Lisa Feldman Barrett, Zombie Ideas, Observer,Ooctober 2019, (APS, Association for Psychological Science):
According to the economist Paul Krugman (2013), a zombie idea is a view that’s been thoroughly refuted by a mountain of empirical evidence but nonetheless refuses to die, being continually reanimated by our deeply held beliefs.
Zombie ideas abound in our culture, nibbling away at the brains of their victims. The mistaken belief that vaccinations cause autism — a celebrated zombie idea — is responsible for rising rates of vaccine-preventable diseases. The belief that a person’s personality type, assessed by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), predicts job performance is another zombie idea that continues to lure otherwise capable managers into making decisions that benefit neither employees nor their companies. [...]
For example, evolutionary psychologists have argued for years that waist-to-hip ratio is a phenotypic cue to reproductive success. [...] there is no evidence that healthy women with larger waist-to-hip ratios are less fecund or fertile than women with smaller ratios (Bovet, 2019). It’s a zombie idea. Ditto for the “body symmetry” hypothesis, which survives despite the empirical evidence (Jennions & Møller, 2002; for cogent analysis, see Prum, 2017). [...]
Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, nominated “the nature/nurture distinction” as an undead idea that will not expire. “It’s commonplace in both scientific and popular writing to talk about innate human traits, ‘hard-wired’ behaviors or ‘genes for’ everything from alcoholism to intelligence,” writes Gopnik, in an aspirational obituary (Gopnik, 2015). She points to growing evidence, including the research of neurologist Michael Meaney, for the many complex ways that environmental factors govern gene expression and protein construction (i.e., epigenetics). [...]
Joshua Buckholtz, a clinical neuroscientist, nominated the “hydraulic model of self-control,” the idea that within each of us lurks ancient brain circuits that, when triggered, cause us to do stuff that we later regret (more colorfully referred to as the four Fs — fighting, fleeing, feeding, and . . . sex). Our prodigious prefrontal cortex allegedly puts the brakes on our inner beast, protecting us from worst selves, and impaired self-control in psychological disorders is thought to result from a faulty brake. [...]
I believe that one can be traced back to Plato's metaphor of the charioteer trying to control his horses.
The hydraulic model of self-control is a close cousin to another zombie, the triune brain, the idea that evolution laid down brain circuitry like sedimentary rock, with reptilian, limbic, and neurocortical layers. It has been known since the 1970s in evolutionary and developmental neuroscience that this story is a myth (Striedter, 2005). Think about this the next time you read that emotions erupt from neurons in the amygdala and other parts of the fabled limbic system, or that rational thought emerges in the neocortex, with one struggling to regulate the other.
I'm rather fond of that one, though I've never thought of it as any more than a metaphor. I believe I was introduced to it in Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine. He, of course, got it from its originator Paul MacLean. Continuing one with our zombie parade:
Here’s a shocker from APS Fellow Sari van Anders, social neuroendocrinologist: It’s time to bury the idea that “male” and “female” are genetically fixed, nonoverlapping categories (i.e., natural kinds). Evidence from numerous disciplines fundamentally disconfirms this common-sense view (Hyde, Bigler, Joel, Tate, & van Anders, 2019). [...]
Our final example of a dead idea that continues to roam the psychological landscape is that people can read emotions in other people’s faces, because certain configurations of facial movements, commonly called “facial expressions,” reliably and specifically signal a specific emotional state. A team of five senior scientists (including myself) met weekly for over 2 years, reviewing more than 1,000 publications related to this topic. We began with starkly different priors, but nonetheless came to consensus over what the data show, and we published our conclusions in the July 2019 issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Barrett, Adolphs, Marsella, Martinez, & Pollak, 2019).
I've got a number of posts that mention Barrett's work.
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