ treatment approach could make things worse in the long term. This question is based upon three clinical observations. First, rates of psychological distress have been on the rise for decades prior to the pandemic, despite the steady infusion of government funds into the psychological therapy services. Second, for many who use public health services, their personal troubles reflect or are shaped by societal ills such as loneliness, impoverishment, and economic inequality. Third, commonly used talking therapies and technologies of wellbeing, delivered with good intentions by their practitioners, are less helpful than is widely supposed: especially for those struggling with social and material hardship. In promoting a seemingly benign form of individualism – the belief that each of us can fortify or even

heal ourselves, if we really choose – these interventions may often serve to conceal and strengthen the toxic social conditions that give rise to widespread malaise in the first place. If psychology is to have a role in helping to alleviate the distress post-pandemic, then it must allow us to see ourselves as real, embodied beings, both shaped and enabled by an equally real world that resists mere wishfulness. This is a world that, in its current neoliberal form, is riven by social injustices which can manifest in our personal lives as inchoate feelings, yet with powerful implications for the public realm. In the UK, widespread frustrations born of decades of economic and political neglect met with myths of sovereignty and with relentless media deceptions to fuel the Brexit vote, and to all but guarantee the defeat of the Labour Party in the last general election.

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These tumultuous events highlight the profound and subtle interconnection between what we mistakenly take to be our entirely private experience on the one hand, and our shared context and communal history, on the other. Above all these events may present a warning. The imbalances of wealth, power and privilege that afflict the UK must be recognised and addressed – if the many who have suffered in the pandemic are to regain any feelings of belonging and of wellness, and perhaps if the country is to have a

future as a stable, democratic entity. Faced with a global economic slump and gathering environmental breakdown, the task is to build upon the lessons of the Covid pandemic and to work toward a more equal, humane, and sustainable society. For this, we need a new kind of psychology that rejects the illusions of neoliberalism, and that acknowledges the impossibility of boosting wellbeing through the use of simplistic techniques, intended to change what is going on inside

of our heads or to ‘boost our healthgiving routines and behaviours’. We need a psychology that instead encourages ‘outsight’ into our wider milieu: that helps us to find the roots of our shared and individual malaise, and to reach toward more tangible answers. The Midlands Psychology Group are clinical, counselling and academic psychologists. See midpsy.org Full version thepsychologist.bps. org.uk/will-drive-post-pandemicwellness-make-us-sicker

Air pollution and mental health

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Most of us enjoy the glow of a cosy winter fire and the aroma of food cooking on a summer barbeque. But it’s well known now that they give off tiny particles and gases that can harm our health. In fact, wood smoke may be even more damaging than cigarettes. As this is a behavioural as well as a medical issue, why are psychologists not more concerned? According to a whole range of recent papers on cardiovascular health, infant development, cognitive decline, dementia and Parkinson’s disease, depression and suicide, neurology, and toxicology, it would appear that chronic exposure to fumes, whether from fires, farmyards, traffic, or artificially scented products, does us no good at all. So, why isn’t there more fuss? If we do not know the risks, or if we choose to ignore them, we cannot deal with the fallout. And who pays the costs? We know we do, if we end up wheezing and tottering our way through a tiring old age, or if we see our precious children being urgently rushed to A&E with a pollution related lifethreatening asthma attack. And what about the cost to the NHS and the number of useful years of life lost to painful illnesses, caused, or exacerbated, by air pollution? Perhaps, by discussing air pollution sources and their effects on the brain, biology and behaviour, psychologists can help reach the wider community, and push for more collective action. The air we breathe matters enormously, and scientific evidence on brain injury from air pollution is coming in fast. Josephine Cock PhD CPsychol AFBPsS (retired)

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Full version thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ air-pollution-and-mental-health

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the psychologist march 2022 letters

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25/01/2022 10:30

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‘Psychology can be the driving force to unite…’ Previewing the British Psychological Society hosted European Congress of Psychology, to be held in Brighton next year

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he vibrant city of Brighton will welcome the 2023 European Congress of Psychology (ECP) next summer – the first time for almost two decades the UK has hosted such a major general psychology conference. Hosted by the British Psychological Society, the 18th ECP is expected to attract thousands of psychologists from across the world under the theme ‘Psychology: Uniting communities for a sustainable world’. The BPS has been working with a number of organisations to build the event, including the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations (EFPA), which organises the bi-annual European Congresses, the University of Sussex and the University of Brighton. The BPS is focusing on sustainability and community in developing the ECP – considering the environmental impact of the event and hosting performances from local arts groups, and organising special events for early career researchers and students. Nicola Gale, Vice President and Treasurer of EFPA, and former BPS president, said the theme of next year’s congress should attract a wide range of practitioners and academics. ‘The ECP audience is not only people directly in the field. Those in the media, and policy makers and their advisers, are especially welcome to engage with what European psychology has to offer, and we know the BPS is especially well placed to bring in this audience.’ Gale, whose role also involves representing EFPA on the ECP organising committee and liaising with the BPS, said bringing people together at such an event gave

them the power to influence and advocate for change. ‘Psychology can be the driving force to unite and harness the power of community on a global scale… Having a good congress is naturally the primary aim, another however is attempting to leave a legacy. This has been envisaged for ECP2023 from the beginning as being primarily around influencing public policy. This gives an opportunity for presenters to submit work with an eye to impact, both in terms of extending the knowledge base and implementation in various applied fields. ‘One thing Covid-19 has taught us is the importance of getting good quality evidence out there quickly, and it would be nice if ECP2023 can make its mark in this way. Another important aspect of legacy and central to sustainability and the community focus of the theme is to leave a positive footprint for the Brighton community… as light as possible in terms of consumption of resources and adverse impact on the planet. This walks the talk in terms of the theme; what the Congress does must be congruent with what it promotes.’ Gale said another important aspect was for the congress to do something positive for the community and highlighted the partnership between Brighton and Sussex universities. ‘The organising committee will work with them to look for example at careers and mentoring for young people, opportunities to perform for local artists and arts students at the Congress, engagement with the public in psychology to increase understanding and foster wellbeing.’

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Organising an event such as the ECP, Gale said, was quite the feat and takes around four years. For 2023 that task is down to the BPS – including the society’s Director of Membership, Professional Development and Standards, Karen Beamish. She said she hoped the congress would be as vibrant as Brighton itself. ‘I hope it makes us all go home and think about our priorities for psychology. We hope delegates will have the chance to think about how we can do things more sustainably, and how we can be more community-minded in what we do.’ Dr Debra Malpass, BPS Director of Knowledge and Insight, has been leading on the scientific programme for the congress. She said the society wanted to include a diverse range of speakers who are representative of psychology and the communities they serve. This diversity will also be reflected in the members of the Scientific Committee and reviewers for ECP submissions. ‘We will be linking closely with the local Universities of Brighton and Sussex, both of whom work closely with their local communities… The event will be a great networking opportunity and we encourage psychologists from all communities, career stages, professions and research areas to participate.’ er The ECP 2023 will be hosted at The Brighton Centre between 3 and 6 July. For more information and to register your interest in attending see ecp2023.eu

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the psychologist march 2022 news

Australia Day Honour Professor Alexander Haslam, the British social psychologist now based at the University of Queensland, has been appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2022 Australia Day Honours for ‘significant service to tertiary education, particularly psychology, through research and mentoring’. The award is described as ‘an opportunity to celebrate those inspiring people who make the nation what it is’. Dr Nik Steffens (University of Queensland) told us: ‘We nominated Alex as a way to recognise his exceptional leadership and contributions over several decades. He has made the world a better place in many ways. His contributions have had a positive influence on the lives of many people… he made distinguished contributions to psychological science by pioneering understanding of big issues such as stereotyping and prejudice, tyranny and resistance, leadership and followership, and health and well-being. Alex is not only a deep thinker and stellar researcher, but an exceptional all-rounder. He excels as a passionate teacher of psychology – whether this is through lively lectures in the classroom, the collection of resources he put together for students around classic studies, and several textbooks he has written.’

Professor Haslam has also made significant contributions to various other communities in society by collaborating with organisations and industry to translate research to improve practice, engaging continuously in public debate and education, and serving in advisory functions. Steffens added: ‘Alex has been a great role model and mentor to younger generations of researchers and professionals. In this capacity, he has been extremely supportive and compassionate. He takes a genuine interest in the interests and works of others, while encouraging others to see the value of their work to the greater good. And despite his achievements and contributions, Alex remains humble, kind, and generous.’ Haslam said: ‘If there is one thing that this award highlights it is the exceptional quality of people that I work with. I can say honestly that over the course of my career there is nothing of any substance that I have done on my own, and for me the really rewarding part of my job is the motivation and intellectual uplift that I get from working with brilliant colleagues and students and from interacting with the many different groups of people around the world who engage enthusiastically with our work.’ js

New Member Conduct Rules, and call for panel members The British Psychological Society has implemented new rules and procedures, developed by members, with more clarity on what is, and what isn’t considered under the Member Conduct Rules, better transparency on process, and clear guidance on what sanctions are considered appropriate for breaches of the rules. Cheryl Jones, Chair of the MCR Review Group, said: ‘Now the rules are live [see www.bps.org.uk/newsand-policy/member-conduct-rules] we invite you to be a part of ensuring that the membership as a whole take

ownership of these new rules and their implementation. We are looking for members to join the Standing Panel from which all of our member conduct panels will be drawn. We want the Standing Panel to reflect the whole society, across all grades, domains and regions/nations, to facilitate inclusivity and diversity, so we can build a shared responsibility for upholding the standards that are based on our shared values.’ If you might be interested, please contact the QA & Standards team concerns@bps.org.uk for information.

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Understanding bad character Emma Young digests the research

Find our Research Digest at www.bps. org.uk/ digest Editor: Dr Matthew Warren Writers: Emily Reynolds, and Emma Young Reports, links and more on the Digest website 18

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wenty years ago, two Canadian psychologists published a paper that instantly captured the imagination of researchers – and reporters. Del Paulhus and Kevin Williams argued that a ‘Dark Triad’ of ‘overlapping but distinct’ toxic traits – subclinical psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism – explained much of what we might otherwise call a ‘bad’ character. Research into the Dark Triad shows no signs of slowing. But the concept is being challenged, and other psychologists are proposing different ways to get to grips with the darker side of human nature…

on this scale are cynical and unprincipled manipulators of others. Narcissists are entitled types who believe that they are superior beings, and should be treated that way. Paulhus and Williams argued that each of the Dark Triad traits has its own psychological profile, but they share a common core of ‘callous-manipulation’ – a disregard for the feelings and wellbeing of others, for personal gain. Dark Triad scales have now been used in literally hundreds of studies, with plenty of headlinegrabbing findings.

What exactly is the Dark Triad?

Dark traits = more attractive dates?

Paulhus and Williams focused on people who fell within the normal range of functioning. So, not diagnosed clinical psychopaths in jail for murder, say, but the kind of person you might find yourself sharing an office with; or, worse, a home. The three Dark Triad traits cover a range of anti-social beliefs and behaviours: Psychopathy is associated with low levels of empathy, and being high in impulsivity and thrill-seeking. Machiavellianism was named, in 1970, after the philosophy of Niccolo Machiavelli; people who score highly

This surprising conclusion from a 2016 speed-dating study garnered global coverage, including our own (tinyurl.com/digest290116). Both men and women who scored highly for narcissism were rated as being more attractive prospects for both short- and long-term relationships. Also, women – but not men – who scored higher for psychopathy received better ratings from their dates. However, participants’ ratings actually seemed to be influenced by other factors that were merely associated with dark traits: women who scored highly

07/02/2022 18:02

the psychologist march 2022 digest for psychopathy and narcissism were also considered to be more attractive, and male narcissists were more appealingly extraverted. Once the researchers controlled for the influence of attraction and extraversion, it didn’t matter how narcissistic a potential date was. Researchers have also recently disputed suggestions that scoring highly on dark traits might bring some other benefits, such as hedge fund success. In fact, unsurprisingly, most links between the Dark Triad and functioning in society have been distinctly less positive…

Faking and ghosting

Dark Triad traits have been linked to everything from faking in job interviews and exploitation of colleagues (a 2018 review led by James LeBreton in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behaviour summed up research on workplace behaviour) to criminal behaviour, and ghosting. A 2020 study of students in Spain, for example, found that two combinations of Dark Triad traits (being Machiavellian and narcissistic or Machiavellian and psychopathic) best predicted risky behaviours, such as getting into a fight or gambling. And a 2021 study of American adults (see tinyurl.com/digest171121) also found that those who’d scored higher on a Dark Triad scale were more likely to find it acceptable to ghost someone – to end a relationship by abruptly ceasing communication.

Challenges to the Triad

Though hugely popular, the concept of the Dark Triad has been challenged. In 2019, Joshua Miller at the University of Georgia, US, and colleagues published a review of work in the field in Current Directions in Psychological Science. ‘Unfortunately, several limitations to this research are unrecognised or ignored,’ they wrote. They argue that one of the biggest is an oversimplification of personality traits in the scales that are used. A study might identify someone as being ‘narcissistic’, say, simply on the basis of a high self-esteem score, when narcissism itself is more complicated (and ‘vulnerable’ narcissism is linked to low self-esteem). Neither is there a single disorder of ‘psychopathy’, argue other researchers, but rather a spectrum of psychopathic disorders, influenced by various factors, including brain structure, early life experience and genes. This would imply that a single ‘psychopathy’ label within the Dark Triad isn’t appropriate. However, for others, the issue isn’t so much the rigour and quality of Dark Triad research, but whether a triad is enough….

Should it be a ‘Dark Tetrad’ – or more?

Various other dark traits have been put forward as equals to those in the triad. Sadism – getting pleasure from inflicting physical or emotional pain on others – has perhaps the biggest backing. The Digest has covered all kinds of research on sadism, including a 2021 study led by Stefan Pfattheicher finding that boredom can drive even people who are low in trait sadism to punish others, just for the minor thrill. Sadism proponents (from an academic perspective…)

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argue that it has a unique profile, while also being an expression of the ‘Dark Tetrad’. Some psychologists (e.g. see tinyurl.com/yc7yyxss) meanwhile argue that ‘spite’ (hurting an opponent even when there is a cost to yourself) should also be considered alongside psychopathy and the rest. But yet others see our dark sides differently again…

The ‘D factor’

‘Over the years, more and more allegedly distinct and increasingly narrow aversive traits have been introduced, resulting in a plethora of constructs lacking theoretical integration’. So argue three psychologists, Moshagen, Hilbig and Zettler, who in 2018 published a popular paper in Psychological Review arguing for a core general ‘D-factor’ (Dark factor) of personality. In this model, nine related dark traits fall within D, which in essence is this: a motivation ruthlessly to put your own interests above other people’s, and to behave accordingly, even when it causes harm to others or even to yourself. This does sound rather like ‘callous-manipulation’ plus spite. Anyway, the nine are: psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, sadism and spitefulness plus Moral disengagement (being able to behave unethically without feeling bad), Psychological entitlement (believing you deserve more and are better than others), Self-interest (a desire to boost your own social or financial status) and Egoism (being concerned with your own goals and achievements at the expense of others’). So, 20 years on from the explosive emergence of the Dark Triad concept, where are we, in terms of really understanding ‘bad’ character? The answer, it seems, is all over the place. Is the Dark ‘Triad’ enough? Are Dark Triad scales useful for screening potential employees, say? Do we really need ‘psychological entitlement’ plus narcissism, in a round-up of dark traits? All these questions, and many more, are still hotly debated. But one thing is for sure: scholarly and public fascination with the darker sides of human nature show no sign whatsoever of abating. So we can expect lots more ‘dark’ research and stories to come.

