The human capacity for self-deception
As a psychologist with 26 years experience ( I figure at this point I have accrued somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 hours of clinical experience), I frequently wonder how I have been shaped by my experience, first as a therapist, and later as a forensic clinician, working in both criminal and primarily Family Court arenas. I just […]
Can Psychologists Predict Future Behavior?
I was always taught that psychology is about the description and prediction of behavior. Description? Easy. I can do that! Prediction? Well, er….not so fast. But isn’t description also prediction? If I say that John has an IQ of 100, it is clearly a description, subject of course to a whole bunch of caveats based […]
More on terror management theory — “mortality salience”
You may have wondered why our political and cultural climate has become so nasty; it seems that political and religious intolerance has never been more intense. In a previous post, I discussed terror management theory, based on the work of Ernest Becker (remember in “Annie Hall” when Woody Allen handed Diane Keaton a copy of Becker’s Denial of […]
Terror, no not terrorist, management
I just did a book review of the massive 5th edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology and came across something quite new. The chapter is “Experimental Existential Psychology: Coping with the Facts of Life.” I thought existential philosophy and psychology were relegated to the ’60’s (you know when everyone read Sartre and Camus), or […]