Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. We have popped into your Freakonomics radio feed today with a bonus episode.

You may have heard the recent two-part series we made on

academic fraud. Well it reminded me of an episode we made several years ago that I

thought you might like to hear now.

It is called five psychology terms you are probably misusing.

The version you're about to hear has been updated.

As necessary, a few of the people we interviewed have since died, including Scott Lillianfeld,

the Emory University Psychology Professor, whose work inspired this episode.

He died in 2020 at age 59 from pancreatic cancer. His New York Times obituary

noted that he spent much of his career trying to quote expose the many faces of pseudoscience in psychology.

The difference between what we think we know and what we actually know, that's coming up

on today's bonus episode, five psychology terms you are probably

misusing.

What prompted us to write this article was that many of us felt, I felt that there were a lot of confusion about psychiatric psychological terminology, both in the popular media, pop psychology, and also even in academic circles.

Scott Lillianfeld was a professor of psychology at Emory for more than 25 years.

I'm a clinical psychologist by training,

and I also have a real interest in the application

of scientific thinking to psychology,

and also how thinking sometimes goes wrong and can lead even the best of the brightest to

embrace ideas that are sometimes questionable, maybe even pseudo-scientific.

You are an author on a paper called 50 psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid.

A list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases.

...