07/02/2022 18:02

Children’s books still feature more male than female protagonists Getty Images

There is an overrepresentation of male protagonists in children’s books, potentially reinforcing damaging societal expectations for those of all genders. That’s according to a new study in PLOS One, which gathered data on 3280 children’s books published between 1960 and 2020. Books were aimed at children aged 0-16, and all featured a single identifiable protagonist. Books were coded for the gender of the protagonist, the year of publication, the gender of the author, the age of the target audience, the type of character (human or a nonhuman being like an animal, alien, toy, or vehicle) and the genre of the book (fiction or non-fiction). The team found that in the 1960s, almost three-quarters of

books had male protagonists. This proportion decreased between 1960 and 2020, including over the last two decades. But there was still an underrepresentation of women and girls in recent books. This representation was also not uniform. Male authors were much less likely than female authors to feature women or girls as their protagonists; in fact, men were three

times more likely to write a male protagonist than a female one. Non-fiction books, books that featured non-human characters, and books aimed at younger children were also less likely to feature female protagonists. Books aimed at infants, for instance, featured male protagonists twice as often as female protagonists. Future work could look at the behaviours associated with male and female protagonists in children’s literature: are specific stereotypes or characteristics being promoted in the content of the books? Similarly, it would be valuable to look at other elements of identity and experience: how non-binary genders, race, class, sexuality and disability are represented. Emily Reynolds

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Arachnophobia may have its evolutionary roots in a fear of scorpions, and our brains ‘overgeneralise’, reacting to spiders in the same way. After all, only a small fraction of spider species are poisonous, and these are mostly not found in Africa, where modern humans evolved, note the researchers behind a recent paper. In support of their theory, the team report that people’s feelings of fear and disgust are similar for both spiders and scorpions – and that their responses are quite different for other arthropods. (Scientific Reports) 20

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07/02/2022 18:02

the psychologist march 2022 digest

Many of us ‘treat’ a bad night’s sleep with a couple of cups of coffee the next morning. But just how much does caffeine really help? Research shows that it makes a big difference to tasks that require ‘vigilant attention’, or continuous monitoring. One theory even holds that the cognitive deficits caused by sleep deprivation are underpinned by impairments in attention, and this implies that caffeine could be a general cure for sleepdeprivation ills. However, a new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition suggests that this is not the case. Caffeine indeed restored vigilant attention to regular levels in sleep-deprived participants. But it had barely any impact on another type of performance that is important for all kinds of jobs. Michelle E. Stepan at the University of Pittsburgh and colleagues studied 276 students with normal sleep habits. They came into the lab in the evening to complete two tasks. The first was a simple computer-based visual vigilance task – a red circle appeared on the screen at random intervals and every time they saw it, they had to click a mouse. If they took longer than 500ms to respond to a circle, this was counted as a lapse in attention. The second task measured what’s called ‘placekeeping’. In this study, the participants had to keep track of where they were in a seven-step screen-based task. The participants were initially trained in how to complete the steps correctly, in the right order, and then expected to remember this information. Every so often, they were interrupted part-way through a sequence and asked to complete another brief task. They then went back to the original task. To resume correctly, and complete the steps in the right order, they had to remember where they’d broken off. The researchers counted the number of mistakes that they made. After this, some participants were sent home to sleep as normal while the others were kept awake overnight in the lab. The next morning, the sleepers came back in, and all were given a capsule that contained either 200mg of caffeine or a placebo. Then they completed a second

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Coffee can’t fix it all

round of visual vigilance and place-keeping tests. The differences in the results were clear. Sleep deprivation (without caffeine) impaired performance on both tasks, as expected. With caffeine, though, sleepdeprived people did just as well on the visual vigilance task as those who’d had a good night’s sleep (without morning caffeine). Caffeine clearly worked very well to fix this particular deficit. (Though those who’d slept and consumed caffeine did best of all.) However, this wasn’t the case for the place-keeping task. A few did get some benefit from caffeine – the people who were worst at the task. But most of the sleepdeprived participants did not. For the majority, caffeine did not affect the cognitive processes needed for placekeeping. The work implies that the theory that all of the cognitive deficits associated with sleep deprivation can be explained by impaired attention is wrong. And the team now calls for more work to get at exactly how a lack of sleep interferes with various types of cognitive processes. But there’s an important practical message, too. Remembering where you are in a sequence of key steps, so that you can complete a procedure properly, is important in jobs everywhere from factories to hospitals. While caffeine does indeed help with simple attention, it could be a potentially dangerous mistake to think that it can fix sleep-deprivation deficits in performing this type of task, too. Emma Young

Those at either end of political spectrum more prone to conspiracy theories Belief in conspiracy theories has been linked to various factors, including low levels of critical thinking, a need to feel special, and even a yearning for excitement and thrills. But how does political ideology come into it? Some studies suggest that there is a straightforward association, in which people with more extreme right-wing views are more prone to conspiracy theories. But other work has found a ‘U-shaped’ relationship, where conspiratorial thinking is more common among people on the extremes of both the right and left compared to those with more moderate views.

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The latter finding has tended to come from research into a small group of relatively prosperous nations, note the authors of a new study in Nature Human Behaviour. But now, looking at data from more than 100,000 people across 26 countries, the team finds further evidence that conspiracy theories are more common among the far left as well as the right, and provides some suggestions as to why this is the case. Across two studies, Roland Imhoff from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and colleagues recruited 104,253 participants from European nations, as well as

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Brazil, Israel and Turkey. Each participant rated their political orientation on a single scale from extreme left to extreme right, and also indicated what party they would vote for (or had voted for in the previous election). They also completed the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, which taps into endorsement of conspiracy theories with questions like “I think that there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions”. The team did find some evidence, in the first study at least, that there was an overall linear relationship between political orientation and having a conspiracy mentality, with people on the extreme right more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. But this effect wasn’t consistent on a country-by-country basis: in some countries there was no relationship, and in others it was actually people on the extreme left that endorsed conspiracy theories more. Instead, the researchers found that the data better fit a U-shaped relationship, where belief in conspiracy theories rose both for extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing participants. This relationship proved significant for both studies, and was more consistent across individual countries. Why would people on the fringes of the political spectrum be more likely to endorse conspiracy theories? One possibility is that these people don’t see their political views reflected in government – after all, extreme political groups do not make it into government as often as more moderate parties – and turn to conspiracy theories to try and make sense of this apparent lack of political control. To test this theory, the researchers looked at whether conspiracy beliefs differed between those who supported a party in government and those who supported a party that wasn’t in power. They found that participants

whose preferred party was not in power did indeed show stronger endorsement of conspiracy theories. But even after controlling for this, the researchers still found that U-shaped relationship between political ideology and conspiracy beliefs, suggesting that a lack of political control can’t be the only reason that people on the extremes endorse conspiracy theories. An alternative explanation is that the extreme left and right actually share some views that are also related to conspiracism. These people often demonise the outgroup, for instance, and subscribe to authoritarian views – themes which also crop up in conspiracy beliefs. Indeed, the team found evidence that supporters of extremely left-wing parties were only prone to conspiracy beliefs when those parties were nationalistic and authoritarian, and not when they were socially liberal. Overall, then, the results suggest that people are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories if they don’t see themselves represented in government – but also that subscribing to an extreme political ideology has an effect above and beyond that of a lack of representation. There are some limitations though. As the authors note, it could be that people who believe in conspiracy theories are drawn to fringe parties, rather than conspiracy theories developing as a reaction to a lack of power. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the team also found evidence that political unrest within a nation and conspiratorial language from its leaders can also have a profound effect on who endorses conspiracy theories. Further work could look in more detail at how political rhetoric can give rise to conspiracy beliefs. Matthew Warren

People who move a lot attach more importance to their romantic relationships

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People who have moved away from their place of birth or who have frequently moved throughout their life are more likely to see their partners as central to their lives, according to a new paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science. First, the team gathered data from a life satisfaction survey, conducted in Turkey annually since 2003. Participants indicated whether they had lived in the same district since they were born, and who they preferred to confide in about work, money, and health – their spouse, their family, or their friends. The results showed that those who had moved were more likely to prioritise their spouse as a confidant above their family or friends. In the second study, participants reported how many times they had

moved neighbourhood, city or country during their lifetime. They then listed people in their life who they speak to frequently, who they see as a ‘safe haven’ and contact when they need help, who they see as a secure base who will always be there for them, and who they miss when they are not together. For each category, participants listed up to four people in order of significance. Again, those who had moved frequently ascribed more importance to their romantic partners in all categories. In a final study, participants again indicated how many times they had moved, before completing scales looking at partner responsiveness, life satisfaction, and ‘eudaimonic’ wellbeing, or how much one feels that their life has meaning and purpose. The

perceived responsiveness of romantic partners predicted participants’ life satisfaction and eudaimonic wellbeing. And for people who had moved more often, eudaimonic wellbeing increased more dramatically as perceived partner responsiveness increased. These results all suggest that romantic relationships are more central to the lives of people who move more often. The team has a number of suggestions as to why this might be, including that moving may foster ‘relationships of choice’ rather than obligatory kin relationships. And if you are a high-frequency mover, your social networks may be more shallow, meaning your romantic relationship is likely to be the most intimate. Emily Reynolds

07/02/2022 18:02

the psychologist march 2022 digest

the

psychologist march 2022

Confidence, wisdom, and the crowd The Dunning-Kruger Effect and Groupthink examined

The Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee has vacancies

also

We need to talk about Long-Covid…

Could you help to shape what we do?

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Send brief info on why you might be interested, and your areas of expertise, to Dr Annie Brookman-Byrne on annie.brookman-byrne@bps.org.uk by 12 April 2022

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www.thepsychologist.org.uk 26/01/2022 13:50

07/02/2022 18:03

We need to talk about Long-Covid Dr Andy Siddaway on the key role of psychologists in research, service design, and interventions

ntil recently, I worked as the Clinical Psychologist in a specialist Long-Covid Service for NHS staff members. Grace, a Physiotherapist living with Long-Covid, was referred to the service by her manager. She saw myself and the rest of the multidisciplinary team (MDT) during her attendance of the Long-Covid self-management group, plus some additional 1:1 support from the team Physiotherapist. In the box opposite, she outlines what her Long-Covid journey has been like so far to set the context for what follows from me.

A psychologist’s perspective Many different approaches to managing the spread of Covid-19 and mitigating its impact on health services have been taken, with advantages and disadvantages to different approaches (Siddaway, 2020). In this article, I argue that, as psychologists, we need to focus our professional efforts not just on Covid-19 but also on Long-Covid. I view Long-Covid as a serious, complex longterm health condition that can be very challenging to live with and have a devastating impact on people’s lives. My experience, and that of other psychologists I have talked to who work in clinical health psychology across the UK, suggests that awareness, knowledge, and attitudes towards Long-Covid and other longterm health conditions continues to be highly variable, including amongst health professionals. Disbelief and stigma continue to be common experiences, with many told or treated as though ‘it’s all in their heads’. Here, I aim to increase awareness of Long-Covid in the hope of reducing that stigma and further catalysing funding for research and specialist clinical

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services for all long-term health conditions. I believe that a biopsychosocial perspective has much to offer in understanding and helping ameliorate Long-Covid and other long-term health conditions, and that psychologists have a key role to play in designing and delivering appropriate and effective clinical services. Definition, prevalence, and cause Long-Covid was barely heard of a year ago; it is now recognised as a clinical condition, increasingly attracting research attention. The British government recently recognised it as its number one health priority (Independent, 2021). It is understood as a chronic, post-viral condition. The NICE (2020) guidelines for this area differentiate: • acute Covid-19 (signs and symptoms of Covid-19 for up to 4 weeks); • ongoing symptomatic Covid-19 (signs and symptoms of Covid-19 from 4 to 12 weeks); and • post-Covid-19 syndrome or ‘Long-Covid’ (signs and symptoms that develop during or after an infection consistent with Covid-19, continue for more than 12 weeks, and are not explained by an alternative diagnosis). This definition is consistent with the available evidence, which consistently indicates that the majority of people infected with Covid-19 recover with time. For example, the September 2021 Office for National Statistics figures indicate that around 3 per cent of people who test positive for Covid-19 report one or more Long-Covid symptoms for at least three months after infection; this figure is around 0.5 per cent among people who did not test positive for Covid-19 (ONS, 2021). Research investigating risk factors for LongCovid is beginning to emerge. Women, 50- to

07/02/2022 18:08

the psychologist march 2022 long covid

69-year-olds, people with existing long-term health conditions, people with high levels of virus in their body when testing positive, and people most severely ill (i.e. hospitalised or admitted to ICU) experience the highest prevalence and severity of Long-Covid symptoms (Ayoubkhani et al., 2021; Fernandez de las Penas, 2021; Johnsen et al., 2021; Taquet et al., 2021a, b). To my knowledge, researchers have yet to investigate any role of psychological variables in predisposing someone to develop Long-Covid, or in its onset and/or maintenance. At present, there is no agreed upon cause or set of

causes to explain why viral illnesses such as COVID-19 can trigger long-term conditions such as Long-Covid. Most infectious outbreaks, including SARS and Ebola, leave behind a ‘long tail’ or minority of people who remain chronically affected (Marshall, 2020). I have seen some speculation about the potential role of cytokines (to explain an over-active immune response), mitochondria (to explain a problem with how energy is produced at a cellular level), and ongoing covid infection (fragments of pathogens may linger in remote pockets of the body, beyond reach of the immune system, where they are periodically reactivated and

The perspective of someone living with Long-Covid My name is Grace. I tested positive for Covid-19 in October 2020, and have had to make adaptations across all areas of my life ever since. I was 32-years-old when I got Covid. At the time, I was working four days a week plus additional work due to the pressures of the pandemic on the NHS. I was also teaching online fitness classes from home via Zoom. Myself and everyone around me thought that I would bounce back within no time and be back at work after my isolation period ended. This was not the case. Four months later, I remained off work. Even when I did return, a very graded phased return had to be put in place. I struggled to accept my new diagnosis and would frequently demonstrate a ‘boom and bust’ approach, which frustrated me even further. Previously I was someone who was always on the go; Long-Covid meant that I needed to nap after having a shower. A mixture of old and new symptoms would come and go with no pattern. I buried my head in research looking for answers, but

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couldn’t find anything. The thought of not knowing when or if the symptoms would completely go away was exasperating. Eventually I decided to ask for help and have been mourning the loss of the ‘old Grace’ ever since. I have been learning to pace, plan and prioritise, and am now listening to my body and what it needs. Long-Covid symptoms vary from minute to minute, never mind day to day, so the unknown is scary. Making plans is difficult, because I cannot anticipate how I am going to be, which often causes me to avoid social engagements. This makes me very isolated and I often feel alone, especially when no-one around can truly understand what I am going through. Recovery from Long-Covid is not linear, but we all seem to be learning this the hard way. I have created some YouTube videos about my own experience called ‘My Long COVID journey podcasts – Grace Ferguson’). I have also created a video in conjunction with the Scottish National Wellbeing Hub, discussing my return to work (https://wellbeinghub.scot/ resource/long-covid-graces-journey/)

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cause harm (Proal & VanElzakker, 2021). I have heard colleagues talk of a functional theory, which posits that the symptoms of Long-Covid are a hypersensitive or over-protective body’s way of taking care of itself by telling or forcing the person to stop, conserve energy, rest, and build back up slowly. None of these theories seems anywhere near sufficient to explain the complex, multi-systemic changes that characterise Long-Covid. My view is that Long-Covid and other long-term health conditions are probably multiply determined (i.e. no one cause) and indeterminate (i.e. different mechanisms or pathways, involving different sets of variables, can produce identical outcomes). An experience beyond the physical symptoms Long-Covid is a complex, heterogeneous clinical condition involving multiple, interacting components (briefly summarised in Figure 1). It can develop immediately or gradually after Covid-19 infection and even after a period of apparent recovery. It involves multiple physical symptoms, the most common of which seem to be mental and physical fatigue, breathlessness, cognitive changes (difficulty concentrating, switching between tasks, word finding and memory difficulties), chronic pain (usually joint pain), palpitations, and dizziness (NICE, 2020; Davis et al., 2021; Michelin et al., 2021). The physical symptoms, quite predictably, have a range of consequences for the person’s body and their life. For example, experiencing chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and/or breathlessness frequently

disrupt people’s sleep and make it very difficult to be physically active, often leading to weight gain and physical deconditioning. Long-Covid physical symptoms can profoundly affect different areas of a person’s life, including self-care, mobility, housework, independence, relationships, leisure activities, exercise, and hobbies. Long-Covid often forces people to reduce or stop doing things that they enjoy and which define who they are. It is no wonder that Long-Covid has a significant impact on well-being and mental health. The person living with Long-Covid is set the very difficult task of trying to adjust to major changes to their health and functional abilities, revising their goals and standards for themselves and their life. It is common and understandable for people living with Long-Covid to feel anxious and worried about their health, their lives, and their future; to have difficulty making sense of and adjusting to Long-Covid and to at times feel down and fed up; to find living with cognitive changes and low energy levels frustrating and upsetting; to feel guilty and distressed that responsibilities and interests cannot always be fulfilled as usual; and to feel angry about the perceived causes of Long-Covid or wish that life was different. It is not easy to adapt. Symptoms can change over time and come and go unpredictably, which can be challenging, stressful, frustrating, tiring, and demoralising. Adjustment and recovery tend to be nonlinear and to take place over a period of time, and are probably best described as a ‘journey’. Long-Covid may also have exacerbated or added to stressors that a person was already dealing with.

