Show notes
Words like “narcissist,” “gaslighting,” “triggered,” “toxic,” and “on the spectrum” have become part of everyday conversation. We use psychological terms to describe our friends, our families, our coworkers—and sometimes ourselves. But what happens when words that have specific psychological meanings become casual labels?
Highlighted moments
essentially, effortful learning is better than effortless learning. By that, I mean if you write a paper and you have a little red underline that says, you know, spelling error. Or grammar error. So if you actually go into your dictionary and find the spelling of the word, or you go into strunk and you get the grammar equivalent of it, you learn that material better than if you just click on, you know, change the word.
“one of the things about good note-taking is it's a skill. And one of the skills about it is listening to what Jim or I say in a classroom. And as you're going along, making a digest of that and reducing it from a whole five-minute, three-minute, whatever point to something that can be written in one or two sentences.”
“Trauma is something, you know, repeated abuse over a period of time. Now, that abuse can be physical abuse, but it could also be the abuse to our psyche, if you would, of going over to a place in the Gulf Coast, you know, in the Gulf, like Iraq or Iran, and fighting over there.”
“research indicates that with one dimension, loneliness, at any one point in time, 70% of the students on campus say that they feel lonely. Now, they're in the middle of a crowd, but what does lonely mean? It probably means disconnected from the crowd.”
Transcript
Welcome and introductions
0:00Welcome to the show.
0:30Hi, Ralph. Hey, Jim. How are you today? I'm good, but you said that you've got a frog in your throat. I have, or something. I have a drippy nose and I have a sore throat. Okay, well. That's having to do with the fall season and all the stuff that's dropping from the trees. That's why it's called fall, Ralph. Yes. Yeah. Well, you'll have that deep baritone bass voice.
1:02I'll come here to drink whiskey and sing bass. Well, we're drinking coffee, at least, and we'll just as soon not hear you sing. Yes. I've heard you sing before. As somebody once said about me, I've heard him eat and I've heard him sing. On the whole, I'd sooner hear him eat.
1:24Well, it's kind of interesting. We've had a number of people who've responded to our psychology in the news. And one of the things that was in the news today, and we're going to talk about psychobabble today, right, Ralph? Right. But one thing that was in the news today was this.
Handwriting versus typing in student cognition
1:44Analog methods like handwriting outperform devices in student cognition. Okay. Now, this was some research that was being done here in Michigan, up in the northern part of the state, the lower peninsula. And apparently, we have talked about this for the last couple of years on and off. And essentially, effortful learning is better than effortless learning. By that, I mean if you write a paper and you have a little red underline that says, you know, spelling error.
2:25Or grammar error. So if you actually go into your dictionary and find the spelling of the word, or you go into strunk and you get the grammar equivalent of it, you learn that material better than if you just click on, you know, change the word. Correct my spelling for me. You get, in both cases, you get, you know, for the most part, better words on the paper, correct words on the paper.
3:01But you really haven't learned how to spell deceive or whatever word. Yeah, which is one of the reasons why in today's classroom you can see, I'm going to give you a horseback guess and say probably 75% of students sitting there with their laptop open in front. And they're keying in the notes that they're taking from whatever their prof says. Now, that's maybe a good thing in the sense that they get more of what the prof says down.
3:38But it's a bad thing in the sense that writing your notes in longhand by cursive, that highly cursed word these days, actually you retain more. You get it in and retain it. Although, in all fairness, we used to take stuff by longhand also. And our retention was like from one exam to another for the most part, right? By and large, yeah.
4:09Now, I have one student who has difficulty writing, difficulty with penmanship. And that student has some sort of a program whereby the program hears me talk and then somehow, I guess, gives a transcript. I don't know how it works. I haven't talked to the student about it. But I think I will just to see if the transcript bears any resemblance to what I am saying in class.
4:40Yeah. Well, one of the things about good note-taking is it's a skill. And one of the skills about it is listening to what Jim or I say in a classroom. And as you're going along, making a digest of that and reducing it from a whole five-minute, three-minute, whatever point to something that can be written in one or two sentences.
5:12Yeah, so you're actually doing synthesis there, not just verbatim. Yeah. And that's the difficulty with getting an exact transcript is you haven't internalized out of that three minutes or five minutes what's the most important thing. Yeah. I'll give you a good example of that, Ralph. Okay, here's a – this is three pages of typing now. You know, we have the headline and then we've got the very first paragraph that actually says whatever the next three pages have to say.
