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Popular Psychology
Popular psychology refers to concepts and theories about human mental
life and behaviour that come from outside the technical study of psychology,
but purport to go beyond everyday knowledge.
Popular psychology should be distinguished from naïve psychology,
the technical term for the intuitive, non-technical understanding of our
own and others' psychological processes that all people have. Like the
parallel areas of naïve physics and naïve biology, naïve
psychology may often be technically incorrect but is often functional,
in the sense that it gives an accurate description of the situations that
we face as individuals, and specifies reasonable courses of action to
take.
Popular psychology, on the other hand, usually purports to offer a technical
insight, and often uses technical jargon, but does so in a way that is
unsupported by systematic analysis or knowledge. Many popular psychology
concepts are taken from pseudoscience but may also refer to academic or
clinical psychology, but the literature tends to seize on ideas out of
context or without the conditions and cautions that a professional psychologist
would attach to them.
Popular psychology should also be distinguished from various schools
of psychological thinking that lie outside the current mainstream, for
example the approaches to understanding psychology that flow from most
religious systems or from astrology. Professional psychologists are as
mistrustful of these as they are of popular psychology, quackery and pseudoscience,
but these systems do generally represent, at least, some relatively systematic
attempt to understand human thought, emotions, behavior, and the psyche.
Some exponents of the genre include James Vikery, Anthony Robbins, David
Icke, Edward De Bono, L. Ron Hubbard and Tony Buzan who have popularized
a variety of unsupported and out of context claims.
One of the most enduring, yet non-factual, statements associated with
popular psychology is that humans use only ten percent of their brain.
Many people accept this urban legend as true science, and it is often
propagated by pseudoscientific and new age practitioners.
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