Figure 1

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the psychologist march 2022 long covid

Psychological symptoms, in-turn, can influence everyday functioning and physical symptoms. For example, feeling frustrated and down can make people less likely to persevere; feeling anxious, worried, and stressed make it more difficult to problem-solve; and moving between extremes of coping and thinking increases the likelihood that someone will struggle to effectively work within their current limits, sometimes resulting in all-or-nothing ‘boom and bust’ physical exertion, which may exacerbate physical symptoms. Overall, a range of variables dynamically interact and influence one-another – and these are only the withinperson effects. Managing interactions and recruiting support On top of what happens within individuals, interactions with other people also play an important role in helping or hindering recovery from long-term health conditions such as Long-Covid. It is a truism that facing any challenge is easier with other people’s support. But to be supportive requires various things. Firstly, other people need to want to help. Unfortunately, long-term health conditions such as Long-Covid are still widely stigmatised. People living with Long-Covid are often either not believed or actively judged and labelled. Many people have told me that health professionals, workmates, managers, friends, and family have said things such as, “it’s all in your head,” “you’re fine,” “pull yourself together”, “it isn’t that bad,” “you’re lazy,” and “you’re selfish”. Many people with Long-Covid and other long-term health conditions have told me that they have been asked to justify that they are genuinely unwell. People have sometimes been made to feel guilty for needing support, blamed, or made to regret things that they did or did not do. Sometimes the people around the person experiencing Long-Covid has a different perspective on how that person ‘should’ manage their health and about how bad it would be if they were to become infected with Covid-19 again. Other people are much more likely to be understanding and compassionate and to want to help if they understand. Directing people to credible, robust information may be possible sometimes and may sometimes help. I recommend two websites – yourcovidrecovery and longcovid.org – for clear, accurate information on Long-Covid and managing the physical symptoms. Further research and education are needed to help society recognise Long-Covid and other long-term health conditions as ‘valid’ (real) health problems. I acknowledge that other people may not want to help, depending on a range of factors. Influencing others, helping them to understand, and recruiting their support are not always possible; some people may sap energy and (unintentionally) add an additional stress that the person with Long-Covid cannot at the moment deal with. The decision on whether to continue seeking support may boil down to whether

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the person with Long-Covid prioritises their own emotional and physical needs or other people’s. For other people to support someone with LongCovid also requires that they are capable. Friends and family may be dealing with their own challenges – and it is difficult for the person with Long-Covid to support others if they are already faced with a large number of their own challenges. Some families I worked with contained two people with Long-Covid. Involving other people and encouraging friends and family to seek support for themselves (e.g., via their GP) may help reduce stress levels in a household. A final point to note about between-person effects is that in order to receive useful and timely support from other people, the person with Long-Covid has to first be aware of their health and psychological needs and to express those needs in a way that other people can hear. Like much of what I have discussed, this is much easier said than done… especially when experiencing high levels of stress, fatigue, cognitive impairment, etc. It is not easy to need other people, to temporarily set aside valued goals, to ask for help, to do less, to be unwell, and to show vulnerability. Sometimes other people’s good intentions and acts are not what is needed at the moment and that is no one’s fault. Being thoughtful about oneself, having honest, explicit discussions about what is and is not needed and helpful, acknowledging the hard (current) truths, having positive experiences together, and being kind, patient, and forgiving with each other go a long way towards collaborating and feeling understood and appreciated. The role of psychologists The clinical guidelines for Long-Covid (e.g. NICE, 2020) recognise that because it is a complex, multisystem illness, multi-disciplinary, holistic interventions are likely to be appropriate and useful. At present, there is no evidence-based treatment or intervention for Long-Covid – perhaps unsurprisingly given the recency of Covid-19. Nevertheless, good clinical governance makes clear that clinical services should be of high quality, effective, and efficient. Clinicians and researchers across the world are no doubt currently collecting data to inform what best to do, but it will be a long time before a robust body of evidence emerges. This leaves clinicians, policy makers, and service commissioners in a dilemma: should services and interventions only be provided once there is robust mass of high-quality evidence demonstrating effectiveness? Or should something be offered, even if in time, with robust evaluation, superior approaches are developed? The latter approach seems to have generally been adopted: Do the best we can, acknowledging that this is a fastevolving field. I am not aware of any effective medications for Long-Covid. I am aware through various forums that, instead, self-help, group, and individual interventions

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are being delivered that draw upon evidence-based approaches for the physical symptoms that make up Long-Covid (e.g. existing interventions for chronic fatigue, chronic pain, compensating for cognitive changes, managing breathlessness, etc), combined with approaches and interventions for helping people adjust to long-term health conditions and evolving clinical experience. These interventions are generally being delivered by Psychologists, Physiotherapists, Occupational Therapists, and Nurses. Psychologists can potentially contribute a great deal to designing clinical services and helping people with Long-Covid adjust to it and try to overcome it (existing data cannot yet speak to the time course of Long-Covid). As a profession, we bring strong leadership, critical thinking and psychological formulation skills, and a background of theory, evidence, and experience of supporting people to adjust to a wide-range of physical health conditions. We aim to collaboratively support people to reduce Long-Covid symptoms and improve functioning and quality of life. Psychologists are really good at being thoughtful, curious, and listening carefully to the people we work with about what they want and what seems to work. In the context of long-term health conditions being disbelieved and stigmatised, these approaches are not just valuable but critical, as they provide a foundation from which to collaboratively

work towards overcoming problems. Psychologists also bring knowledge of alternative service delivery models, how to make best use of limited resources, and robust clinical governance. We can offer consultation, supervision, teaching, and training to widely cascade psychological ways of thinking and working, and influence service design and delivery. A promising approach seems to be to deliver a transdiagnostic or ‘trans-symptom’ group programme that is supplemented by individualised interventions from the multidisciplinary team as needed. The ethos adopted is ‘self-management’, which aims to empower people living with long-term health conditions to take control of managing their health. Self-management involves giving information, learning skills and strategies, and experimenting to discover what works and what does not and when and why; it involves learning and balancing what can be changed and when, and what needs to be adjusted to or accepted and when. Self-management of long-term health conditions is, of course, easier said than done. It is far from easy to try to prioritise health over other responsibilities and commitments, to balance different life areas and conflicting goals, to develop a new role or identity, and to cope with ongoing stress and uncertainty. Everyone falls into what might be called coping or selfmanagement ‘traps’ from time to time, such as totally

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the psychologist march 2022 long covid

focusing on Long-Covid to the exclusion of other life areas, exclusively using avoidance to cope, or focusing entirely on change with less emphasis on acceptance. It is not easy to be patient and understanding with oneself when there is so much to deal with. Recovery is not something that can be done to or for the person with Long-Covid. Many people find a way to adjust to Long-Covid, but some people benefit from a psychologist’s support. Psychologists are also able to help people overcome additional Covid-related difficulties, such as complicated grief or posttraumatic stress disorder, using evidence-based interventions. I have observed several people experience what is probably best described as a specific phobia of Covid-19, characterised by feeling highly anxious about further Covid-19 infection and high levels of avoidance and impaired everyday life. Psychologists are also wellplaced, if needed, to provide neuropsychological assessment and interventions – although at this stage it is not clear whether this is needed or useful, or whether cognitive changes may be secondary to other Long-Covid symptoms such as fatigue. Research Psychologists also often bring research skills. For example, soon after the inception of the Long-Covid Service, in consultation with members of the LongCovid multidisciplinary team and other Long-Covid services, I designed a service questionnaire to routinely collect data and inform clinical decision-making. The questionnaire is quick to complete (important due to cognitive impairments and fatigue) and gathers a large amount of clinical information. It is used by the team to identify potentially life-threatening physical issues (that require medical assessment); save assessment time (that can be used to discuss nuances and complexities); help provide matched care; track symptom changes over time; and evaluate service effectiveness. Where possible, existing measures with established psychometric properties were used. To my knowledge, existing and ongoing research studies measure the presence/absence of Long-Covid symptoms and functional impairment. In contrast, the service questionnaire measures the frequency of Long-Covid symptoms and impairment across different areas of life to gain a much more detailed and clinically useful understanding of individual experience and change over time. Talking to psychologists in other Long-Covid services, it is common to screen for depressive and anxiety symptoms and for people with Long-Covid to report frequent distress. It is an empirical question whether measures of depressive and anxiety symptoms have acceptable sensitivity and specificity to identify who most needs psychological support. I do wonder whether measures of the different facets of well-being (Oishi & Westgate, in press) would best capture how mental health and quality of life are impacted by Long-Covid.

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Psychologists are able to promote the value of routinely collecting data and to use this to evaluate services (so-called practice-based evidence), share good practice, and better-understand Long-Covid. There are many possibilities. For example, routinely collected data regarding Long-Covid symptoms, functioning, and mental health could be analysed using network analysis to clarify complex relationships and identify the most ‘central’ variables. Network theory hypothesises that reducing or eliminating these can potentially decrease the activation of connected variables (Borsboom & Cramer, 2013; Bringmann et al., 2019). Longitudinal service data might be used to identify the presence of different trajectories or subpopulations of people experiencing Long-Covid using latent transition analysis, which is likely to be valuable for developing individualised interventions and allocating limited resources. Driving forwards Change is needed. Sadly, many people experiencing post-viral syndromes such as Long-Covid encounter stigma and a lack of support. There is a common lack of understanding, including among health professionals. Sometimes people with long-term health conditions are explicitly told that they are not unwell and that there is nothing that can be done for them. There is considerable ongoing controversy regarding the conceptualisation of long-term health conditions and the effectiveness of psychological therapy for longterm health conditions (e.g., Chalder & Willis, 2017; Fink & Schroder, 2010; Hughes & Tuller, 2021; Scott et al., 2021). As a psychologist, I subscribe to the biopsychosocial model: I believe that biological, neuropsychological, social, and psychological factors may each play a role in a long-term health condition. I do not see a simple dichotomy between mind and body. Indeed, even if Long-Covid turns out to have purely biological causes, I would still see a role for psychologists in helping people manage and adjust to it. Furthermore, hypothesising that psychological variables may, in part, predispose, precipitate, and/or perpetuate Long-Covid (which, like all hypotheses, requires empirical testing) does not imply fault or blame towards the person experiencing Long-Covid. As discussed, there is also a question regarding whether services and interventions should only be provided once there is robust mass of high-quality evidence demonstrating effectiveness. I hope that an unforeseen benefit of the Covid-19 pandemic is that it catalyses further thought, education, funding, and research into long-term health conditions and developing and refining effective interventions. We need to reduce stigma and improve availability and access to evidence-based support and interventions. I see a crucial role for psychologists in driving forward research, clinical practice, and how services are designed and delivered.

Dr Andy P. Siddaway is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Expert Witness. See online version for references.

See www. bps.org.uk/ coronavirusresources for the British Psychological Society’s coronavirus resources, including a link to a wealth of perspectives from The Psychologist. Also see www.bps.org. uk/membermicrosites/ divisionclinicalpsychology/ covid-19 for bulletins and resources from the Division of Clinical Psychology around LongCovid.

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The persistent irony of the Dunning-Kruger Effect Robert D. McIntosh and Sergio Della Sala

Unskilled and unaware Kruger and Dunning’s now-famous paper was entitled ‘Unskilled and unaware of it’. It reported four studies, in which people performed tests of intellectual or social reasoning, and then estimated how well they had done, as a percentile relative to others, or by guessing their actual score. The numbers were analysed by a peculiar method. People were divided into four tiers (quartiles) of ability based on ranked performance, and then actual and selfestimated performance were plotted for each quartile, resulting in the graph on the left of Figure 1. For all four studies in the paper, and for many studies since, the same general pattern emerged. Poor performers overestimated themselves much more than did those who were truly competent. This is the signature pattern of the DKE. Kruger and Dunning (1999, p.1130) suggested this effect to be ‘a psychological analogue to anosognosia’, referring to a profound lack of insight that can accompany stroke or dementia, which leaves people unaware of their physical or cognitive impairments (see Mograbi & Morris, 2018). They argued that, for many intellectual activities, the skills that we need to judge our own performance are exactly the same as the skills that we need to perform the task. For example, the skills needed to judge whether a sentence is grammatical are the same as those needed to compose grammatical sentences. Unskilled people suffer a ‘dual burden’ because they lack ability for a task, and this also robs them of the ability to recognise it. Accordingly, people of low ability have a ‘metacognitive’ deficit, a blind spot for their own errors, which makes them Figure 1. The true figure DKE figure (A) shows results from Kruger & Dunning’s overconfident. The former President’s ignorance and (1993) Study 1, a humour judgement task (1999, p.1124). Participants performing his arrogance would be two sides of the same dual in the bottom quartile grossly overestimated their ability. Top quartile performers burden. underestimated themselves, but to a lesser degree. Note that people in general hen Donald Trump suggested that we could treat Covid-19 by injecting disinfectant, it was hard to know whether to be more astonished by his ignorance in forming the idea or his arrogance in voicing it. And one could only sympathise with Dr Deborah Birx, the pandemic task force coordinator and viral immunologist, squirming in her seat a few feet away. There could hardly be a more vivid illustration of the idea that those with the least expertise in a domain are the most overconfident, whilst true experts are more modest. Variations on this theme have been expressed by eminent thinkers throughout the ages (see box opposite). It has also featured in the psychological literature, starting from a 1999 paper by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, from whom it takes its popular name: the Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE).

ranked themselves as better than average (above the 50th percentile). Online explanations (B) of the DKE are more often accompanied by this fictional figure, not from real data, which plots confidence against competence. Mt. Stupid is an artistic invention. The message seems to be that ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’, a well-known line from a poem by Alexander Pope (and subsequently sung by Frank Sinatra amongst others).

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The DKE in psychology and beyond In 2000, Dunning and Kruger were awarded the IgNobel Prize – honouring achievements that ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think’ –

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the psychologist march 2022 dunning-kruger effect

Variations of the DKE.

Marcelina Amelia http://marcelinaamelia.com

for ‘their modest report’. (The 2017 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony further honoured the DKE by including the premiere of a mini-opera, ‘The Incompetence Opera: A musical encounter with the Peter Principle and the Dunning-Kruger Effect. And the word so’.) The original paper now has nearly 7000 citations in Google Scholar. The classic pattern, of gross overestimation amongst the least skilled people, has been replicated for diverse domains, from laboratory participants performing logical reasoning tasks, to students sitting real exams (see Dunning, 2011, 2017). The DKE has been extended to the domain of political beliefs (Hall & Raimi, 2018), and applied to explain the confident endorsement of medical misinformation amongst vaccine sceptics (Motta et al., 2018).

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Peter Baskerville: ‘The ignorant are ignorant of their ignorance.’ Daniel J. Boorstin: ‘The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it’s the illusion of knowledge.’ Charles Bukowski: ‘The problem with the world is that intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.’ Confucius: ‘Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.’ Charles Darwin: ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’ Mehmet Murat İldan: ‘The selfconfidence of the ignorant is one of the biggest disasters of the humanity!’ Bertrand Russell: ‘… those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.’ Shakespeare: ‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.’ George Bernard Shaw: ‘He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.’ Lao Tzu: ‘To know that you do not know is the best. To think you know when you do not is a disease. Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it.’ Voltaire: ‘He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.’

It has also permeated the wider culture. Web searches on the ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’ return a bewildering array of hits, from popular science sources to online encyclopaedias, business blogs and political punditry. The DKE is often portrayed in terms of general intelligence, rather than domain-specific expertise, as epitomised by a YouTube clip of John Cleese explaining that stupid people are too stupid to know they are stupid. On social media, #DunningKruger is a pithy way to disparage the intellect of those we disagree with. Double-dipping and regression to the mean At the same time, in the academic literature, it has

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been suggested that the signature pattern of the DKE (Figure 1A) might be nothing more than a statistical artefact. In a typical study, people’s tendencies to under- or overestimation are analysed as a function of their ability for the task. This involves a ‘double dipping’ into the data because the task performance score is used once to rank people for ability, and then again to determine whether the self-estimate is an under- or over-estimate. This dubious double-dipping makes the analysis prone to a slippery statistical phenomenon called ‘regression to the mean’. Regression to the mean is most often described for situations where we measure the same thing twice over time. Extreme scores on the first occasion ‘regress’ towards the mean or average level on the second occasion, not due to any active process, but just because of the dumb mechanics of chance. Consider that, if you throw one die and roll a six (or a one), then you will probably have a less extreme score when you roll again, just by chance. The same general principle applies for any two measures in which random factors play a role. There is a superstitious fear amongst US athletes that being featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine causes a subsequent slump in form (Smith, 2002). We do not need to believe in malediction to explain this ‘Sports Illustrated jinx’ we need only realise that sports people get selected for the cover at the very peak of their form, from which the only way is down. Imagine an athlete running 100 meters in 10.45

Key sources Burson, K., Larrick, R. & Klayman, J. (2006). Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 60-77. Claessens, A., Keita-Perse, O., Berthier, F. et al. (2021). Self-illusion and medical expertise in the era of COVID-19. Open Forum Infectious Diseases, 8(4), ofab058. Dunning, D. (2017). We are all confident idiots. Pacific Standard, updated June 14th. https:// psmag.com/social-justice/confident-idiots-92793 Dunning, D. (2011). The Dunning-Kruger effect. On being ignorant of one’s own ignorance. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (1st ed., Vol. 44). Elsevier Inc. Fleming, S.M. & Daw, N.D. (2017). Self-evaluation of decision-making: A general Bayesian framework for metacognitive computation. Psychological Review, 124(1), 91. Hall, M.P. & Raimi, K. (2018). Is belief superiority justified by superior knowledge? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 76, 290-306. Krueger, J. & Mueller, R.A. (2002). Unskilled, unaware, or both? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(2), 180–188. Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. McIntosh, R.D., Fowler, E.A., Lyu, T. & Della Sala, S. (2019). Wise up: Clarifying the role of metacognition in the Dunning-Kruger effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(11), 1882–1897. McIntosh, R.D., Moore, A. & Della Sala, S. (in press). Skill and self-knowledge: do unskilled people really lack insight? Registered Report. Royal Society Open Science. Motta, M., Sylvester, S. & Callaghan, T. (2018). Knowing less but presuming more: Dunning-Kruger effects and the endorsement of anti-vaccine policy attitudes. Social Science & Medicine, 211, 274–281. Full list available in online/app version.