5:45Yeah. So it's – those of us who read headlines and, you know, read the first sentence in a news article, maybe we're getting as much out of it as, you know, you and your eager beaver style of reading the whole thing and committing it to memory. Well, I'm not sure about memory, but – Well, you know, people have been talking about, oh, things like AI, you know, effortful learning and things like that.
The rise of psychobabble on social media
6:19But one of the things that has come up is the use of psychological terms on the internet and the places that most people go on the internet are YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. Those are the top ones. And I'm not seeing very much psychobabble in YouTube and I don't go on to the other three platforms, but apparently that's where psychology is reigning in terms of the misuse of the terms in our profession.
7:04Yeah, and one of the things that is also becoming more widespread is in business. We're seeing a lot of people who are using and misusing psychological terminology because they're trying to create some kind of buzzword. Uh-huh, okay. You know, so – Do you have an example of this?
7:34Well, holistic healing, codependency, closure, synergy, which is often a common buzzword in business. Uh-huh. We're creating synergy. What does that mean? Well, it's supposed to mean we're taking the energy of this one and the energy of that one and we're combining them so they make a bigger energy. So one plus one equals three. But are we using that correctly? Yeah, I got you. You know, sex addiction.
8:06Addiction. Sex addiction? Yeah. You want to unpack that one for me? Well, some people who claim that they are not just – what could I use as a polite term? How about interested? They're not just interested in sex. They're not just interested in sex. They're not just people who randomly choose sex partners. They are sex addicts.
8:38They can't help it. Okay. Well, the answer is probably for most of us, yeah, we enjoy sex. But if it came to an inappropriate relationship, we could say, no, I don't want that. Okay. You know, it's not an addiction. It's not like we can't stop ourselves. With an addiction, you don't have any control. Okay. Yeah. I get you. I'm going to leave that topic totally alone, okay? Okay.
Redefining trauma and gaslighting
9:05And how about inner child? Ah, yes. That poor, wounded inner child. Yep. Yeah. We all have one of those. And that gets into what I'm seeing. Like, when I look around and talk to people, even people in the mental health fields, you know, everybody, it seems, is traumatized. Yes. Everybody, it seems, is on the spectrum. Now, I don't think that's so. Yes, I mean, what is trauma?
9:35Trauma is something, you know, repeated abuse over a period of time. Now, that abuse can be physical abuse, but it could also be the abuse to our psyche, if you would, of going over to a place in the Gulf Coast, you know, in the Gulf, like Iraq or Iran, and fighting over there. Shooting at people, being shot at by people.
10:05Yeah. Under conditions that, you know, you're just plain not prepared, you know, to be in and doing things you're not completely prepared to do. So, that can be traumatic. I mean, that's what I, you know, traumatic brain injury is a blow to the head that injures the, you know, soft, squishy part inside the skull. Yeah. The brain. But, you know, oh, I, the Detroit Lions lost a football game, and I'm so traumatized.
10:39Luckily, I've been a Detroit Lions fan for 30 years, so I can buck up to Lions losses. Believe me. Which you just watched last time they played. Yes, indeed. They are notorious for playing well the first half of the season and falling apart just when you have your hopes up. Indeed. But, you know, here's another term that's commonly used. Gaslighting.
11:09Yeah. There's a movie back in the 30s called Gaslighting. And if I remember the plot, was it a Hitchcock movie? I don't remember who was the director, but the basic idea was that whatever you were saying to somebody else, you were saying it in such a way that you were convincing them that they were mentally ill.
11:39Yeah, and the gaslighting part was that the husband was talking to the wife, and he said things like, you know, dear, you left the gas on. You know, back in the day when you had to light up pilots and things like that, you left the gas on. Maybe they had gas lights, I don't know. But, and so he was making the female lead think that she was losing her mind, right?
12:11Yeah. Yeah, because he was sure she had not left the gas on. And so that was the idea, that you say things that convince the other person that their marbles are scattered around. But, basically, today a lot of people use it when somebody says something they don't agree with and they say, don't gaslight me. Well, what do they really mean?
12:41Not that you're trying to convince them their marbles are spilled, but that you're trying to give them things that are not what they agree with. Right. Good point. You know, we get subscribers and followers every week. We get new ones, and we have the share button and the subscribe button up on the screen right now. And for those of you who are listening on Spotify or Apple, hey, you can subscribe also. There's a way of doing that. But we have had one person unsubscribe, Ralph.
