Psychology Today

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Psychology Today is a print and online magazine that publishes popular psychology articles. Some articles cite scientific research and others are based on opinion or observation. Many of its contributors are qualified, though their articles don't undergo peer review.

Some of its articles veer into pseudoscience territory, so don't believe everything you read.

History

Psychology Today was founded by Nicholas Charney, Ph.D. in 1967, and publishes issues every other month.

Recent history

Psychology Today has a large web presence, featuring many blogs with popular psychology articles. It also includes a large online therapist directory where patients can find a specialist who suits their needs.

Its covers feature white people 88% of the time—usually skinny, conventionally attractive white women. They are often wearing makeup and "sexy" clothes.

Articles

Media Bias/Fact Check lists Psychology Today as pro-science with high factual reporting. It notes that while individual writers show bias, the publication is scientific overall.

The good

Psychology Today explains scientific concepts in accessible language, educating the general public in facets of psychology. The language is plain enough that teens as well as adults can read it and learn new things.

The magazine includes articles about issues that affect the general public, such as self-esteem, identifying and treating mental illnesses, and identifying abusive relationships. This knowledge can make a difference to people who need it.

Psychology Today employs a diverse group of contributors with different specialties and backgrounds. This includes hiring people with certain psychological conditions to write about those conditions, such as people with ADHD and autism writing articles that help others understand them better.

The bad

Psychology Today has a diverse team of writers, and sometimes that includes people with ideas that really shouldn't get published. A few articles are biased, non-factual, or even straight up rotten.

The article saying black women aren't pretty

Obviously Kanazawa needs to get his eyes checked.

In 2011, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa pubished an article entitled "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" on Psychology Today. Yes, really. He used "research" to prove his point, though he didn't disclose sample size or confounding factors.

Other contributing writers, understandably horrified that their colleague could publish such an article, quickly wrote refutations that pointed out the many holes in his research. Finally, editor-in-chief Kaja Perina issued an apology for allowing the article's publication, saying that it had been taken down and that they had "taken measures to ensure that such an incident does not occur again."

Some people felt that the apology was not enough. A Change.org petition called upon Psychology Today to apologize more deeply, dismiss Kanazawa, clarify what "measures" are being taken to prevent future incidents, and post articles debunking scientific racism.

Autism and schizophrenia stereotypes

See the main articles on this topic: Autism, Schizophrenia, and Stereotype

“”In other words, while autistics don't mentalize enough, psychotics mentalize too much; where autistics don't seem to have minds at all, psychotics suffer from cancers of the minds they do have.

—Christopher Robert Badcock, who doesn't seem to realize that he's talking about actual human beings

Who gave this violent feral shell of a human being a microphone?

In 2016, Psychology Today published two articles by Christopher Robert Badcock, Ph.D., claiming that autistic people were "undomesticated humans" (using "evidence" like head size and ear shape and the debunked claim that autistics are violent) and people with schizophrenia were "hyper-domesticated humans."

Badcock has also published articles with other "fun" claims, like:

• Autistics lacking theory of mind (debunked)
• Wealth causing the "autism epidemic" (which probably isn't a real thing)
• Males being naturally more autistic and females naturally being more psychotic, and Western society being more autistic and thus having more "LGBT-ism"<
• Failing to examine gendered biases in diagnosis, like thinking that "the overwhelmingly female incidence of hysteria in the 19^th century" was a sign that women were mentally ill more often (instead of being more likely to be diagnosed by men after they dared to protest against sexism).

In 2020, these articles surfaced on Twitter, where autistics expressed their disappointment. "Apparently we autistics are nothing more than undomesticated humans with aggressive behavior, facial anomalies and… weird ears," wrote autistic parent and artist Steve Asbell. Another autistic person said "Just curious, does the author think we’re irritable and agressive^[sic] before or after showing us this article?"

Presenting pseudoscience as real

Psychology Today includes articles on neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a pseudoscientific technique that claims to cure all kinds of mental and physical ailments. It displays articles treating NLP as a valid method for treating mental illness and its therapist directory includes NLP therapists.

Defence of inspiration porn

Another article in 2016 suggested that inspiration porn was acceptable because there was a need for more encouraging news in such turbulent times. This being in the context of a particularly dirty political campaign which was widely agreed to be one of the most negative in recent history. The fact that disabled people don't exist for the purpose of making the able-bodied comfortable is lost on the author.

The comments, thankfully, did point this out, by explaining how such porn helps to turn disabled people into objects of pity rather than autonomous human beings.