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seconds. She would set a new world record, and she might feature on the cover, but it is unlikely that she would beat or even match her record next time. Her performance would seem to take a turn for the worse, giving credence to the notorious jinx. The Nobel Prize-winning psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tverseky (1973) have highlighted these sorts of regression artefacts as amongst the most perilous of pitfalls for causal reasoning. The problem is pervasive, because regression to the mean does not only happen over time; it occurs between any two measures that are less than perfectly related (e.g. Chen & Chen, 2021). Imagine that we measure the height and weight of 100 people. Taller people tend to be heavier than shorter people, but the relationship is far from perfect, so the 25 shortest people will not also be the 25 lightest. This means that the shortest people will rank on average higher for weight than they do for height, and the tallest people will rank lower for weight than they do for height. If we notice this pattern, we may come up with causal explanations for why short people are relatively overweight, and tall people relatively underweight. But these explanations would be as fallacious as the Sports Illustrated jinx; there is really nothing to explain beyond the fact that height and weight are imperfectly related. A similar origin has been proposed for the DKE (Krueger & Mueller, 2002). Self-estimates are often uncertain, so they relate quite weakly to actual performance, giving plenty of room for regression to play. It is even worse if the task is on a bounded scale, like a percentile, because anyone scoring at either extreme would be able to misestimate in one direction only. If we focus on the people with the poorest performance, we will inevitably find that they rank higher in terms of their self-estimated scores, and we may say that they over-estimate themselves. We may even be tempted to give a causal explanation such as the dual-burden account, which proposes that unskilled people have a metacognitive deficit. But a simpler explanation would be dumb old regression to the mean. The ‘better-than-average’ effect, and the DKE One objection to the idea that the DKE is a regression artefact is that poor performers over-rate themselves by a lot, whilst top performers may under-rate themselves by a little, but still have reasonably accurate self-estimation (Figure 1A). If the DKE were due to regression of self-estimates towards the mean, then surely it should be symmetrical, with overestimation at the bottom end matched by an equal and opposite underestimation at the top? Well, not necessarily, because it depends on what mean level the self-estimates are regressing towards. If the overall mean self-estimate is the same as the mean actual performance then we would expect a symmetrical pattern, but if they are different, then we

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the psychologist march 2022 dunning-kruger effect

would not. In Figure 1A, the mean actual percentile is 50 per cent, but the mean self-estimate is more like 65 per cent. Regression of self-estimates towards this high mean level would produce the asymmetrical pattern of mis-estimation that we see. This figure provides one instance of a curious phenomenon: that people in general rate themselves as better-than-average, across quite a wide range of tasks. It’s an effect sometimes known as illusory superiority. A well-known example is that the most drivers think they are better than average, though only half of the driving population could truly be in the top 50 per cent. In a DKE analysis, a general tendency for people to over-rate themselves would ensure that self-estimates regress towards a high number, so that top performers’ self-estimates would seem close to the truth, whilst the bottom performers would seem overconfident. This idea was ingeniously tested by Katherine Burson and colleagues, in 2006. They noted that

people tend to think they are better than average at tasks (like driving) that seem fairly easy and non-specialist, but rate themselves more pessimistically for tasks that seem difficult. Burson and colleagues ran a study in which they stepped up the difficulty of quiz questions by requiring very precise answers. People generally rated themselves pessimistically for this hard quiz, so the worst performers had fairly accurate self-estimates, whilst the top performers greatly underestimated themselves. This is a reversal of the classic DKE, because it now looked like the most skilled people had the metacognitive deficit. The dual-burden account cannot explain this reversal, but regression to the mean easily can. Measuring metacognition The dual-burden theory says that our ability to think, and to think about our thinking, are tightly coupled, so metacognition marches in lockstep with cognition.

Marcelina Amelia http://marcelinaamelia.com

Meanwhile, the pandemic has provided food-for-thought concerning the relationship between competence and confidence. Just as Donald Trump opined on the benefits of internal disinfectant, so the Chechnyan leader Ramzan Kadyrov has advocated garlicchewing to ward off the virus, and Boris Johnson boasted about shaking hands ‘with everybody’. Such displays of confidence are less than inspiring; we would presumably like our leaders to be

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able to judge when it is appropriate to be confident and when it is not. Endorsement of unproven information about Covid-19, and sceptical attitudes to the virus and to vaccination, have inevitably been branded with the stamp of the DKE. A recent study confirmed that the people with the least knowledge about the virus over-rate their knowledge the most, suggesting a ‘selfillusion’ of medical expertise (Claessens et al., 2021). As is typical of such studies,

the data look a lot like regression to the mean, and may tell us very little about cognitive or metacognitive ability. People might be uninformed, misinformed, or suspicious of mainstream messaging, but this does not mean they are too stupid to know they are stupid or suffering illusions of superiority. Casting such complex issues in terms of the DKE is likely to create divisive debates, rather than to illuminate the factors involved.

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If our cognition is faulty, then our metacognition will be too, and we may be the last person to know it. of the famous DKE, which is just Unfortunately, the DKE pattern itself a regression artefact. provides no good evidence for this We next need to ask whether theory, not only because of doublethese conclusions extend to the dipping, but because typical selfhigher-level intellectual skills estimation studies do not really for which the DKE is usually measure metacognition. Asking Robert D. McIntosh and Sergio studied. Future studies can take someone to give one number to say Della Sala, Human Cognitive advantage of rigorous methods how well they did at a task, or to Neuroscience, Psychology, developed recently for the analysis rank themselves relative to others, University of Edinburgh, UK. of metacognitive ability. The study may involve some degree of selfR.d.mcintosh@ed.ac.uk and of metacognition is a growing awareness, but it also involves sergio@ed.ac.uk area in cognitive neuroscience. guesswork and approximation, and Theoretical developments have there is no easy way to unpick these led to formal computational models of metacognition, factors. as a ‘second-order’ process that allows the brain to A better approach is to use more granular methods of self-estimation. Nuhfer and colleagues (2017) tested monitor its own cognitive (or perceptual) performance (Maniscalco & Lau, 2012; Fleming & Daw, 2017). more than a thousand people in science faculties, from The essence of good metacognition is that a person novice undergraduates through graduate students to will be more confident when they are performing well professors. Everyone did a detailed self-assessment than when they are performing poorly, showing that of their competence for multiple areas in the practice they are sensitive to the quality of their performance. of science and sat an equally diverse skills test. Given This ‘second-order’ model is different from the simple this more detailed self-assessment, people were idea proposed in the dual-burden theory of the DKE, generally pretty accurate, although the professors had in which metacognition is said to depend on exactly a tighter range of estimation errors than the naïve the same processes as cognition (this would be a ‘firstundergraduates. Extreme estimation errors were very order’ model of metacognition). The emerging field rare, and they were just as often underestimates as of metacognition has recently been summarised in overestimates. This study concluded that experts may Stephen Fleming’s very accessible 2021 book, Know develop a more precise picture of their competencies, Thyself. but there was no systematic overconfidence amongst their less skilled counterparts. Another promising procedure is to get people to The persistence of the DKE give multiple confidence ratings whilst they do a task, The persistent popularity of the DKE meme may say as a kind of metacognitive commentary. By analysing more about our psychological foibles than the DKE how confidence relates to performance over many itself does. Excessive self-confidence is more noticeable trials, we can get better measures of metacognition. (and objectionable) than excessive modesty, so it may We have applied this strategy to some very simple appear to require a special explanation. Our patterntasks, in which people pointed at dots flashed on a seeking minds find it easier to embrace a causal touchscreen (McIntosh et al., 2019). We collected explanation with a satisfying human story (‘stupid overall self-estimates of accuracy, and we replicated people are too stupid to know they are stupid’) than an the classic DKE pattern. We also had people rate their impersonal statistical force (regression-to-the mean). performance after every trial so that we could extract The causal story is then protected by a confirmation measures of metacognitive insight. Low-accuracy bias, whereby we count supporting examples in its people did indeed have poorer metacognitive insight than the high-accuracy people, but these metacognitive favour, whilst explaining away the counter-examples. If we see an expert wracked by self-doubt, we may differences were not responsible for the DKE. One way that we showed this was through a further attribute this to a different phenomenon (‘imposter syndrome’), failing to notice that this contradicts the experiment where we first measured people’s ability in idea that competence begets self-knowledge. pointing to dots, and we then adjusted the dot sizes, There is a self-satisfied air of superiority when the giving bigger dots to low-accuracy people and smaller DKE is ‘weaponised’ as a way to dismiss the views dots to high-accuracy people, so that everyone ended of others, or to impugn their intelligence. Calling up hitting the dot around half the time. Once we had someone out as a victim of the DKE seems watertight, equated the hit rates in this way, the low-accuracy because any denials can be taken to confirm the lack people did not overestimate their success any more of awareness that the insult implies. But the irony is than the high-accuracy people, yet the metacognitive that to namecheck the DKE in this way shows a lack of differences between them persisted. This study suggests that low-ability may indeed be associated with awareness of the evidence, so any air of superiority is only an illusion. poorer self-monitoring, but that this is not the source

07/02/2022 18:14

the psychologist month year uncertainty

Vacancy: British Journal of Psychology, Editor-in-Chief The British Journal of Psychology, the flagship journal of the British Psychological Society, is currently looking for an Editor-in-Chief. This high impact journal publishes original research on all aspects of general psychology including cognition, health and clinical psychology, developmental, social and occupational psychology. The Editor-in-Chief, in conjunction with the Society, is responsible for setting the strategy and direction of the journal, oversees the peer review of manuscripts and is responsible for all editorial decisions made at the journal. The Editor is supported by a team of associate editors, and the professional editorial office at Wiley. In addition, they commission high-quality review articles, topical special issues, and manage the editorial board. The successful candidate(s) for the position of Editor-in-Chief will be recognized internationally for their achievements in their field and have a track-record of publications and presentations at conferences. They will also have an extensive international network of contacts on which they can draw to continue the development of the journal. The post carries an annual honorarium. To Apply To apply send a covering letter describing your qualifications and editorial experience, a CV, and a 300-word outline of your vision for the journal and how you would like to see it develop in the future. Please email your application to: Rebecca Harkin, Publisher, Wiley at rebecca.harkin@wiley.com by 11 March 2022. Further information about the journal can be found at: https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/20448295.

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07/02/2022 18:29

Groupthink – a monument to truthiness?

Getty Images

Ramon J. Aldag

Psychological concepts often seep into the public consciousness. Through salient examples, powerful metaphors, or compelling arguments, some gain general – if tentative – acceptance. Others are widely embraced but remain subject to continued critical inspection. Relatively few gain the status of received wisdom – the enshrined. Groupthink has become one of the most remarkably successful of the enshrined. But is its respect deserved?

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ntroduced by Irving Janis in a 1971 Psychology Today article, groupthink has been presented as established fact rather than theory in textbooks, classrooms, and the popular press. It has been blamed for everything from the Salem witch trials to the Volkswagen’s diesel emissions scandal, from the Challenger space shuttle disaster to the US invasion of Iraq. Over just the last several years, groupthink has been invoked to explain such dark topics as the ethics of torture (Kleinberg, 2016), terrorist radicalisation (Tsintadze-Maas & Maas, 2014), human trafficking (Cheshire, 2017), the dynamics of gangs (Caya, 2015), modern rape culture (Hermann, 2014), ‘Cancel Culture’ (Wood, 2020), the ‘conspiracy’ promoting climate science (Orient, 2019), and Brexit (Forsberg, 2019). Most recently, Dominic Cummings used the term 15 times in his evidence at the Houses of Commons in relation to the UK government response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing in The Guardian, social psychologists Stephen Reicher and John Drury argued that blaming groupthink for Covid mistakes was obscuring the real reasons why bad decisions were made. Indeed, groupthink bears similarities to ‘el chupacabras’ (the goatsucker) of recent lore in the western hemisphere, invoked as the malevolent culprit behind everything from the death of livestock to crop failures to vicious attacks on humans, to, a wife

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the psychologist march 2022 groupthink

claimed, bite marks on her neck. As Sally Fuller and I wrote more than two decades ago, ‘…groupthink has come to symbolize all that is bad about group decision making, and flawed decisions are quickly dissected for signs of groupthink. Despite a quarter century virtually devoid of support for the phenomenon, groupthink refuses to die and, indeed, continues to thrive’ (Fuller & Aldag, 1998, p.165). What is groupthink? Irving Janis proposed that highly cohesive groups are likely to suffer from groupthink, a strong concurrenceseeking tendency that suppresses critical inquiry and results in faulty decision making processes and flawed outcomes (Janis, 1971, 1982, 1989). He chose the term groupthink because of its frankly Orwellian connotation, like ‘doublethink’ and ‘crimethink’. Janis gave as examples of groupthink such major historical fiascoes as the lack of preparedness for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the escalation of war in Korea, the failed US-sponsored landing of anti-Castro rebels in the Bay of Pigs, and escalation of US involvement in the war in Vietnam. Following its Psychology Today introduction and expansion in Janis’s later books, the groupthink phenomenon quickly gained remarkably broad and firm acceptance, dominating the literature on group decision-making for decades. Janis reasoned that dealing with vital, affectladen issues such as war results in ‘hot’ cognitions, in contrast to the ‘cold’ cognitions of routine problem solving. Situations triggering ‘hot’ cognitions induce stress, resulting in defensive avoidance, characterised by lack of vigilant search, distortion of the meanings of warning messages, selective inattention and forgetting, and rationalising. Whatever the level of empirical support for the overall groupthink model, Janis offered a clear set of prescriptions that, when appropriately applied, may facilitate successful group functioning in stressful situations. While these prescriptions had previously been offered in a more scattered fashion, they were nevertheless persuasive in Janis’s concise, coherent, and compelling presentation. At a time of great turbulence and concern about blind obedience to authority, Janis starkly envisioned a dark force draining individuality and fostering mindless collective thinking. Antecedents and consequences Janis presented three categories of antecedents to groupthink. First, moderate to high group cohesion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for groupthink. Structural faults and a provocative situational context are secondary antecedents. The structural fault category includes insulation of the group, lack of impartial leadership, lack of norms requiring methodical procedures, and homogeneity of members’ social backgrounds and ideologies. The provocative situational context antecedents focus on the role

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of stress. These include external threats of losses combined with a low hope of finding a better solution than that of the leader. Internal stress stems from temporary low self-esteem attributable to members’ recent failures, and perceptions that the task is too difficult to accomplish and there is no morally correct alternative. Janis viewed the antecedents as leading to symptoms of groupthink, including an illusion of invulnerability, rationalisation to discount warnings and other negative feedback, belief in the inherent morality of the group, stereotyped views of members of opposing groups, pressure on dissenters, selfcensorship, an illusion of unanimity, and selfappointed ‘mindguards’ acting to shield the group from adverse information. Janis saw groupthink as resulting in consequences that interfere with effective group decision-making. For instance, the group limits its discussion to only a few alternatives. After a course of action is initially selected, members ignore new information concerning its risks and drawbacks. They also avoid information concerning the benefits of rejected alternatives. Members make little attempt to use experts. And, because they are so confident that things will turn out well, they fail to consider what may go wrong and, as such, do not develop contingency plans. Janis saw these ‘defects’ as leading to poor decision quality. Janis relied on case studies, with their opportunities for rich description, rather than other methodologies. It is important to recognise that Janis did not write about experimental or survey research. He apparently considered these to be rather sterile and artificial. Are we clear on ‘groupthink’? Sally Fuller and I wrote more than 20 years ago that at least four views on the meaning of groupthink have emerged: • Groupthink is overreliance on concurrence seeking. In fact, though, recognition of the dangers of such overreliance predated groupthink. For example, Richard Schanck wrote almost 90 years ago of ‘pluralistic ignorance’, in which each group member who disagrees with the preferred solution believes that he or she is alone in that view and, therefore, remains mute. Similarly, Solomon Asch (1956) conducted experiments dramatically demonstrating the power of conformity pressures, even in the face of obvious facts. As such, this view grants groupthink no unique contribution. • Groupthink is a complete sequence of clusters of dysfunctional characteristics which result in flawed decision-making. This was the perspective that Janis adopted. He wrote: ‘It does not suffice to see if a few of the eight tell-tale symptoms of groupthink can be detected. Rather, it is necessary to see if practically all the symptoms were manifested and to see if the antecedent conditions and the expected immediate consequences – the symptoms