13:15Only one. Only one that, you know, has come right out and said, you know, I unsubscribe because we were gaslighting. Okay. Do you remember the – I don't think I shared this with you. Remember a year or so ago we had that Catholic priest on the show talking about mental health on campus? Yeah. Okay. And that's what we were talking about, right? Mental health on campus. Mental health on campus. Student beliefs. Yeah. And so this person unsubscribed and said, you're gaslighting me.
13:50Okay. I guess that meant he was hearing something that he didn't want to hear. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that I think a lot of people would prefer to believe that young students in university are happy people, that they have no problems with their mental health. Why should they? I mean, they're living their best lives right now.
14:21Well, unfortunately, and the priest who has lots of people who come to him and not only say, I'm having doubts about my faith, but also say, I'm really having trouble keeping it together. Mm-hmm. You know, and he said, there's much more mental health issues and problems on campus today than people think.
Campus loneliness and toxic environments
14:52Yeah.
Campus loneliness and toxic environments
14:53Well, in fact, research indicates that with one dimension, loneliness, at any one point in time, 70% of the students on campus say that they feel lonely. Now, they're in the middle of a crowd, but what does lonely mean? It probably means disconnected from the crowd. You know, you've been at a party, Ralph, when everybody else is around there having fun, and you're standing there saying, who are these people, and why are they behaving this way?
15:24Yeah, and, you know, on the whole, I'd like to go and find a corner and sit down and pick up a book, or I'd like to just go home, because these people who seem to be having such fun, I can't get with them. You can't relate, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and so in that case, a person might say, I'm lonely because I can't fit into this mob, or somebody else tells them that they have 350 friends on Facebook, and they don't have any,
16:02and so they can feel, you know, disconnected as well. Yeah, and the thing is, you know, it used to be, now, I don't mean this to age myself into an old fuddy-duddy, but... You did it anyway, Ralph. Right, but there are people who kind of say, you know, in today's classes and today's campus life, I have lots of people who are acquaintances.
16:42But I don't have anybody that I could say, let's meet in the coffee shop and, you know, just have a good talk. How about this one, Ralph? Can you find somebody who could make your bail at 3 o'clock in the morning? Besides me? Probably not. Okay, yeah, talk in the coffee shop, maybe, but, you know, who would donate a pint of blood if you were bleeding out?
17:16Besides me, your wife. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, I'm O-negative, so I can donate to anybody, but it's more difficult for me to get a donation. Uh-huh. So don't bleed out in the middle of the night, okay? Yeah, I'll try not to. And don't call me if you need to make bail. So another term that we hear a lot is the term toxic. You know, that's a toxic environment. That person, you know, is toxic.
17:48Well, what do you think the true science definition of toxic might be? Poisonous. Poisonous, yeah. Poisonous to the extent of what? Death, right? Yeah. I mean, that's... That's the ultimate end of toxic consumption. Yeah. A coral snake, the bite of a coral snake is toxic, right? Yeah. But if I say to you, oh, Ralph, your shirt has got a stain on it, is that toxic?
18:24No. No. That's just information. I might not like your information. I might not like to know that I've spilled coffee down the front of my shirt and it's all grubby. But, hey, better to know than not to know. Okay. So you wouldn't say necessarily that Jim Carroll was a toxic person based upon that comment. No, I wouldn't. You just have to know the rest of me to know how toxic I am, right? Yeah. Okay. So the thing is, often what happens in psychobabble is we try to elevate our personal pain, okay?
19:12Okay. So we don't say, my girlfriend ditched me or somebody ghosted me. We say, oh, it was traumatic. She was abusive. Uh-huh. You know? Yeah. Well, really abusive? I can show you abusive, but yeah. So we use that term. Another term we often, we've kicked around a lot. We use this with politicians, and one I can think of, a narcissist.
19:46Uh-huh. Now, at the fine coffee shop where we get our coffee, we were talking to the manager today, and she said that was one of the terms that she heard and used on social media. But she also mentioned, or I mentioned to her, you know, do her kids say six, seven, six, seven, six, seven? Remember that, Ralph? Yeah, I remember that. A couple years ago? Haven't heard that one in six months.
20:16Yeah, right. Speaking of six or seven months. Yeah. I guess when I was at the homeschool convention in May, kids were still using it, but it's, I think, dried up. But that was, and that was not an example of psychobabble. That was a matter of kind of a cohort of people knowing something that the rest of us didn't know. Yeah. Kind of like the in-joke. So this is just the in-joke of seven- and eight-year-olds.
20:51Yeah.
