Posts Tagged: psychology

  • Wife talking to WOTW man in Sydney restaurant. He imagines that he is being psychoanalysed because she is using psychobabble.

    Psychobabble—mental health jargon

    Psychobabble is psychological jargon used inaccurately and pretentiously that sometimes normalises unacceptable behaviour or criticises normal behaviour. It is also known as therapy-speak or pop psychology. A more specialised branch of psychobabble is neurobabble. It is the vocabulary of the consulting room that has escaped into everyday conversation—trauma, triggered, boundaries, validation, gaslighting. It turns the […]

  • A humorous editorial illustration of a meeting of intelligent professionals behaving irrationally—experts fixating on familiar solutions, everyone debating minor details, the boss dominating the discussion and others reluctantly agreeing, while one frustrated participant watches the meeting unravel.

    Meeting behaviours

    Australian professionals are experienced and well-educated yet put them in meetings with clear objectives, agendas to address, or problems to solve and peculiar behaviours start to manifest. The Ringelmann effect suggests that the more people in a meeting the less value they contribute. Max Ringelmann discovered in the 1880s that as more people pulled on […]

  • A group of young men mogging each other with Mr WOTW watching on.

    Mogging and maxxing in the manosphere

    I grew up in rural NSW; my father was a vet; and later I studied science and graduated as a zoologist. These meant in my childhood I watched bulls, rams, roosters and other male farm animals posing, presenting and fighting to get the attention of female farm animals. If you live in the city you […]

  • Picture of a man on his laptop with a backdrop of a wikipedia page Caption Our clever friends—the ultracrepidariansOur clever friends—the ultracrepidariansPicture of a man reading a book with a backdrop or a wikipedia page representing an ultracrepidarian

    Our clever friends—the ultracrepidarians

    Do you have a too clever friend? We’ve all got people in our lives who are self-appointed authorities on everything from the mating habits of penguins to the aerodynamics of paper airplanes. Many of these people came out of the woodwork recently to guide us through COVID claiming to know more about epidemiology and virology […]

  • Line drawing of Ambrose Bierce with quote "Friendship—A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather but only one in foul". Ambrose Bierce (1842—1914)

    Friend—navigating your digital friendships

    Navigating digital friendship Friendship is a concept that is embedded in our language. Having friends enriches our lives and protects us from loneliness. But has the digital age killed the meaning of friendship? The term “friend” can be traced back to the Old English “freond,” denoting an individual attached to another by feelings of personal […]

  • Gaslighting is a common term that means manipulating someone by psychological means into doubting their own sanity.

    The meaning of gaslighting

    Merriam-Webster, America’s oldest dictionary publisher, has just chosen gaslighting as its word of the year for 2022. They based this on the number of searches on their website for the word which spiked by 1,740% in 2022. They stated that “In this age of misinformation—of ‘fake news’, conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes—gaslighting has emerged […]

  • IMAGE: Modified from The Winged Monkeys carrying Dorothy, The Tin Man, and The Cowardly Lion, as illustrated by W.W. Denslow in “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (1900). Wikimedia Commons.

    Flying monkeys—pets for narcissists

    There is an area where academic analysis and the layman’s understanding of mental health issues converge. In this crossover place, there is a rich vocabulary that uses metaphors from popular culture. The words and phrases we use to describe them often have some underlining wit. This perhaps helps us to cope with what can be unpleasant […]

  • The most delightful fauxbia. Anatidaephobia originated from the Far Side comic by Gary Larson. He defined it as "the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you".

    Anatidaephobia an animal phobia

    The irrational fear of animals (for instance, spiders, insects, mice, cats, or snakes) can be a severe phobia according to psychiatrists. Phobia comes from the Greek word for fear, ‘phóbos’. Scientific research shows the frequency of common animal phobias is 5.5 % for ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) and 3.5 % for arachnophobia (fear of spiders). […]

  • Quote from Albert Alligator, Pogo comic, 26 Sept 1951—I may not understand what you say, but I'll defend to your death my right to deny it.

    Defending your right to denial

    The origins of deny and denial The word denial has been around for 500 years. It has several related meanings: a refusal of something requested or desired; and a statement that something is not true (as in the refusal to accept that something is true). In the 19th century it was also used in the […]

  • Hubris in Greek mythology was when man became so arrogant that they thought they were the equal of the gods. Nemesis would punish them. So it is with Australian cricket!

    The meaning of hubris in Australian cricket

    The word of the week is hubris. It has been thrown around in the media to describe the attitude of the Australian cricket team leading up to this week’s controversial ball-tampering incident. Otherwise known as #cricketcrisis, #tapegate or #sandpapergate. I have always struggled to understand exactly what hubris means but with a bit of reading […]

  • metacognition is sometimes described as thinking about thinking

    Metacognition and the Dunning-Kruger Effect

    I came across the Dunning-Kruger Effect recently. I got quite excited about it because it explains how some of those difficult conversations come about that you have with people who confidently state their views without anything resembling knowledge, experience or facts. It also explains how it sometimes can be difficult to deal with clients who […]

  • Illustration of a referee holding up a yellow card to an All Blacks player with word caption SCHADENFREUDE in the background

    Understanding schadenfreude

    When you respond to other people’s emotions there are four very distinct ways of doing so:

    Sympathy is when you are unhappy at the unhappiness of others;

    Joy is when you are happy at the happiness of others;

    Envy is when you are unhappy at the happiness of others;

    And schadenfreude is when you are happy at the unhappiness of others.