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the majority of circumstances. This is turn leads to a of defective decision-making – are also present.’ spiral of ignorance and superstition that is not easily (Janis, 1989, p.60). circumvented. How incongruous that the concept • Groupthink is an undesirable constellation of warning us of the dangers of overconformity becomes a characteristics resulting from highly cohesive victim of that conformity’ (pp.112-113). groups. There is again simply no empirical support If anything, the dearth of research has since become for this perspective. To the contrary, there is no more apparent. Ironically, this may be due in part to evidence either that the purported characteristics groupthink’s enshrined status. That is, any research of groupthink ‘hang together’ as a group or that (as supportive of groupthink is likely to be met with a I discuss a bit later) these characteristics are most ‘we already knew that’ shrug. Conversely, findings evident in highly cohesive groups. contradicting the groupthink model are likely to be • Groupthink is any set of group processes that are dismissed as heresy, generally antecedent to poor decision defined as ‘opinions held in outcomes. This essentially tautological view sees “Supporters have added, opposition to commonly received doctrine, and tending to promote groupthink as all the bad things deleted, twisted, and division or dissension’. People that precede poor outcomes. As transformed groupthink strongly resent and resist ‘heretical’ such, any poor group outcome views, however valid. must be due to groupthink. rather than abandon it” Let’s take an example. In 2000, Won-Woo Park – who is What about the application of in fact one of the more critical of groupthink we’ve seen, to such a the groupthink researchers – tested 23 predictions of wide range of organisational, military, personal, and the groupthink model using an experimental design other situations? Janis made no such claim for his with participants playing roles in a decision-making ideas. Instead, as evidenced by his arguments and scenario. He found only two of 23 hypothesised examples, he saw groupthink as primarily applicable relationships to be significant and supportive of to extremely stressful, ‘hot’ situations, where severe groupthink. The remaining 21 did not support threats and, often, time constraints, preclude rational, groupthink. Remarkably, seven of the hypothesised vigilant thinking. Janis did not see moving beyond relationships were significant and opposite the such conditions as within the scope predictions of groupthink. Rather than present such of groupthink. And as noted earlier, Key sources results as damning of groupthink, Park interpreted Janis did not argue that groupthink them as evidence that Janis’s predictions were ‘only is evident when even a few of its partially correct’. proposed symptoms or defects Aldag, R.J. & Fuller, S.R. (1993). Beyond All in all, nothing has changed the conclusion can be isolated, only when all are fiasco: A reappraisal of the groupthink I reached with Sally Fuller on the 25th anniversary present. phenomenon and a new model of group decision processes. Psychological of groupthink (Fuller & Aldag, 1998, p.165): that Bulletin, 113, 533-552. groupthink’s vitality comes not from empirical Fuller, S.R. & Aldag, R.J. (1998). evidence, conceptual development, or demonstrated The evidence base Organizational Tonypandy: Lessons value added, but from a remarkable combination It is remarkable that so few from a quarter century of the groupthink of faith, subjective perception, and retrospective studies have directly assessed phenomenon. Organizational Behavior sensemaking. Supporters have added, deleted, twisted, the groupthink model. Neck and Human Decision Processes, 73(2/3), 163-184. and transformed groupthink rather than abandon it. and Moorhead (1985) wrote of Janis, I.L. (1971, November). To keep it alive, if only in name, they have tied it to groupthink that, ‘(c)onsidering Groupthink. Psychology Today, 43-46, a Procrustean bed, stretching and cutting as needed the popularity of the concept, the 74-76. to force a fit, with little thought to the nature of the scarcity of research examining its Park, W.-W. (2000). A comprehensive surviving entity. propositions is startling’ (p.538). empirical investigation of the Marlene Turner and Anthony relationships among variables of the groupthink model. Journal of Pratkanis (1998) wrote on the Organizational Behavior, 21, 873-887. Why won’t it die? 25th anniversary of groupthink ‘t Hart, P., Stern, E.K. & Sundelius, B. The almost universal acceptance of groupthink that, ‘This divorcing of belief (1997). Beyond groupthink: Political group across contexts, decades, and outlets is not, I would and scientific evaluation has dynamics and foreign policy-making. argue, compelling evidence of its validity. The almost unequivocal negative consequences University of Michigan Press. unquestioning acceptance of groupthink in the face of for both consumers of research and Turner, M.E. & Pratkanis, A.R. (1998). Twenty-five years of groupthink theory consistently negative research findings is baffling, yet its practitioners. The unconditional and research: Lessons from the some potential explanations can be offered. acceptance of the groupthink evaluation of a theory. Organizational First, it’s a really good story. The examples given phenomenon without due regard Behavior and Human Decision Processes, as evidence of groupthink are vivid, straightforward, for the body of scientific evidence 72(2/3), 105-115. and engrossing. For instance, the Challenger space surrounding it leads to unthinking shuttle disaster is frequently presented as a classic conformity to a theoretical Full list available in online/app version. example of groupthink. It is noteworthy, though, that standpoint that may be invalid for

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the psychologist march 2022 groupthink

Mark Maier, who penned a well-known analysis of the Challenger disaster, wrote, ‘I am bemused that so many of my colleagues in management and in academia have accepted as dogma the popular characterization of Challenger as a classical example of groupthink. Notwithstanding the misrepresentation by a popular training video involving a made-for-television reenactment, it emphatically is not an example of groupthink. Two of its defining characteristics are conspicuously absent, namely, the conviction of invulnerability and the illusion of unanimity’ (2002, p.288). Groupthink also plays into the hands of cognitive bias. Vivid, salient, concrete examples such as Janis presented foster what is termed availability, the tendency to assess relative probabilities of events based on their ease of recall. Our implicit theories of groups inform us that bad things must precede bad outcomes. In the face of bad outcomes, we search for those bad precedents. This is especially tempting when a known culprit – a metaphor for malice – can quickly be identified in the line-up. Also, we sometimes see associations between things because we are looking for them (termed illusory correlation). We think Friday the 13th is unlucky because we’re attentive to bad things that happen on

Friday the 13th: we don’t focus on bad things on other days or good things on Friday the 13th. Similarly, when a group decision fails, we search for evidence of groupthink. Conversely, we see no need to seek signs of groupthink in group successes. In fact, the uniformly negative, Orwellian phrasing of groupthink creates a negative frame, leading to a focus on things consistent with that frame and distorting our perceptions and conclusions. What can we salvage? The last 50 years of groupthink theory and research have provided many lessons about group decision-making, in part due to pursuit of evidence regarding groupthink. Group decision-making is a broad area of psychological theory and research, and considering groupthink can remind us to attend to multiple outcomes, not just decision quality. Janis focused solely on decision quality. However, there is strong theory and evidence to demonstrate that many of the same factors enhancing narrowly-defined decision quality may cause serious, sustained damage to morale, group cohesion, organisational commitment, and retention. We are also reminded that cohesiveness is not necessarily corrosive in decision-making. To the contrary, cohesion is very valuable in most groups, encouraging

Dorothy Bishop Festschrift 2022 Grant Dorothy Bishop is one of the most distinguished psychologists of her generation, having pioneered the investigation of impairments in the development of language. A group of her colleagues are arranging a Festschrift, at the Royal Society (27-28 June 2022) to celebrate her contributions to psychological research. Find out more about the event here: www.celebratingdorothy.web.ox.ac.uk Grants are available to support Members of the Society, who are UK early career researchers (ECRs) or postgraduate students who have had a poster accepted as part of the programme to attend the full event. Each grant consists of up to £200 to contribute towards the

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costs of registration and travel to attend the conference. Get your applications ready to submit by the deadline on Thursday 31 March 2022. For the full criteria and a link to the electronic application form please contact awardsandgrants@bps.org.uk Note: For the purposes of the bursary scheme, we define an early career psychologist as a person who is within eight years of completion of their doctoral degree or practitioner doctorate in psychology. To avoid unconscious bias, we select applicants through a process of blind assessment.

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dissent and alternative generation, diminishing self-censorship and enhancing member satisfaction and self-efficacy, and reducing turnover. Groupthink researchers simply haven’t been able to demonstrate its dangers. To the contrary, Moorhead and Montovani wrote of Ramon J. Aldag is Skillrud in minimising them. If, as is their research that, ‘the empirically Family Chair in Business at the often the case, people use the derived model suggests that several Wisconsin School of Business, term groupthink to simply mean linkages were opposite those University of Wisconsin-Madison. overreliance on concurrence predicted by the Janis framework’ raldag@bus.wisc.edu seeking, that’s fine; they just need (1986, p.408). For instance, to recognise that evidence of such cohesion had a negative impact overreliance predates groupthink and does not validate on self-censorship, a positive impact on dissent, and a negative impact on the defect termed ‘few alternatives’. the entire Janis model. Late-night television host Steven Colbert spoke Such findings and others led an earlier groupthink passionately, and often humorously, about what researcher, Matie Flowers, to state more than 40 years he termed ‘truthiness’ (the 2005 American Dialect ago that, ‘a revision of Janis’s theory may be justified, Society and 2006 Merriam-Webster word of the year). one which would eliminate cohesiveness as a critical variable’ (1977, p.895). This is, of course, diametrically Colbert coined truthiness to satirise the misuse of appeal to emotion and ‘gut feeling’ as a rhetorical opposed to Janis’s view that high cohesiveness and device in recent socio-political discourse. In this age, its accompanying concurrence-seeking tendency are filled with ‘alternative facts’, the Oxford Dictionary necessary, central features of groupthink. announced ‘post-truth’ as its 2016 word of the year So, what are we left with, in terms of leadership (McIntyre, 2018). Desire for truthiness rather than guidelines for effective group functioning? Well, there are valuable insights, if not entirely original, but only if truth permitted Diederik Stapel, a prominent Dutch social psychologist, to perpetrate an audacious properly applied in appropriate contexts. It may apply, academic fraud (see, for instance, Vogel (2011). He for example, if the group is facing a very high stress, had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental ‘hot’ decision situation; Janis stated that invoking data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong groupthink in other contexts is simply inappropriate. obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to Also, it may be appropriate to follow Janis’s concoct sexy results that journals found attractive, that prescriptions only if the group is in an early stage of the world wanted to hear about human nature. ‘It was group development; members of mature groups (in a quest for aesthetics, for beauty – instead of the truth,’ the performing stage) have developed norms and are he said. secure enough in their roles and status to challenge Groupthink oozes truthiness. It is a familiar, one another and have developed ways of reaching comfortable, flexible, and rather formless sweater. agreement (Leana, 1985). The broader organisational Why toss it aside? culture is also important: an oasis of open questioning Because, while it’s important we welcome new in an organisational desert where dissent is generally theories and frameworks and learn all we can stifled will quickly dry up. Further, groupthink from them, we should not follow them blindly, prescriptions strictly apply only when outcome especially when they seem intuitively appealing and quality is tantamount. Decision implementation and are enthusiastically and uncritically embraced. Let commitment to the decision, ongoing motivation of me return to the theory for an illustration of this. the group and leader, future use of the group, affective responses, and other outcomes, while often critical, are Do victims of groupthink often display lemminglike behaviour, blindly moving toward collective relatively unimportant in the groupthink model. disaster? Yes, but only in popular storytelling. In fact, groupthink and lemming stories share some mythlike characteristics. The lemming legends are simply Truthiness… and lemmings false. They were popularised by a staged 1958 Disney Flawed theories sometimes lead to useful outcomes. documentary (White Wilderness) which purported to In a sense, Janis’s influence is like that of Frederick show lemmings with a powerful compulsion to commit Herzberg’s 1966 two-factor theory of motivation. mass suicide, leaping to their deaths into the ocean. While the theory is now discredited, Herzberg’s This was all faked; the lemmings were imported to the key argument – that intrinsic motivation is more area, herded toward the sea, and physically catapulted important than was generally recognised – was a into the water. Despite video and other documentation significant catalyst of the job enrichment and worker of that fabrication, the lemming saga survives, empowerment movements. Similarly, whatever its apparently like myths – things that never were, but flaws, groupthink has raised general awareness of always are – and beyond convincing refutation. potential group dysfunctions and generated interest

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“You have to see the person behind the behaviour and understand what’s happened to them rather than focusing on what’s wrong with them.” Jenny, Forensic Psychologist, HMPPS

07/02/2022 20:18

‘We are all involved in this false information universe’ Our editor Jon Sutton meets Tom Buchanan, Professor of Psychology at the University of Westminster, to talk misinformation

Your background is personality and social psychology, and for the last 20 years or so how people behave online. How did you come to focus in on false information and what motivates people to share it? A lot of my earlier work was around deception in online communication, so there’s a historical thread there. But also round about 2016, a lot of things were happening in society: the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit referendum. There was an explosion of interest, certainly among psychologists, in the role that false information online had in those events. It’s not a new research area – political scientists and communications theorists have been working on false information, propaganda, misinformation, for many, many years. But more psychologists realised that we should be paying a bit more attention to this as a discipline. Also, like many people, I’ve encountered misinformation in personal settings that raises curiosity, flags up the importance of thinking about this as a serious social issue. Around the time of the Brexit referendum, there was a lot of material being bandied about that wasn’t true. People who I knew personally started posting things on social media that really surprised me. Out of character based on what I knew about them, their backgrounds and so on. It really took me aback in some cases, and that was one of the things that spurred me to start investigating it a little bit more formally,

You mention information that ‘wasn’t true’: a clear judgement on what is therefore ‘misinformation’. Yet we know from the history of psychology itself, some things that are treated as conspiracy theories at the time turn out to be true… MK Ultra, things like that. How do you go about making that judgement, particularly for research purposes, on what you’re going to describe as misinformation? There are big questions there about the nature of truth… but there’s a common distinction in the literature, between misinformation and disinformation. Disinformation is essentially material that is shared in the full knowledge that is untrue: someone might make up a story and post it online, for whatever reason, political gain, financial gain. But that’s

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deliberately telling lies. Misinformation is material that people share or spread in the belief that it’s true, even though it isn’t. They’re mistaken about it. The same story could be disinformation, or misinformation, depending on your perspective, and depending on who’s sharing it. So if I make up a lie, and I tell it to you, that’s disinformation. If you then tell it to someone else, because you thought it was true, then that’s misinformation. Because of that ambiguity, around the person’s motives, I prefer to talk about false information, which can be either disinformation or misinformation depending on the context. Other people have talked about ‘soft facts’, about ‘malinformation’, and of course the term ‘fake news’ which has become so politicised that it’s essentially useless as a technical definition. So yes there are big issues around how we talk about information, but what I’m interested in at the moment is the person’s motivations in sharing the material, and whether or not they believe it to be true at the point where they share it. There is objective truth, in many cases, and then there are some facts and beliefs that are contested. Science is all about disproving hypotheses, so we should expect things that used to be considered to be true, to no longer be considered true in the future. That only makes it more important to think about what people believe to be true and why as a motivator of their behaviour. Do those lines get blurred in people’s own minds? People who have actively made up information who come to the point where they believe even that to be true? And if people are confronted over the sharing of misinformation, do they hold their hands up or cling to those beliefs? Thinking about disinformation, there’s an element of intent there, a malevolent behaviour there. That is not something that you’re going to change easily by having a reasoned conversation. There’s a lot of research on debunking, ‘pre-bunking’, and inoculating people against misinformation, educating people about how to detect misinformation, some work on the kind of conversations one can have with people. But I don’t think there’s a clear answer on how easy it is to change people’s beliefs. All this links back to classic work on the psychology of persuasion… it’s a complicated area.

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the psychologist march 2022 false information

Do you personally challenge people? I try to avoid conflict in most areas of life. If something is clearly wrong, and I’m in a position to say something about it, then I often would; in other circumstances, it’s just not worth getting into the arguments. You may be challenging deeply held beliefs that people have. So they’re not going to react well to you publicly saying, ‘this is a load of nonsense, you shouldn’t be saying that’. The BBC have good guidance on how one could go about having those conversations [e.g. tinyurl. com/33p85cba]. Some of the key points are, try not to get emotional. Don’t be dismissive. Don’t publicly shame people for their beliefs. Try to encourage questioning and critical thinking: ‘Why do you think that? What the evidence? What are the person’s qualifications for saying that?’ In a feature on our Research Digest, Emily Reynolds wrote about research led by Mike Yeomans at Harvard Business School, about being receptive, and trying to bridge the gap – ‘I understand that…’, ‘so what you’re saying is…’ – trying to find any common ground to build on and reacting in a calm, empathic way… to the extent that you’re able to do that. Yes, sometimes easier to say than actually do, especially in the context of family arguments, and so on.

