American Psychologist

Um, I, I ...

The way I understand it or the way I think about it is, is in terms of, you know, my recent paper in American Psychologist, um, The Evolution of Social Paradoxes, um, where, uh, status seeking is, uh, rarely overt.

Um, because if I come out as an overt status seeker or overtly seeking dominance and superiority, well, my status is actually gonna fall rather than, uh, uh-

Yeah

So I'll ask you to bear with me.

But why does she do it? Why does she agree to work with these folks? Well, if you ask Loftus, she often refers back to an article that she wrote in the American Psychologist Journal entitled The Repressed Memory Controversy.

And this is something that she wrote when she was responding to specific critiques that she had received from, well, critics in the mental health community.

So if pressed, she might say something like, memory is not a perfect recording, right? It's not a video camera.

She might tell you that recovered memories can be unreliable.

Loftus has long criticized memory work techniques used in some therapeutic contexts, and I think this would be a direct reference to the recovered memory techniques that are sort of at the heart of the argument, arguing that they can produce false memories of abuse, as we've discussed.

In her American Psychologist article, she writes that she's not denying child sexual abuse exists, but is concerned about, quote, memories that emerge in adulthood after extensive memory work using techniques that can implant or distort recollections.

She may tell you she views her role as serving science, not the defendant.

Veik.

Carl Veik is an American psychologist from 1984.

He had a paper called Small Wins, Redefining the Scale of Social Problems.

And that's the sentence I want you to kind of hear and how well it describes what we've spent 20 minutes talking about, right? He wrote that the massive scale on which social problems are conceived often precludes innovative action.

Yeah.

So I mean, there was a brilliant article recently, uh, in the, uh, is it American Psychologist? A kind of the, the flagship kind of magazine journal of the American Psychological Association last year by a colleague of mine, Professor Etzel Cardeña, and, uh, he basically just gave a, a really nice overview of the state of the art in parapsychology.

And, you know, there's, there's, there's 10 distinct research paradigms which the meta-analyses all show that there are highly significant- Positive effects indicating that psi is a genuine phenomena.

And that constitutes hundreds and hundreds of, of individual research studies all kind of collated and meta-analyzed and so on.