I mean this both in terms of credentials and in theories.
I happened to be looking at the intro of this book called "The Female Brain" by Louann Brizendine and while the book sounded very informative, I felt that it sounded a little too anecdotal, but I thought the author was well qualified. However, I decided to see
amazon.com reviews on the book and I happened to find out that the author's credentials weren't as good as she was putting them to be, and even though she is an MD and is a clinical psychologist, she used inadequate references as citations for some really eye popping statements, plus according to one neuroscientist reviewing the book, she committed quite a bit of scientific fallacies time and time again in the book.
Examples:
"2) The author consistently confuses neural structure (brain) with psychological function (mind, mental performance, emotions, behavior). This is a huge error. The author is extraordinarily fond of citing functional gender differences. She'll talk about differences in verbal output, memory, eye contact, thoughts about sex, emotions, divorce initiation, aggression, chilhood behaviors, etc. She'll say these functional effects are in the brain, repeatedly. Good scientific thinking doesn't confuse these things. Part of the work is to measure sex differences in the brain (e.g., anatomy, physiology, chemistry). A completely separate part of the work is to measure psychological variables (e.g., behaviors, cognitions, emotions, perceptions). The third, most essential part, is to discover true correlations between structure and function. Many of the most egregious and elementary errors of cognitive neuroscience occur when researchers attempt to localize psychological functions inside brain regions or chemicals. All good neuroscientists understand this, but it is a tricky issue. One of my mentors, Davida Teller, spent years contemplating the issues surrounding "linking" hypotheses, while many great neuroscientists have struggled with this third part (Robert Efron, Steve Kosslyn, Georg von Bekesy, Gustav Fechner, and on and on and on). The author's disregard for this elementary issue is an obvious felony in my book. "
"Alerted to the possibility that Brizendine might have made it all up, and his appetite whetted by the confessed public failure of the avatar of all the news that's fit to print, Liberman rummaged among his books and fired up his online university library system and investigated the citations for Brizendine's assertion that "studies indicate that girls are motivated -- on a molecular and a neurological level -- to ease and even prevent social conflict."
Here's what he found:
"My summaries of these articles, in the context of Brizendine's claims [that studies indicate girls are motivated on a molecular and neurologicallevel to ease and even prevent social conflict]:
1. Jasnow 2006: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships or humans of any sex.
2. Bertolino 2005: Nothing here about social conflict or preserving relationships or teenagers of any sex.
3. Hamann 2005: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships or teenagers.
4. Huber 2005: Nothing here about sex differences, about social conflict avoidance, about preserving relationships, or about humans of any age or sex.
5. Pezawas 2005: Nothing here about sex differences, about social conflict avoidance, about preserving relationships, or about teenage girls.
6. Sabatinelli 2005: Nothing here about sex differences or social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships.
7. Viau 2005: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or about preserving relationships.
8. Wilson 2005: Because Penn lacks a subscription to this journal, and I was unwilling to pay $30 for a 7-page article, I'm not sure about the details. Unlike the other articles cited, it does have something to do with social interaction, but there's apparently no direct relevance to social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships.
9. Phelps 2004: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships."
You can read more at
http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine-M-D/dp/0767920090However, her book sounds appealing to women and especially feminists, and it seems that the book was written for women as a target audience, for sales (as in telling women what they want to hear), not for genuine psychological knowledge, as she seems to be too biased to even be taken seriously. Much of her psychology work is from a private practice that takes a hormonal perspective in treating problems of women, which seems to be outside the realm of typical therapy.
This is the thing about pop psychology, that it many times is done by charismatic people who portray themselves as an expert when they aren't, and even if they are, certainly not with an intention of being unbiased. One pop psychologist is obviously Dr. Phil Mcgraw, which has a PhD in clinical psychology but of which his background is in mostly trial consulting (since he stopped general psychology practice in 1990 after getting in trouble with the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists due to inappropriate contact with a patient) and Dr. Phil legally hasn't practiced psychology in 5 years (and his shows are legally considered entertainment.) Another pop psychologist is John Gray, author of the book "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", which told people what they wanted to hear or at least what women wanted to hear. The problem is that John Gray wasn't a real Phd, he got his PhD from Columbia Pacific University, an unaccredited distance learning school in California
that was closed by the State of California in 2000 due to inadequate educational standards (like inadequately trained staff and failing to meet requirements for issuing PhD's.) Gray got his Bachelors and Masters in Creative Intelligence from one of the Maharishi Manesh Yogi's Universities, so certainly his background wasn't in an acceptable form of training in psychology. Yet he purported to be some kind of expert in psychology, especially with the use of his "PhD" credentials. Why take the information in the book seriously (which is heavily anecdotal anyway) if the author is seriously misrepresenting his own credentials?
I'm making this post so others would beware of pop psychologists when trying to learn and understand things in psychology, because knowing bad information is worse than having no information.