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I went to see Robin Ince recently, the comedian and writer. He works with Professor Brian Cox a lot, who apparently goes into a sort of meltdown if confronted by ‘Flat Earth’ views… it just does not compute. Robin said he would find it very difficult to have that kind of conversation with a Flat Earther because it runs so deep, and encompasses such a constellation of views. But one of the interesting things he said was that if you watch videos from Flat Earthers, often what you’ll notice is they start with, ‘So I’ve not been having a very good day…’, and then get on to ‘your government’s lying to you, the whole world is lying to you’. Absolutely, the social context is very important. Some research suggests that belief in false material – whether it’s conspiracist ideation, or political misinformation – tends to be associated with feelings of powerlessness, and loss of control of one’s life. Some research points to that as an important underlying factor as to why people become particularly receptive to these kinds of beliefs. And as you mentioned, it’s fairly well documented in the domain of conspiracy theories that people who believe in one also tend to believe in others. People who have been active in the Coronavirus denial movement are now being more vocal around climate change misinformation [tinyurl.com/4vmt8zy5]. I’m interested in the underlying social and individual level

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factors that make people vulnerable to thinking about and sharing this type of material. And I know that Stephan Lewandowsky has talked about that in terms of sense of control. With the pandemic, inevitably, more and more people feel like they’ve lost control of their lives and they’re afraid… so the pandemic triggers more conspiracy-based thinking. His suggestion to counter that is not trying to talk somebody out of their belief, but trying to make them feel good about being in charge of their lives. Their grip on those beliefs perhaps starts to loosen because they don’t need them anymore. Yes, and another thing that comes out of research that he and his colleagues have been doing is teaching skills of critical thinking and questioning. All of these things are part of a bigger picture, but not the full solution. That bigger picture encompasses the social context. So every time you see something in the news around politicians and trust, presumably, you’re thinking, ‘here we go, this is going to have a knock on impact on my research…’ Absolutely. If one observes the pronouncements of politicians and also how politicians are portrayed in the media, it’s easy to become aware of how false information on social media is part of a much larger ecosystem. People talk about it as ‘generalised information disorder’ in society: as well as looking at what’s going on social media, where my focus is, you’ve got to look at what’s happening in the mass media broadcast media, newspapers, TV channels, in particular US cable TV channels. You’ve got to look at politicians and public figures themselves, who in many cases are both having false material spread about them, but also spreading false material themselves on both international and domestic stages. It becomes a convoluted morass of all kinds of dishonesty going on all over the place. It’s quite easy to become quite angry and cynical about the whole thing, unfortunately.

Within that broader ecosystem, is there still room in your research to look at personality characteristics and more individual level factors? I think so. It’s known that there are links between personality and how people behave on social media in general, and there are specific hypotheses one might put forward about particular constructs that might make people more or less likely to engage with false information. I’ve found a fairly erratic pattern of results across a number of studies using various different methodologies. That makes me think that personality does have a role to play, but it’s perhaps a relatively weak role in terms of determining whether or not someone is going to share false information. It will interact with other variables as well. So for instance, there’s some evidence that lower agreeableness is associated with people’s reports on whether or not they would share false information. And lower conscientiousness also appears to be associated with

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sharing false material. Those are the most stable effects. But some more recent research we’ve been doing has suggested that it’s perhaps the association of those variables with other characteristics such as maladaptive traits that lead one to rely more on heuristics, rather than careful reasoning, that may be at the root there. So there’s a lot of work to be done around unpacking exactly what the mechanisms are, what variables are important. We’ve got a focus on schizotypy as a potential mediating variable at the moment. Educational level, does that have much impact? There’s a lot of debate about demographic characteristics and how they impact on sharing false information. Digital literacy is very important. Government reports will focus on raising digital literacy at population level, in order to try and reduce the impact of false information. But not everyone who shares false information is doing it because they’ve been tricked into believing it when it’s not true. For those people who are sharing false information that they know is not true, then increasing digital literacy is never going to be your solution. It’ll just enable them to do it more effectively, in some ways. In my own research, things like education level, age, have had inconsistent relationships with the likelihood of sharing false information. Part of the reason is that these things are bound up with other variables that may also have an influence – political orientation, for instance. Older people tend to become more conservative, and the majority of false information that’s out there is right wing in orientation. By no means all, but the vast majority of stuff. So if you’ve got a conservative political orientation, that means you’re more likely to engage with it. It would be so much easier if we could say ‘people who share misinformation are disagreeable, shoddy, stupid individuals’… but presumably pretty much anybody can be at risk. Absolutely. You’ve probably done it yourself, just by clicking on something on Twitter, or Facebook, that seemed plausible at the time, but then with hindsight, may not have been. You don’t have to actually share it in order to boost the signal, because of the way that social media platforms work. Even if you spend time looking at it, your dwell time on the page is high. That causes the algorithms to kick in, and then show it to some other people. It’s increasing eyeballs on the screen, and that’s increasing advertising revenue. We are all part of the problem. This is why I increasingly limit my time on Twitter to rating Christmas sandwiches. In terms of different channels, at least with social media the companies can take some steps: ‘do you want to read this article first?’, for example. But we’ve seen a bit more in the last year or so about the spread of misinformation within WhatsApp groups.

07/02/2022 18:21

the psychologist march 2022 false information

Closed communication channels like WhatsApp are incredibly difficult, to get a handle on what’s going on – even for the companies themselves, if they’re using end-to-end encryption. It’s a hidden world that nobody beyond the people in the groups has access to. Very, very difficult to research, or to do any kind of intervention or prevention measures. Even on social media though, you’ve mentioned Twitter playing with the interface to change people’s engagement. But that’s not something that social media platforms are particularly incentivised to do… all of these interventions are necessary from a social responsibility point of view, but will also hurt your bottom line in terms of how the platform works and how profitable it becomes. Not an easy answer. So what next for you in terms of the research direction? Understanding the role of individual differences in a bit more detail. We’re planning to talk with people who we know shared false information, and essentially ask them ‘why did you do this? What was the motivation?’ We’re hoping that will give us a bit more insight into the kinds of things that we need to be thinking about and measuring in terms of understanding why people share false material online. It’s going to be so interesting to see how much insight people have, or are willing to share. I can see how you might become cynical and hardened… I’ve had to stop listening to BBC Radio 5 Live phone-ins, where people say things like ‘well, it’s just my personal choice at the end of the day’, as if that’s actually a legitimate way to end a debate. Positions become very entrenched, unfortunately. I certainly avoid reading the comment sections under articles. Well worth avoiding. I think I’m probably a little bit more aware of some of the processes and some of the media level manipulations that are going on around sending narratives and so on, but do I avoid it? Probably not. Have you encountered misinformation from within our own profession, whether that’s about psychology or otherwise? I could go off on a bit of a rant here about the whole of the psychology curriculum being built on misinformation. The replication crisis has demonstrated that many of the ‘facts’ that we’ve been teaching our students for decades may not actually reflect reality. As psychologists, our relationship with truth does bear some scrutiny… we all need to reflect on the amount of credence we can assign to some of the things that we teach. Also, some of the myths that are spread around psychology, particularly at the interface between psychology and the rest of society – some forms of psychological testing, for instance, I would put very firmly in the category of ‘soft facts’. So that’s certainly within the profession. The fact that we’re psychologists doesn’t mean that we’re not

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people like everyone else. We are entirely subject to the same processes, same influences, reasoning biases, as everybody else. We are all involved in this false information universe in exactly the same way. It’s been a lesson for me from the past couple of years… I’ve received communications from psychologists with some really quite wild conspiracy theories, and my initial reaction was ‘surely we’re better than this, as evidence-based people of science?’ But in some ways, psychology is quite a questioning discipline, we pride ourselves on that critical approach, and perhaps sometimes that can tip over into a mode when we’re questioning whether anything is true, whether you can trust anybody. That could take someone down the rabbit hole. Yes, into the era of alternative facts. But I may have painted a fairly bleak worldview – ‘we live in a world that’s a tissue of lies, deceit and deception’. That may be true. But there are people out there who are truthful and – it sounds corny – pursue the cause of truth. People doing a lot of work to try and correct false information, whether those be researchers or fact-checking organisations or people working within government organisations, and so on. We should recognise the hard work that a lot of people are doing in what is essentially a very hostile information environment. Yes, even just in terms of the pandemic, I know there have been psychologists such as Stuart Ritchie setting up websites covering common Covid misinformation. Maybe it’s a question of signal boosting, giving more attention to the efforts to counter misinformation? Absolutely. One of the findings from some of the research I’ve been doing is that an important factor that influences whether people share material is their level of familiarity with it. The more exposed you are to it, and the more you see it repeated, the more likely you are to share it. And the lesson there is don’t engage with stuff that you think is false even to argue with it, because that increases exposure on social media [see tinyurl.com/nc3222]. But do engage with the stuff that you think is true, and is worth sharing.

Listen to Professor Buchanan as part of the latest episode of our Research Digest podcast, PsychCrunch, kindly sponsored by Routledge Psychology digest.bps.org.uk/podcast

07/02/2022 18:21

Magic, gangs and prison Professor Richard Wiseman interviews Darren Way and Gareth Foreman

Darren Way

There is more to magic than meets the eye. Learning how to perform a magic trick isn’t just about discovering the secret to the illusion, but also involves a range of important skills, including practicing, dexterity, confidence, and storytelling. As a result, many magicians, therapists, and educational practitioners have recognised the potential of magic to improve people’s lives. The area has a surprisingly long history. For instance, during the First World War, the book Tricks For The Trenches And Wards described a series of illusions that could be performed by convalescing soldiers as a form of occupational therapy. In the 1950s, the National Committee for Therapy Through Magic encouraged magicians across America to team

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up with medics and to teach magic tricks to their patients. More recently, several large-scale initiatives have been launched across the world. For example, the legendary illusionist David Copperfield and occupational therapist Julie DeJean created a magicbased program designed to enhance patients’ wellbeing and motivation. American magician Kevin Spencer has developed a similar program after suffering serious injuries in a car accident. In Canada, magician Julie Eng runs an initiative entitled My Magic Hands, in which magicians and occupational therapists help children with a range of physical challenges. In the UK, Breathe Magic Intensive Therapy Programme uses magic-based interventions to help those suffering from childhood hemiplegia. A key part of this work involves helping their clients to carry out necessary repetitive exercises by incorporating these movements into magic tricks. In South Africa, The College of Magic teaches magic to children to help provide several important life skills, including responsibility, empathy, and humility. In Holland, the Magic Care initiative encourages children in hospital to learn magic to help aid their recovery. Working with Caroline Watt, I recently reviewed experimental work that had explored the impact of magic on both wellbeing and education (Wiseman & Watt, 2018, 2020). This work looked at around 50 studies, with the findings suggesting that learning magic results in several key benefits, including increased self-esteem and better social skills. Some of my other work in this area has involved looking at the impact of magic on creativity. In a study conducted with Amy Wiles and Caroline Watt, one group of schoolchildren learned how to perform a magic trick whilst another took part in an illusion-based art lesson (Wiseman, Wiles & Watt, 2021). Pre and post scores on the Alternative Uses Test showed that the magic-based intervention resulted in significantly higher levels of creative thinking. Other work, carried out with magician Will Houstoun, showed that incorporating magic tricks into an educational video resulted in increased levels of engagement, attention, and absorption (Wiseman, Houstoun & Watt, 2020).

07/02/2022 18:50

the psychologist march 2022 magic, gangs and prison

I believe that this type of work is especially promising because, compared to many other performing arts, magic has several unique and desirable attributes. For example, whilst learning to play a musical instrument can be extremely time consuming, magic tricks can often be taught in a very short period of time. Also, unlike dance, and drama, they can be performed in a wide range of situations, including to both individuals and groups. Finally, learning magic is economically viable because most illusions involve everyday objects, such as playing cards, coins, rubber bands, etc. Darren Way and Gareth Foreman have extended this work by exploring the potential impact of magic in two additional and challenging environments, gang prevention and prisoner rehabilitation. Darren Way has spent 25 years working as a gang prevention and interventionist in East London. In 2001, following intensive research in America, he founded the charity, Streets of Growth. Gareth Foreman is a counsellor and has extensive experience working in custodial settings, including HMP Wandsworth, Holloway and Wormwood Scrubs. Both have a background in magic, and in this interview we explore how they have used conjuring as the basis for innovative, unusual and effective interventions. Darren, how did you start using magic in your work with gangs? Working with gangs depends on forming healthy relationships with clients in their neighbourhoods. I first started as a Youth Worker before becoming a specialist intervention practitioner, and I was often met with suspicion, resistance and even anger. One evening in 1995, I decided to see if performing magic tricks could help to break the ice. I approached some lads that were known for being involved with drugs and postcode violence, and produced a flame from my jacket. It certainly caught their attention and one of the lads wanted to see more. I had him choose a playing card and place it back in the deck, and then produced the card from my pocket. One of the lads became aggressive and asked me to explain the trick. I said that I would if we could meet the following day. We met up and I taught him the trick, and this is where I began a conversation about his situation and to gain his trust. From here, I began to help him build a case for change. Over the years I have developed ways of using magic to build relationships, and the most effective approach depends on the situation. It can be a fast-

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Gareth Foreman

track way of getting some gangs to come off the street and enter into my Charity’s community-based Centre. It breaks down barriers and creates conversations that can otherwise take a long time to achieve. Why does magic work so well? I don’t believe there is a definitive answer to that. One example I can give is that young adults who are involved in crime and violence are used to deceiving and concealing weapons, and so maybe they are drawn to someone who seems to have similar skills. Plus, they seem to like knowing something that other people don’t know because it makes them feel superior. Magic allows for that in a safe and positive context. It’s weird that a deceptive form of communication like magic can be used to build trust. Whatever their reasons are for responding to magic, I leverage this curiosity to help gangs overcome their misconceptions and distrust of me. How else can performing magic help with gangs? When I use magic to build relationships with gangs, it has frequently helped to reveal the gang hierarchy. Let me give you a simple example. I was once performing a card trick to a group on a stairwell of a block of council flats. Halfway through the trick, this lad grabbed the cards, threw them at me and told me to f**k off! The following night, during my second attempt to talk to

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this young man, he apologised. He basically let slip he of his work in contained correctional environments. was the main man of this group and explained that he had felt threatened by the magic because he didn’t feel Now to you Gareth… can you tell us something in control of the situation. about how you use magic as an intervention? Many people assume that the individuals drawn Sure. In 2016, I was working in Wormwood Scrubs to gangs are confident because of the harmful delivering CBT-type rehabilitation programmes. activities that they get caught up in. However, many I wondered whether magic might help and so put of the young adults that I have worked with often together a 5-day course. feel insecure. Learning how to perform magic allows As with most courses, the prisoners started off them to strip off the armour they have built to protect being cynical and suspicious. They often see courses as themselves from these insecurities. It encourages them something that they have to do pre-release. However, to build positive relationships with when I performed a magic trick, others without the need to join many of them instantly became a gang. Having a deck of cards “… magic is a tool that curious and attentive. I can in your pocket is far safer than can promote engagement, remember one client saying “Sir, carrying a knife. you’ve just done me. I’ve spent the attention and curiosity. past 20 years doing other people Does magic have its limitations in However, real change and you’ve done me, and it ain’t a this context? depends upon many other good feeling”. Oh yes. After building a trusting I then tell the group that they interventions…” relationship with ‘higher risk’ are going to work out how the trick young people, I work with them was achieved. They doubt that they to create positive plans for their can do it, but I divide them into lifestyle, education and career. At this point, magic groups and give each group a deck of cards. As they fades into the background because people need real are working on solutions, I walk around and listen to help including a wider range of specialist interventions their conversations. It’s quite amazing what they come and courses linked to support at street level rather than up with. tricks. This process can take anywhere between 1-3 Some prisoners like instant gratification and years. struggle with the emotional conflict caused by not Also, in my experience, magic is just a tool and having a quick fix. Often that is one of the reasons that there are many other ways of achieving the same ends. they have turned to violence. This exercise encourages Other practitioners use sport or art to achieve similar patience and perseverance. It also promotes divergent impacts and outcomes. My clients often remember the thinking. They have to consider alternative possibilities magic as an unusual way of breaking the ice but say and stop thinking that something can’t be achieved. that it was my other interventions that were key to Also, the solution to many tricks is surprisingly simple. breaking their cycle of self-defeating behaviour. We often tie ourselves in knots over-analysing a situation and in fact the answer is straightforward. That’s fascinating. When and how did you meet Gareth? What happens next? In 2012 and by chance. We happened to bump into Eventually, they come up with the right method, and I one another at a magic shop in London and began then encourage them to think of an issue in their own chatting about a possible collaboration teaching magic lives, and I ask them to use the same approach to think to ‘at risk’ young people to improve their future. about possible solutions once they are released into the community. I see. What came out of your collaboration? For example, you might have a client who had We staged a 12-week evening early intervention course been homeless, went shoplifting, sold what he stole, for 14 to 16-year-olds based in East London. They and then made his way to a crack house. He might started off learning simple tricks and then moved onto have seen this as a temporary solution, but it soon more challenging material. The course encouraged becomes a routine and so he ends up in prison. This a range of skills including literacy, numeracy, cycle repeats itself again and again. The magic course concentration and perseverance. Many of our clients becomes a springboard for asking him to reflect on had been excluded from mainstream education or left what he could do differently, explore other options, with very low grades and found that learning magic realise that the first answer is not always the best, and was an engaging way of developing these important persevere with looking for solutions. skills. Again, magic was a good hook but there was Other times, it might be about opportunities and much more to the course than that. Many clients faced employment goals. For instance, a client may want to serious issues in their lives, and my outreach workers become a pilot but this may not be possible. However, helped to ensure that the skills from the course were the course encourages them to adopt a different being applied in the real world. Running the course perspective and to find another way of working in the encouraged Gareth to think about using magic as part aviation industry.

