In response to Jane O’Grady’s Open Democ­racy arti­cle cri­tiquing the ‘neuro-social-sciences’, Julian Sanchez out­lines his thoughts on the per­ils of pop psy­chol­ogy:

There are argu­ments that sim­ply can’t be made in the span of even a longish news­pa­per or mag­a­zine arti­cle. If one is writ­ing for a lay audi­ence, in fact, I feel pretty con­fi­dent that it’s not even pos­si­ble to clearly lay out the con­tested ques­tions, or what pre­cisely the var­i­ous posi­tions on them are, in that allot­ment of space. At best, an untrained reader of O’Grady’s piece would come away sim­ply befud­dled and unsure what she was get­ting on about. Some, to judge by the com­ments, appear to believe they have learned some­thing from it, which sug­gests that O’Grady has given them the unhealthy illu­sion of know­ing something.

Pop psy­chol­ogy and phi­los­o­phy suc­ceed only in fur­ther­ing con­fir­ma­tion bias and the Dunning-Kruger effect among read­ers, Sanchez believes:

This brings us around to some of my long­stand­ing ambiva­lence about blog­ging and jour­nal­ism more gen­er­ally: “Dis­course at this level can’t pos­si­bly accom­plish any­thing beyond giv­ing peo­ple some sim­u­la­tion of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for what they wanted to believe in the first place.”

[…] Peo­ple who actu­ally know some­thing are more likely to be fairly ten­ta­tive and cir­cum­spect, while peo­ple ill-informed enough to think every­thing is quite sim­ple will be con­fi­dent they know all they need to.