20:53Let's see. Now, one of the things, Jim, that I have to throw in here with that, and it's kind of an in-joke, but it's also a desire for clear answers. Okay. So we like medical labels because they provide comfort. They offer a neat, ready-made explanation for chaotic human behavior, and human behavior is often pretty chaotic.
21:30Right. So we say, okay, well, we can intellectualize our feelings, and we can put sterile clinical terms on them. So we could say, you're neurotic. Mm-hmm. And you might look at me and say, well, you're psychotic. And, you know, we sort of distance ourselves. Right. And we have a label that gives us comfort.
22:02Now, the thing is, the old saying was neurotic people made castles in the air, and psychotic people lived in them. Yeah. In other words, the neurotic person had a rich fantasy life, which they knew, and the psychotic person didn't know. Yeah. They were quite content to be part of the fantasy. Mm-hmm. Yeah, those terms aren't used anymore.
22:33It's kind of like the term psychopath is not used anymore, and all that gets thrown around, you know, all the time.
Misusing the label narcissist
22:39Yeah.
Misusing the label narcissist
22:40One that I was moving toward was narcissist. Mm-hmm. That one gets thrown around a lot, particularly in looking at some politicians. Yeah. Now, narcissist is a clinical term, and it doesn't mean somebody who is, what, stuck up, self-centered, ego-centered. I mean, it's much more nuanced than that. But we use these little buzzwords, little zingers to try and, you know, what, identify characteristics in other people.
23:20It's easier to say narcissist than to say someone who has an inflated ego. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and somebody who makes it a point, one of the things that I experienced as an undergrad was a guy that I knew who was a very nice young man, but he made it a point to always dress extremely well.
23:59Okay. And so he would come to class and, you know, he'd be wearing a very nice, well-pressed shirt, pants, good shoes, highly shined, et cetera, et cetera. And you never saw him in the same outfit. Uh-huh. So I didn't, you know, really remark on this other than I thought he was always well-dressed. But one day he invited me to come over to the place where he lived.
24:35He had his own apartment. It was actually a two-bedroom apartment. Uh-huh. Now, most of us who had two-bedroom apartments had one room set up as a study, workroom kind of thing. What he had was a second room. In my two-room apartment, Ralph, there were about four of us living there. Yeah. Okay. We had, he had the second bedroom set up as a giant closet. Okay.
25:05He must have had 40 shirts and 20 pairs of pants and 10 pairs of shoes. And, yeah, no wonder he could always. Yes. Where are you going with this one, Ralph? Well, I'm going, I'm saying that today somebody might say he's a narcissist. Oh, okay. Because he's always better groomed, better turned out than the rest of us. Okay. Yeah. Or, you know, he's got a really big ego.
25:36No, he was actually a very humble guy. He just came from a lot of money. Yeah, he had a nice big bank account. Yeah. I get it. Okay. Yeah. You know, you were talking about him, you know, being well-dressed. When I went to Michigan State, that was the norm. You know, we would wear sports coats to class. You know, button-down shirts. You know, a crease in her pants, shine shoes, no socks. Yeah. You know, that was part of the, you know.
26:07Part of the look. Part of the look. And if my parents were around, they'd say, you know, how come you're not wearing socks, Jim? They would probably say something like that. Yeah. And they wouldn't understand that that was part of Jim Carroll wanting to fit in, right? Yeah. Okay. So we use some of this language, I think, because other people use it, and we want to show that we're just as hip as they are. Yeah. That, hey, being a hep cat, right, Ralph? Right. Okay.
26:37I used to be a hep cat. Now I'm just a hippie cat. Don't break your hippies anymore, Ralph. I'll try not to.
Book promotions and sign off
26:44Okay. Well, I want to do a shameless promotion right now. Here is one of the latest books by me. It's called The Human Side of Psychology. And it takes the story of psychology, and it brings it up into the 20th and 21st century. We don't cover, I don't cover Freud and Jung to any extent, or Wertheimer or Weber. You know, I cover psychologists that are making sense and making points and making knowledge available today.
27:18So down below and learn more, you can get a link to it. Click on it. You can read a good chunk of it. And if you like it, go ahead and purchase it. Also under there, you'll see that there's a link to all of the books that Jim, Jerry Fuller, and Ralph have made over the last year and a half. There are about 20 of them. Just click on that. You can see the stuff that we do when we're not here in your ear or in your face.
27:49Cycle babbling at you. So let's see. I'm going to see if I can push the right button today, Ralph. Okay. We'll try that. See if this works.
28:04Yeah, I think we got it, Ralph. Sounds good, Jim. And remember, keep your stick on the ice. Because we're all in this together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together. Together.