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07/02/2022 18:51

the psychologist march 2022 magic, gangs and prison

How does the course progress and what other skills do people learn? Each day we start with a new piece of magic, and again participants are asked to work out how it was done. I also create other roles for people. For instance, one client in each group might be nominated as the performer, and they come up and explain the ideas from their group. Another person might act as the manager and they explain how the group reached their solution. Every week I get feedback from my clients, and the consensus is that the course builds a variety of skills, including self-confidence, trust, team working, mood, decision making, listening skills, social skills and a sense of achievement. Do you have any collective final thoughts? [Darren and Gareth] Yes. For us, magic-based interventions are becoming increasingly popular in many different contexts, and our joint concern is that they are being seen as a miracle intervention. Much of the data from this work is not being collected in real world situations nor measuring longer term impact. In our experience, magic is a tool that can promote engagement, attention and curiosity. However, real change depends upon many other interventions, including people feeling safe in their communities, not being involved with gang members, dealing with trauma, moving away from problematic family homes,

identifying possible solutions to their issues, and learning to holding down a job.

Key sources Wiseman, R., & Watt C. (2018). Achieving

Much of the academic work into the impossible: a review of magicthe educational value of magic has based interventions and their effects on wellbeing. PeerJ 6:e6081 been carried out within somewhat Wiseman, R., & Watt, C. (2020). artificial settings and taken a Conjuring cognition: a review of broad brush approach. Darren and educational magic-based interventions. Gareth have provided a valuable PeerJ 8:e8747. and nuanced insight into the use Wiseman, R., Wiles, A., & Watt, C. of magic in a far more realistic (2021). Conjuring up creativity: the effect of performing magic tricks on divergent and challenging context. Their thinking. PeerJ 9:e11289 extensive experience suggests Wiseman, R., Houstoun, W., & Watt ,C. that there are both advantages (2020). Pedagogic prestidigitation: using and disadvantages to this type magic tricks to enhance educational of intervention. On the upside, videos. PeerJ 8:e9610 magic captures attention, can help to build relationships and has the potential to encourage people to view situations in a more expansive way. However, on the downside, it rarely leads to real and sustained change. Instead, progress is only obtained over a long period of time, and through using tools that confront the types of serious psychological and societal challenges facing their clients. For further information about Darren and Gareth’s valuable work, please visit www.streetsofgrowth.org

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07/02/2022 18:51

Getty Images

Creativity and the chaos rainbow William Todd Schultz on themes from his new book The Mind of the Artist: Personality and the Drive to Create

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ou find it hard to control your thoughts. At work you get distracted by daydreams. You see patterns and connections where there are none. You often feel happy and sad at the same time. You confuse fantasies with real memories. You have urges to do something shocking, or to break and smash things. Accidents, you believe, can be caused by mysterious forces. There are times you get a feeling you may possess magical powers. You like doing the opposite of what people suggest even though you know they are right. As a child, you lived in a make-believe world much of the time, and you spent at least half your waking day imagining. If you want to, you can finish or change a dream after it’s over. You blend visual images together instead of seeing them separately and sequentially. You don’t filter information coming at you from outside, even stuff that’s irrelevant to whatever you happen to be focusing on. These sound like items from a diagnostic manual. They sound, in fact, like prodromal symptoms, the beginning stages of schizophrenia. They aren’t. They are the artist mind. Each of these statements is taken from questionnaires measuring aspects of creativity and creative accomplishment. But they don’t just correlate with creativity. They also correlate with openness, a mysterious and heterogeneous trait of personality, which

predicts everything from IQ to sensation-seeking. The question is: What makes this style of mind emerge? And why is it so conducive to new and different ways of shaping experience, of making connections no one has thought of or seen before? Traits and states In the psychology of old, traits and states were seen as separate processes, two different phenomena. Traits were static (always there), states dynamic (everchanging). Traits were durable, impervious to context; states episodic, they came and went. Anyone could go into any state at any time, whereas traits were more personspecific, with borders and limits. The reality is more interesting. Traits incline you toward states. They make states more or less probable. States, then, aren’t disconnected entities. They come for a reason, and a reason is personality. Who you are is why you think and feel and perceive as you do. Let’s take one particular mental state: chaos. What does it mean to have a chaotic mind, a chaotic internal life? It means a lot of the things referred to in the opening paragraph. A capacity for irrationality. A willingness to forsake logic. A reluctance to follow rules. A commitment to fantasy, a belief that fantasy is part of reality. A comfort

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the psychologist march 2022 books with messes, with jumbled thoughts and feelings, with uncertainty, with disorder and disorganisation. A desire to suspend belief sometimes, and to let the mind wander. A talent for accessing child-like experience, for stepping outside of ‘adult’ concerns. We tend to think of chaos as just that – chaotic. It’s bad, destabilising, something to be feared. On occasion, these reactions – an instinct to recoil – might seem valid. Useless chaos is unhelpful. With artists, however, it’s a different story. Chaos is key. It delivers the raw material. It’s the portal. It is useful. The philosopher Nietzsche, for instance, believed in creative frenzy. To him, chaos birthed dancing stars. Francis Bacon arrived at the same conclusion. ‘Deeply ordered chaos’ was how he described his art. Saul Bellow called art ‘the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos’. To Paul Cezanne, being creative meant living in ‘a rainbow of chaos’. Henry Miller called chaos ‘the score on which reality is written’. Then there’s collagist Romare Bearden, who phrased the question most directly: ‘The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, “How do you organize chaos?”’ Notice how, in most of these quotes, what’s being described are two seemingly opposed qualities. Chaos then stillness. Chaos then reality. Chaos then organisation. A chaos rainbow. The question really is as Bearden laid it down: How is chaos shaped, how is disorder ordered? A penetrating magic You might think artists alone knew the answer. You might think you could ask them and they’d tell you. It’s not that easy. They usually have no idea. They know what they are doing, but they don’t know how they do it. It’s as much Getty Images

Bob Dylan believed his early songs came out of a ‘penetrating magic’

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a mystery to them as it is to us. Bob Dylan believed his early songs came out of a ‘penetrating magic’. He couldn’t say what this magic was or how it came to possess him. Looking back, he doubted he could write such songs again. The secret was lost to him. Other times meanings come long after the fact. Capote reread his first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, and he was embarrassed by how transparently autobiographical it was. He’d missed that fact before, and he found his ignorance ‘unpardonable’. Grammy-winning songwriter Aimee Mann told me something similar. Her songs got clearer to her years down the line. She’d have a Eureka moment: ‘Wow! So that’s what this song was about.’ Let’s start with a simple example. We know that one of the six facets of openness is ‘fantasy’. You have a vivid imagination. You love to daydream. You get lost in thought. You indulge in ‘wild flights’ of reverie. There’s a measure of fantasy proneness called the Creative Experiences Questionnaire (CEQ). It includes items such as, ‘When I think of something cold, I actually get cold’; ‘I am never bored because I start fantasizing when things get boring’; and ‘Sometimes I act as if I am somebody else, and I completely identify myself with that role’. Fantasy-prone people don’t stay on task, their mind veers off, they make more errors. The need to fantasise, in other words, gets in the way. It’s a sort of interruption. It’s chaos in the system. As expected, the trait of openness also correlates with fantasy proneness. The two go together. There’s more. Fantasy proneness correlates with creativity. One study, for instance, found those high in the fantasy proneness state to be better storytellers. What emerges, then, is a triangular relationship. Openness produces chaotically creative states of mind. What these states toss up into consciousness is art’s raw materials. There’s an activation, followed by a synthesis. Mental contents get arranged. Apple founder Steve Jobs had a simple take on it: he said creativity was just ‘connecting things’: soaking up what the mind offers you, and forming unexpected linkages. The process seemed so dull, so ordinary, it made him feel guilty when anyone asked about it. Latent inhibition There’s a theory about minds wandering and how this invites creativity, and it revolves around something called cognitive disinhibition, which itself revolves around – no surprise – openness. Here’s how it works. Humans automatically filter information, and we do so unconsciously. It’s an evolved adaptive mechanism, a screening tool. We don’t know we do it. We just do. It happens beneath the threshold of awareness. The process goes by the fancy-sounding name of ‘latent inhibition’ (LI). We inhibit what we take in. We focus in order to get things done. We avoid distraction. Except, some people are less inclined to this than others. Some don’t focus. Some don’t avoid distraction. Stuff that may be irrelevant to the task at hand – perceptions, mental images, memories, thoughts, or partially processed material – injects itself into

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awareness. They go off on tangents. They get sidetracked. They feel, in some cases, overstimulated. Reduced LI seems to have one of two main outcomes. For some, it’s destabilising, overwhelming. There’s too much going on in the mind, and the mind unravels. You lose your bearings. You can’t think straight. But for people like Jobs, reduced LI is a gift, a positive. The less you filter the more you notice. Noticing more widens the field of perception. At root, it’s all about relevance judgments. If your Getty Images

relevance threshold is strict, info gets excluded. You see and think what you need to. You find out nothing new. If your relevance threshold is loose, info gets included. New patterns suggest themselves, as do new metaphors, new connections. LI is limiting, reduced LI is stimulating. LI is closed, reduced LI is open. Art emerges when we let irrelevance in or make it relevant: the tools of Pollock, the nonsense lyrics in some Lennon songs, photographer Francesca Woodman scooping up irrelevant powder in the street to make photographs with. The research backs this. First, compared to a noncreative high IQ control group, high IQ creative achievers have significantly lower LI scores. They filter less, screen out less. Second, eminent creative achievers – those who’d sold a novel or published poetry, had a gallery showing, recorded their own music – are seven times more likely to have low rather than high LI scores. So, LI doesn’t just predict creativity. It predicts creative success. For many, it’s the very definition of creativity: making connections others have missed. And since you can’t connect what never gets in, art is enhanced potential for connectivity. The Mind and the Artist: Personality and the Drive to Create is coming soon, published by Oxford University Press. For more, on reality distortion and lucid dreaming, see the online version of this piece.

The tools of Pollock

‘We have that history to face in our own household’ Black Identities + White Therapies: Race, respect + diversity (PCCS Books) examines therapeutic professions in the context of ethnicity, race and culture. Co-editors Divine Charura and Colin Lago speak to Deputy Editor Shaoni Bhattacharya.

In your preface you wrote ‘This book really does set out to decolonise the profession from its roots and origins’ – what does this mean? Divine: I think that this idea of decolonising the profession is often misinterpreted. In chapter 17, we write about when we’ve spoken to colleagues who say ‘Oh, we’ve included a few black authors or authors from different epistemologies who have minority heritage’ who in fact will be from the global majority, as it were. And in the history of psychology there has been lots of research that does Colin Lago and Divine Charura not put at heart

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the reality of diversity. In decolonising the curriculum, Professor Frank Keating at Royal Holloway argues that this can be done by analysing how oppression and power are used to exploit, or oppress, or discriminate against racialised groups. And the importance of examining and critically examining the beliefs that we hold in psychology, about other groups and the process of othering. One of the things that we talk about is around decolonising research and practice, which essentially is about us challenging Eurocentric ideas, how we use Eurocentric-based psychology, psychotherapy-counselling ideas, to inform what we do in practice. It’s also about challenging the pre-eminence that we give to Western models in viewing mental health, mental ill health, wellbeing, psychological dis-ease. Even when these things don’t apply to other groups, we tend to still look down a Western perspective. And it’s important, I think, for us to see other epistemologies, other cultures, other psychologies as equal knowledge-generating partners, and as worthy of critiquing Eurocentric psychology. I train counselling psychologists, and I think it would be wrong for us to say, ‘right, we’ll teach you a purely

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the psychologist march 2022 books based Eurocentric system that has psychometric tests that are biased towards racialised groups that do not include how others might see psychological distress in the formulation’. And then at the end, we say, ‘right, you’re graduated, now you’re going to work in a diverse Britain’… It doesn’t work. Colin: It’s both theoretical and it’s about the complexity of practice… trying to mine the assumptions in contemporary theory and practice. These are assumptions about the other – whoever the other is, right? It’s trying to be absolutely sensitive, in terms of the quality of practice to each client that comes to consult us. It’s about a questioning of profound assumptions originating often through training that this is what we learn – so this is therefore what we do. At its ultimate, I would love this book to be informing the quality of sensitivity of practice. So that relationship formation with clients is at the core. Moments of discrimination, or racism or oppression, are well recorded within the profession. It’s not something that happens only on the streets or in organisational structures… there is something about going to the heart of what it is we do as therapists, psychologists, and how we can best do it. The world can come into our room. It’s a striving for an efficacious, effective, socially-just way of being with another. Divine: Maybe there’s something else in addition to what Colin is saying about facing up to our history. We can look at statistics, the likes of Ronald Fisher, William Gossett, Karl Pearson, and the critical arguments that have been made against the problems in ethnic bias in assessments; in reduced access to psychological therapy via primary care pathways; the high prevalence of mental ill health in black and ethnic minority communities and over-representation in psychiatric systems; the lower likelihood of being referred to talking therapies and greater likelihood of being prescribed medication; the report of discriminatory and traumatic experiences of mental health services and so on. We have that history to face in our own household. Colin: These negative experiences range from the ‘diagnostic’ level, right through to the levels of professionals’ sensitivity and openness to understanding the complexities of transgenerational trauma. Knowing that things can manifest for clients which they themselves don’t understand. It can be deeply rooted – so it’s an openness to that kind of phenomenon. In your first chapter you talk about psychology professionals, and society in general, being uncomfortable with talking about issues of race – how can psychology tackle this discomfort? Divine: The first thing is for us to be open, to have discussions about our history. Psychology is not without its faults in playing a part in discrimination and oppression within its studies, in its magnificent endeavour to understand human behaviour and the mind. Alongside that is to create spaces, and opportunities for dialogue with those who have the lived experience of oppression, or discrimination. And I’m talking about

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shifts in the geopolitics of knowledge, in which whole modes and epistemological frameworks of knowing and understanding the world are challenged. I also think it is about breaking down the structures that support the status quo [power inequalities and discrimination]. An example is around training and access: who is able to access our training, and its costs? The other thing is about our capacity to do deep selfwork: to look at our own biases and for us psychologists to challenge and critically examine our own beliefs that we hold about ourselves, about other groups of people, how we other, because we’re all prejudiced. And also taking a real radical shift that is more than tokenistic in decolonising the curriculum in the way we’ve already spoken about. Colin: In terms of the profession, my own sense is that it will be important to tackle these issues whenever and wherever possible. This means a greater openness about the arena within training courses, professional journals, continuing professional development courses, conferences and so on. Such initiatives will need continued support and attention from those in positions of institutional power within the profession. Support, recognition and encouragement will also need to be extended to the current ‘diversity’ interest group within BPS to expand its work. The profession could promote ‘training the trainers’ conferences to support trainers striving to include the subject more fully in their courses. If there’s one key message you’d like readers to take away from this book, what would it be? Colin: I would invite readers to conduct two continuing professional development exercises for themselves. Firstly, to think and reflect more deeply upon the human experience of being oppressed/‘othered’/discriminated against… and its devastating impact upon the selfesteem, confidence, experience of (in)security/safety and consequent behaviour that such oppressive treatment evokes in the recipient. Thus to engage in an act of ‘imaginative empathy’, seeking to understand the ‘other’s’ experience, as to the likely impact of such (frequently long term/unsolicited/ aggressive) behaviour. And secondly to monitor one’s own perceptual emotional reactions to others of difference and diversity – people in the street, on TV, in magazines, etc. – and to note these attitudinal reactions and internally reflect upon questions such as ‘where did my reaction come from? How come I reacted that like? And if that person came into my interviewing room today how would I respond/ how would I like to respond? How might I deal with these reactions in myself?’. Divine: I’d like them to think about ‘how can I contribute to bring about the change that is so needed in the world?’. And in our profession – in relation to black identities and white therapies. We all have a responsibility. And as psychologists, what are we doing? Because we can’t just stand and watch. Read the full Q&A: thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/we-havehistory-face-our-own-household

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‘It’s an unusual type of therapy’ Danny Taggart and Jess Chown watch Procession and speak with Director Robert Greene

rocession is a three-year collaborative documentary project between filmmaker Robert Greene and six men who were victims of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Missouri, United States. Now, in their 50s and 60s, the film bears witness to Eddie, Michael, Mike, Tom, Joe and Dan in coming to terms with their abuse. Procession has been lauded as a structurally ambitious and morally exacting work of art. The documentary process is an alternate form of therapeutic practice, whereby the men work as a group with a drama therapist to recreate scenes related to their abuse in short dramatised segments. There’s a shared artistic lineage with the drama-therapy documentary The Act of Killing, which recreated scenes from the anti-communist genocide in Indonesia, employing ex-soldiers as actors. In Procession, however, it is the victims who are centre stage

and dictate the narrative, even as they struggle to exert control over their emotions and memories of the past. As a psychologist and a psychotherapist working in the field of trauma, we are interested in what draws people to step into such a dark and disturbing corner of human experience. When we spoke with Robert Greene, the energetic and loquacious Director, the first question we asked was, why did you immerse yourself in these men’s lives and their abuse histories, when for so long society and the Church has turned away from them? He replied that the horror of child sexual abuse and the scale of the cover up made this ‘the one story that I couldn’t take in… I would literally go and turn off the radio’. This aversion forced him into a reflective and creative process where he reached out to ‘help’ the men who would go on to become filmmakers, to frame the work within a drama-

