Mindhacks and The Troublemaker’s Fringe

By mthomas

During the week I joined a few hundred other hot, but well-mannered, people crammed into a basement in Holborn to participate in a Troublemaker’s Fringe event. Speakers were Vaughan Bell, Ben Goldacre and Petra Boynton. Vaughan is a neuropsychologist, researcher, clinician and associate editor colleague of mine on the Psychologist Magazine. He also writes for Mindhacks  a great site about ‘neuroscience and psychology tricks to find out what’s going on inside your brain’. It is well worth bookmarking as it is a site full of good content. Vaughan  spoke about ‘media scaremongering’ about technology such as email and his excellent presentation can be found here.

Ben Goldacre might be known to you from his writing for the Guardian’s Bad Science slot and badscience.net. He is a vitriolic presenter and could cut it on the stand-up comedy circuit. His message was deadly serious though and he set out the implications of  science writers ‘misleading the public’. Petra Boynton is a social psychologist and agony aunt with an interest in sexual health and relationships. She also spoke about the dangers of taking advice from ‘media experts’, particularly in relation to sexual matters which tend to be ’spun’ into lightweight entertainment.

It was great night in that it challenged us to think more critically about psychology how our work is can be communicated to a wider audience in a way that might be more evidence based and useful.  There was a hint of stereotyping of all journalists as either inept, corrupt or both and, as someone who has had an opinion on psychology misrepresented, I am usually sympathetic to the view. However, there are noble exceptions among writers and I was relieved recently to be portrayed accurately by Rosi Hinton of Decanter (see August issue ‘My Passion for Wine’ article). 

The wine world and other areas are not immune from tensions relating to media representation but I think psychology is an exceptionally difficult subject to write about and most journos are not skilled as scientific journal readers. It can be hard to translate an abstract full of technical terms into something meaningful for a wider audience. On the other hand some are just tabloid hacks who knowingly trivialise and should be ashamed of their negative contribution to human experience, knowledge and well-being…