John Q. Public: What’s your Psychology IQ?

My worries about America’s literacy in the field of psychological science began mushrooming this year. It started in earnest when I attended the 1998 Summit of Psychological Science Societies. This was the meeting where representatives from over 90 of the leading behavioral science organizations convened to talk about the future of psychology. (See the May/June 1998 Observer for full coverage of the Summit.)

One of the main topics of discussion was how to communicate psychological science more effectively. As one attendee put it:  “I’m tired of going to parties and telling someone I’m a psychologist and having them immediately ask if I would like to psychoanalyze them.” (Who hasn’t had this experience?) Why is “Are you psychoanalyzing me?” the first thing that comes to mind when people hear the word psychologist?

A few weeks later I attended the APS meeting in Washington, DC, at which I got the chance to enjoy the many interesting talks, fantastic posters, and the volume of great research that took place there. Unfortunately, though, the public is relatively unaware of both the dynamic research presented at that meeting as well as the offerings of the field as a whole.

You know those surveys of high school students that periodically get published in the newspaper? If you give students a skeleton of a map of the world and ask them to tell you where Italy is, an astonishing percentage can’t do it. If you ask people questions about American history, a surprisingly large number don’t get the right answers. We bemoan the poor geographical literacy or the poor historical literacy, but when was the last time you saw a news article about poor psychological science literacy?

At the APS Convention, I had the chance to have lunch with Elizabeth Knoll, who is the psychology editor for Harvard University Press. Munching on crab cake sandwiches, we talked about psychological literacy. Knoll’s husband, a neuropsychologist, has occasion to test people from all walks of life who have experienced brain damage. His observation, as Knoll told me, was that everyone can tell you who Albert Einstein is. I found that very interesting: How is it that everyone knows who Albert Einstein is?

Just to be sure this wasn’t a fluke, I tested my next cab driver. After asking the usual “Where are you from?” I asked him who Albert Einstein was. Without missing a beat he said “He’s the guy who discovered the theory of relativity.”

After the APS meeting, I attended “Memory, Consciousness, and Brain,” a conference in Tallinn, Estonia, to celebrate a birthday of the great memory psychologist, Endel Tulving. When my Estonian waitress stopped by at breakfast to pour me some coffee, I asked if she spoke English, and when she clearly could, I asked her who Albert Einstein was. She held up a hand near her head, moved it in an outward direction (perhaps illustrating Einstein’s hair, I thought) and said something like “big brains.” So they know Einstein there too. Why? How?

What comparable things do these same people know about psychological science? I have a hunch that if we were to test the public, we would find that many people are extraordinarily ignorant of some of the most basic facts and findings from psychological science. They would almost certainly have heard of Freud, and maybe Skinner, but those two may exhaust the list. If we could measure America’s literacy in psychological science, and then call upon our estimated 2,000,000 collective IQ points to figure out how to increase that literacy, we would be doing our field and our society a great service.

I offer these initial thoughts to begin a dialogue about what should even go into a measure of psychological science literacy. It would be of great importance if some of us would take the first steps towards reflecting as a field about whether we have a consensus about what the right questions and the right answers should be. What should the literate citizen know about us? And how do we make that happen?