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the psychologist march 2022 culture therapy model and to use the film as a medium to explore what he described as ‘the unacknowledged scripts of society’. Greene said the unspoken scripts here concern the ‘indoctrination [of Catholicism as] crucial to the way the abuse is framed in the survivors mind and body… the way power is inscripted in all these rituals and then that is turned against children’. He said the filmmaking process was like ‘throwing a spiritual Molotov cocktail in the middle of the Church’. To take a group of six men who are bound together by shared experiences of sexual abuse committed by priests, invite them to re-enter the church as adults, and immerse themselves in the iconography of Catholicism – from the gleaming tabernacle, to the menacing organ music, to the priest’s green vestigial gowns – is certainly, as Michael said, ‘an unusual type of therapy’. The men, while sharing the legacy of abuse, are also very different from one another and this is reflected in their approach to filming their respective staged scenes; for some the tone is angry and confrontational, while others presented more of a childhood imaginative viewpoint. The themes in the scenes concern secrecy, lies, silencing and shame. Power is ominous and ever-present, embodied in the form of priests, and the control the Church exerts over the individual psyche. A tapestry of scenes reflect the varied narratives of each filmmaker, acted out by the other survivors with a child actor representing the abused child. The documentary intersperses these scenes with interviews with the six filmmakers, footage of set building, scripting and the filming process. We also see the in-between times, conversations between takes and journeys to and from remembered places. The shared wish to contribute to a therapeutic process for one another is striking and it’s a privilege to see the relationships between the six men develop as they confront their individual traumas through the collective act of filmmaking. As you might imagine, Procession makes for uncomfortable viewing. The sight of adult survivors of sexual abuse dressing up in the garments of the men who abused them, reenacting scenes related to their abuse, with a child actor actively involved playing an abuse victim, raised some ethical concerns about the potential harm to the young person who embodied this victim role, as well as the potentially retraumatising nature of the process. When we asked Greene if he worried about the damage the process caused, he said felt it was ‘way too risky’ at points but that it wasn’t up to him, it was the men who decided what direction they took. The drama therapist told him early on in the project, ‘Their trauma, comes from the fact that their power has been taken away at every turn, what you have to do is never do that, never repeat that dynamic’. The potency of the staged scenes and their overwhelming emotions in response, is evidence that Greene succeeded in ceding control. The role of the child actor, Terrick, although accompanied by his parents throughout, raises questions for us about what it means to produce a film about child abuse that casts a child playing the role of victim. Overall, Terrick comes across as an experienced child actor who

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made his own decision to take the part. He watches as his mum recounts him saying ‘I wanna do it. This really happened? It’s not my reality, Mom, it’s acting’. The viewer can see he is practised in using the role to distance himself from the material; however, there are moments where we were left curious about the contracting of therapeutic boundaries, for example when Terrick is given stage direction using his true name rather than being in role, or when his own mother is cast as the mother of his character as she drives him to the place where a second sexual assault takes place. However, the interactions between the participants and their actor are consistently considerate and empathic and we see Mike come out of role to reassure Terrick before an expletive-laced rant, ‘Don’t take this too seriously, ok?’ It seems to us that ethical questions like this are bound to come up when the subject matter is so inherently traumatic and laden with social taboos. How can child sexual abuse be represented in art without it causing harm itself for both viewers and the artists themselves? And, more psychologically, is it inevitable that when artists represent the world of abuse that the art will take on some of the characteristics of the abusive act, leaving viewers feeling disturbed by what they see? It seems to us that when the words ‘powerful’ or ‘brave’ get attached to this form of art, as they have done with Procession, that it is often a positive way for the reviewer to say it was overwhelming to witness. So, given the disturbing subject matter of the film, why should you watch it when there are gentler forms of entertainment available? It is a pleasure, albeit a complex one, to watch these men create something out of their pain and to watch them support one another is affirming of the need for collective solutions to individual traumas. There are moments of great humanity and humour expressed between them, and this solidarity is inspiring and filled with hope for the healing potential of art. The traumatic aftermath of abuse is so destructive of the human mind and spirit that it can lead to people finding themselves unable to speak, represent or symbolise their experiences. This locks people in shame and isolation, leading to struggles to make and maintain the human connections we all need to flourish. Creative acts contain within them a different form of creative destructiveness, one that enables new connections and language to describe unspeakable acts. In this sense, Procession, in its juxtaposition of darkness and light, is a triumph. Procession is now available to watch on Netflix. Danny Taggart is a Clinical Psychologist who works at the University of Essex and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. His current research is focused on the impacts of child abuse on adult health and social functioning. Jess Chown is an Integrative Child Psychotherapist at Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust and in private practice. She works with children and adults with complex trauma.

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The agonies and the breakthroughs tv Couples therapy BBC2

This is ‘reality’ TV, a ‘fly on the wall’ series which gives the audience a sense of what it’s really like to be in couple therapy: the nervousness and shame, the sudden rising fury and talking over each other, followed by painful silences. Dr Orna Guralnik also gives us a window into what it’s like to struggle along their side as a therapist. How to reach that awkward client who evades, blames and tries to hide their panic about being truly seen. To him, Guralnik calls his bluff, saying, ‘do you know how hard it is to really meet you?’ New York-based couples are seen around 20 times and their stories intercut. Perhaps the key to the show’s success is that the creator, Josh Kriegman, is himself the son of two psychotherapists. Kriegman wanted to find a way to convey the agonies and the breakthroughs of couple therapy he’d heard his parents describe. He came up with a set that completely concealed the crew and cameras to give the chosen couples as near a genuine experience of working with Guralnik as possible. As psychotherapists, we each have our own version of ‘the frame’, and Guralnik’s version might seem a bit informal to some. She tends to lean forward, cradling a cuppa. When departing patients asks for a hug, they get one. Personally, I was charmed by her dog, who attended every session and greeted the couples with her before flopping into his bed, whilst the couples seem to benefit from his calming presence. However informal in style, Guralnik does not tone down her psychoanalytic stance for the camera. Couple therapy requires gumption and we are no good to our couples if we can’t say the unsayable. Take Elaine, who has created a tough exterior to cope with early neglect and trauma, and now attempts to control partner DeSean’s every move. Whilst sympathetic to her past

suffering, Guralnik confronts her tendency to blame DeSean for her distress and suggests that it is she who ‘paints her trauma’ over DeSean’s desire to spend some leisure time without her. It’s a breakthrough moment for Elaine, who drops her armour and becomes more selfreflective in subsequent sessions. Whilst this is great TV, I was frustrated not to discover more about DeSean’s own complicity in this ‘pursuerpursued’ dynamic. Did he, perhaps, have a critical or intrusive mother and so unconsciously provokes Elaine into a hectoring role? We will never know because the answers are on Kriegman’s cutting room floor. This absence of such material may reinforce a common misconception that the couple therapist’s task is to find out which one of the couple is ‘the culprit’, rather than to unearth what is always a collusive pattern. Whilst Series One is unsatisfyingly vague about some of the client’s backgrounds and parental relationships, Series Two has improved on this, taking more time to reveal how couple dynamics link to childhood. Series Two also shows the transition into Lockdown, and I found it cathartic to watch another therapist try to adjust to the tricky transfer to Zoom. However, both series seem to suggest that a lot can change within a relatively short phase of treatment, and I did wonder whether the couples may have felt rushed to an end result. Each episode contains visits to Guralnik’s supervisor, and although I recognised the agony of the responsibility she describes, these meetings feel rather staged. More revealing are the scenes of the couples outside the therapy room; hugging in the street, chatting and laughing on the subway, and pottering about at home. These moments spoke to me of how couples can benefit from leaving something to be contained by their therapist. Relieved at having survived another stomach knotting session together, they may then feel more able to tolerate the eternal conundrum of being in a twosome. Reviewed by Ella Bahaire, a Couple Therapist for Tavistock Relationships and in private practice

The surprise of the green-eyed monster podcast Why do I feel? Nathan Filer

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Why do I feel? is a rich and thoughtprovoking podcast hosted by qualified mental health nurse and author, Nathan Filer. Following the title of the podcast, I anticipated more explanation of ‘why we feel’: instead, each episode centred around one emotion in particular, but generally explored a situation the individual had experienced that evoked the emotion. I was hoping for some psychologically-informed discussions, but none-the-less I still found myself

engrossed in the stories. In the episode ‘The GreenEyed Monster’, we hear from Dr Windy Dryden, emeritus professor of psychotherapy and expert on envy. Host Nathan receives a single session of CBT, centred around his experiences of envy. This episode is worth a listen, and as someone who’s not familiar with how singlesession therapies work I was really surprised at the developments made in that short time. Dr Windy

Dryden cognitively reframed Nathan’s outlook on his envy-evoking habit of comparison to other authors. It’s worth a listen to hear some interesting stories, with a touch of input from experts too. I look forward to seeing what future series of this podcast cover: more psychology would be a great addition. Reviewed by Dani Olliffe, BSc Psychology and Counselling student, University of Westminster.

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the psychologist march 2022 culture

We don’t talk about generational trauma In Encanto, Disney’s latest animated musical, we enter the world of the Madrigals, a multigenerational family in Colombia. The grandmother of the family, Abuela, loses her husband, and as a refugee she is left on her own to care for her three children. Over the years, Abuela focuses on surviving rather than thriving in their new world. When her children and grandchildren are of age, they receive their magical gifts through a miracle candle and use their gifts to be of service to their community – except our main character, Mirabel. Following on from this, the cracks in this ‘perfect’ family quickly starts to show. The film explores how Abuela’s actions stem from past wounds that she unconsciously passes down to her children and grandchildren. We see Abuela emphasise the use of the gifts to ‘strengthen our community, strengthen our home’, suggesting that if the family helps others, history (her trauma) will not repeat itself. As an Indian and an individual from Turkey (Shrinidhi and Tugce respectively), we can relate to this through the pressure placed on young people to enter conventional fields of work that our communities see as secure, such as doctor, engineer or lawyer. Upon reflection, we think that this may be the need of our communities to prioritise our safety over flourishing in a field we are passionate about – similar to Abuela. Alongside this, it can be detrimental if an individual’s self-worth is placed solely on their career path (or in the film, their gift) and what they can offer their community. This is illustrated beautifully in Luisa’s song ‘Surface Pressure’. We witness how the suppression of individuality and vulnerability can suddenly come to the surface without the person even realising that they are struggling. In a systematic review of intergenerational trauma published by Cindy Sangalang and Cindy Vang in 2017, it was found that children of refugee parents were highly susceptible to having anxiety and depression. Alongside this, they were found to have views of ‘taking on’ the pain experienced by their parents, being a burden on them, and responsibility for the surviving parents’ feelings. In an ideal world, family offers unconditional positive regard. However, we see that her past trauma leads Abuela down

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the road of providing conditional love for her family. This is evident with Pepa, who has the gift of impacting the weather through her emotions. When the weather is clear and sunny, this pleases Abuela, but when her anxiety causes a downpour, Abuela tells Pepa to get rid of the clouds. This has conditioned Pepa to repeat ‘clear skies’ to herself, equivalent to telling someone to ‘stop worrying’ or ‘calm down’. In both of our cultures, the mental health stigma is instilled into us from a young age, and we can find ourselves being gatekeepers of our emotional expression to avoid being a burden on loved ones. Despite disapproval from her mother, Pepa’s storyline shows us that our emotions are not problematic and there will be people who understand and support their expression, such as Pepa’s husband. In addition, individuals that try to break the cycle of generational trauma can be treated differently for questioning the family dynamics, which was the case with Mirabel who was blamed for any family misfortune. Near the end, we see a cathartic moment where Mirabel confronts Abuela about her expectation of perfection. This reveals that Mirabel’s actual gift was to bring about the unconditional acceptance they were all craving and establish a healthier foundation for her family. This allows the rest of the family to come out from beneath the shadow of their gifts, such as Pepa who we see dancing with her husband whilst there is hail falling above them – she is relieved to no longer hide her emotions. From seeing how Encanto is taking social media by storm, clearly many people can relate to this Latinx family and their struggles. Generational trauma is real, and it can take a lot of our energy without us realising. If you are actively pushing against this, please take care of yourself and if you have not, watch Encanto. You will feel seen. Reviewed by Tuğçe Koca, BSc, MSc, Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner; Twitter: @Tugcek17; Instagram: @tugce_talks_psych; and Shrinidhi Sathish, MSc Health Psychology; Instagram: @shrinidhi_speaks

film Encanto Disney+

More online: Find extra reviews at thepsychologist. org.uk/reviews, including Jolel Miah on the ‘Uncanny’ podcast

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We dip into the Society member database and pick out… Dr Raj Gnanaiah Consultant Chartered Psychologist at Mindz One aspect of my work that I love People are dynamic, always changing, never dull – well, on the whole at least! Building relationships with my clients and colleagues is the aspect of my work that I always value the most. It nurtures trust and bridges change in the most astounding ways. In a post-pandemic world, this has never been more important. I often remind myself of this when logging on to yet another Zoom meeting. We are social beings and in need of each other, especially during a pandemic and all the challenges it brings to our everyday lives.

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One stress reliever Going on a drive and listening to classical music clears my head. This seemingly small habit has helped me maintain a healthy work-life balance, for which I am grateful. Be intentional about being resilient, because you can only give what you have. So, do one thing well, rather than many things in haste. This remains one of my enduring mottos in life. One approach I couldn’t do without They say it takes 21 days to learn a habit. I’m so glad I took the time to see joy in the little things… to focus on positives ‘mindfully’, even in the midst of negatives that my clients might bring, without minimising or invalidating their problem. We tend to underestimate our resilience, forgetting our own inbuilt coping mechanism, which is ever present within us. Take a closer look to discover your hidden strengths and make it a habit – rediscovering it again and again. It might surprise you! One impact the pandemic has had on me The pandemic and numerous lockdowns have been hard for everyone. However, I’ve found that during all the unprecedented changes, disappointments, and frustrations it has also given me fresh outlook, insight, and a renewed appreciation of human resilience. We always survive and move on in the face of death and destruction. There is always hope! More via thepsychologist.bps.org.uk

coming soon… we are ramping up efforts around our summer 2022 edition, inspired by the Society’s Senate-voted theme of ‘tackling class-based inequality’. We’re looking for diverse and creative contributions. We are also planning a special December 2022 / January 2023 issue around predictions and priorities for the year ahead: in the Society, Psychology and the wider world. If you might be interested in contributing to either special, please get in touch with me on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk comment… email the editor, the Leicester office, or tweet @psychmag to advertise… reach a large and professional audience of over 57,000 BPS members: see details on inside front cover maybe you missed… …March 2021, a special feature gets ‘lost’ Search it and so much more via thepsychologist.bps.org.uk

march 2021

One change I’d like to see In India, there is a shared belief that is millennia old. In Sanskrit it is ‘Vasudhaiva

Kutumbakam’, which means ‘the world is one family’. Whilst this might sound slightly clichéd, as my daughter pointed out, in practice, we should ponder on its implications when calling for ‘universal equality’ – which we are still striving to see in the world. These sentiments are paramount for effective psychology and can be so easily overlooked. For example, people want to be valued, accepted as they are, heard, and taken seriously. I have found that by prioritising these aptitudes in practice, indifferences and any unconscious bias that we too often hold are minimalised, ultimately leading to positive change and universal acceptance.

the psychologist

One place I would like to visit When Covid permits, the southern tip of India will be top of my list. It is beautiful and always brings back wonderful memories of family holidays when I was a child. Fast-forward 40 years and it is still unmatched! The location is naturally beautiful because it’s where the three seas meet: the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Early in the morning, the red fiery ball of the sunrise from these oceans is truly a spectacular and breath-taking experience to behold – it always exceeds expectation.

one on one

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psychologist march 2021

Lost

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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The Psychologist is one part of the British Psychological Society’s communications, centred on being a magazine about psychology and psychologists. See also the society website, member emails and more…

Find out more online at www.bps.org.uk

Society Trustees www.bps.org.uk/about-us/ who-we-are President Katherine Carpenter President Elect Dr Nicky Hayes Honorary General Secretary Christina Buxton Honorary Treasurer Dr Roxane Gervais Chair, Education and Training Board Professor Niamh Stack Chair, Practice Board Alison Clarke Chair, Member Board Professor Carol McGuinness Chair, Research Board Professor Andrew Tolmie Trustees Dr Peter Branney, Dr Esther CohenTovee, Dr Adam Jowett

Chief Executive Sarb Bajwa Change Programme Director and Deputy CEO Diane Ashby Director of Communications and Engagement Rachel Dufton

society notices

society vacancies

The Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee See p.23 Dorothy Bishop Festschrift 2022 Grant See p.39 British Journal of Psychology, Editor-in-Chief See p.49

Director of Finance and Resources Phil Hodgett Director of IT Mike Laffan Director of Knowledge and Insight Dr Debra Malpass Director of Membership, Professional Development and Standards Karen Beamish Head of Legal and Governance Christine Attfield

The Society has offices in Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and London, as well as the main office in Leicester (St Andrews House, 48 Princess Road East, Leicester, LE1 7DR).

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