Patients always receive treatment in agreement with the best scientific evidence available, right? Well, no. Not really. Clinical practitioners seem to suffer from many of the cognitive biases that affect the rest of us, and treatment decisions are often much less science-based that we might like to think. Scott Lilienfeld joins Igor and Charles to discuss evidence-based practice in psychotherapy, the importance of doubting, clinical psychology’s dirty little secret, Scarlett Johansson’s brain, confirmation bias, how science really works, and why people just can’t let go of the idea that a full moon triggers werewolf-style behaviour. Igor reveals he learnt his English from TV detective ‘Columbo’, Scott discusses the fine art of planting seeds of doubt in conversations, and Charles learns from Abraham Lincoln that intellectual humility can ultimately be a path to earned intellectual confidence. Welcome to Episode 22.

Special Guest: Scott Lilienfeld.

Links:

• The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others - Emily Pronin, Daniel Y. Lin, Lee Ross, 2002
• The Psychology of Intellectual Humility - Leary
• Are Self-Report Cognitive Empathy Ratings Valid Proxies for Cognitive Empathy Ability? Negligible Meta-Analytic Relations With Behavioral Task Performance - Murphy & Lilienfeld (2019)
• Evidence-Based Practice: The Misunderstandings Continue | Psychology Today
• Epistemic Humility: An Overarching Educational Philosophy for Clinical Psychology Programs - Lilienfeld, Lynn, O'Donohue, Latzman (2017)
• Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong - Vox
• 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior | Introduction to Psychology | Psychology | Subjects | Wiley
• Frontiers | Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases | Psychology
• Lucy TRAILER 1 (2014) - Luc Besson, Scarlett Johansson Movie HD - YouTube
• Elizabeth F. Loftus – UCI School of Social Ecology
• Scott Lilienfeld: The Search for Successful Psychopathy - YouTube
• Evidence at Emory - Psychology - YouTube
• Bright Scientists, Dim Notions - The New York Times (2007)