Kim Mills: It's almost Halloween, time for kids of all ages to dress up as ghosts and monsters, watch scary movies, and indulge in all things spooky and supernatural. The costumes and treats are just for fun, but survey suggests that many people take ghosts quite seriously. One 2019 poll found that 20% of Americans believe that ghosts definitely exist and another 25% say they probably exist. Many others believe in extra sensory perception, demons, space alien abduction, near death experiences, and all sorts of unearthly things.
Where do these beliefs come from? What is behind their enduring appeal? And what explanations, psychological rather than supernatural, might underlie paranormal experiences? What does the science tell us? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.
Our guest today is Dr. Chris French, an emeritus professor of psychology and head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. He studies the psychology of paranormal beliefs and anomalous experiences, looking for psychological explanations for phenomena including near death experiences, ESP, and ghostly visitations, for example. He's written more than 150 journal articles and book chapters and several scholarly books. He also brings his research to the public by writing regular columns for the UK publications Skeptic and The Guardian; and he makes frequent appearances on TV, radio, and podcasts to offer a skeptic's perspective on paranormal experiences.
Thank you for joining us, Dr. French.
Chris French, PhD: It's my pleasure.
Mills: So I just mentioned that you're the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at the University of London. What is anomalistic psychology?
French: I thought that might be the first question. Anomalistic psychology is primarily focused upon trying to come up with, and where possible put to the test, non-paranormal explanations, usually psychological explanations, for ostensibly paranormal experiences. So all the kinds of things you just mentioned there, people who think they've been abducted by aliens, people who think they've seen ghosts or that they have psychic powers and so on. Our working hypothesis—and I have to emphasize this is all it is, but it's a working hypothesis, let's assume paranormal forces don't exist, can we explain those claims in other terms.
I would self-identify as a skeptic certainly, but for me an important part of skepticism is to always be open to the possibility that you might be wrong, new evidence might come along that makes you revise your opinion. For the time being, I would have to say I don't believe that paranormal forces exist.
Milla: So what are some of the psychological or cognitive factors that drive belief in the supernatural? People are very wedded to these beliefs.
French: I think there's a whole host of different kinds of cognitive biases and weird experiences that people genuinely do have. I retired about a year ago, but before that I used to teach a 20-hour course on this stuff. So we'll try and boil it down into around 40 minutes or so. But basically people do have genuinely weird experiences. Just to give one example, one of the ones that we're most interested in is a phenomenon called “sleep paralysis,” which is fairly common in its most basic form. But for a few people, they get very, very vivid hallucinations while they're having this experience as they lie there in their bed. And if you already believe in ghosts or demons and so on, it's not surprising that they will sometimes opt for that as an explanation. So that's just one example.
There's a whole range of cognitive biases that are also relevant to this topic. Again, just to give you a couple of examples, the very first systematic investigation of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony was actually carried out in the context of a fake seance back in the Victorian era. So again, a lot of paranormal claims are based on anecdotal evidence and we've always got that problem of, well, how reliable is the account? Even if the person's being honest, they may be mistaken. Then when it comes to paranormal belief, again, there are a whole host of cognitive biases, problems that we have with probabilistic reasoning for example, the list goes on and on, and I'm sure we can touch on some of them during our talk.
Mills: I thought it was particularly interesting that you studied sleep paralysis. That's something that I experienced a great deal when I was a college student. I think you've found that that's true among college students. Just to help people better understand, it's almost like you're conscious but you're asleep. Can you explain a little more about what's happening?
French: It is this weird hybrid state between normal waking consciousness and dream consciousness. As you say, students are particularly prone to it interestingly. In terms of what I would call basic sleep paralysis, which is really when you're half awake, half asleep, and you realize you can't move, it's a period of temporary paralysis. It lasts a few seconds and you snap out of it and you maybe think that was a bit weird, but it didn't really go any further than that.
Interestingly, estimates vary hugely from one study to another across different countries, from literally a fraction of a percentage point up to 65%, 70%. So clearly there's something weird going on there. And it's really about obviously how you ask the question, how you define it, and so how you present it to people. But the best estimate we have taking all those surveys into account, this is from an American friend of mine, Brian Sharpless, about 8% of the population will experience sleep paralysis at least once in their life. But that's the general population. There are two groups that stand out in terms of having rates of more like 30%, and that is students and psychiatric patients, which is quite interesting. That does make sense because if you have the underlying susceptibility, then you're much more likely to have an episode if your sleep pattern is disrupted. And two groups who have notoriously irregular sleep patterns would be students and psychiatric patients.
Now, as I said in its most basic form, it's no big deal. But for a smaller percentage of people, you can get a host of associated symptoms. You can get a sense of presence, feeling that there's something evil in the room with you, even if you can't see it or hear it, you just know it's there. But sometimes people do actually hallucinate. So they might hear voices or footsteps or mechanical sounds, they might see lights moving around the room or dark shadows or even demons, witches, all sorts of stuff. Also people often report a sense of pressure on the chest, difficulty breathing. Now, can you imagine if you get all this, it's not too surprising people also report intense fear. But it's a kind of fear that it's almost over and above the kind of fear that even people who in real life have been in life-threatening situations feel. They say this is just orders of magnitude greater. And it's possible that it's the over-activation of the amygdala that's maybe causing that, so it's an integral part of the whole experience.
But it's absolutely fascinating, I get sent lots of firsthand accounts. Again, I'm a skeptic. Usually the person who's sending me the account is a skeptic because they've figured out themselves it's sleep paralysis, this thing that we know about. But the stories can still send a shiver down your spine.
Mills: I don’t think my episodes were ever that entertaining. Another area that you've studied is the ideomotor effect, the fact that people can make movements if they're not consciously aware of. And it's supposedly behind things like dowsing for water or Ouija boards. I found this especially interesting because when I was a kid, I was in junior high school, I had a friend and she and I became obsessed with this Ouija board that I had and we would use it together.
It would spell out all kinds of words and it would send us on expeditions around the neighborhood. It had just a whole series of personalities and rituals that we were supposed to go through. Now, I was not pushing that little table, I still know where this woman is and she swears to this day that she wasn't pushing the little table. So how does your work explain what may have been going on? Were we not in touch with—they called it “Ouija control.” The board would tell me that there was a place called “Ouija control.”
French: That's a new one on me. I like that idea. Now, I think we can be pretty sure that in fact between you, you were pushing the little planchette, but you weren't consciously aware of it. I totally know where you're coming from because as an undergraduate student and in my final year at Manchester University, I would go out on the Friday night and go to the pub and have a few drinks. I lived in a house with five other guys. And it was a regular thing that we do when we got back in just to entertain ourselves. We would play around with the Ouija board. And it does feel very much like, I'm not pushing this, I'm not pushing this.
It's interesting again, one of the nicest illustrations of the fact that this is what we call the ideomotor effect, where basically non-conscious muscular movements. But again, if we look back in the history of this, at the time of the heyday of seances back in the Victorian era, another craze that caught on, initially from America and then came over to Europe, was called “table turning” or “table tilting.” This was again supposed to be a way of contacting the spirits, where you take a small wooden table, the sitters would put their hands on the tabletop and they'd ask questions. On a good session, the table would shudder in response to the questions. On a very good session, it could even end up it appeared that people were trying to chase the table around the room trying to keep their hands in contact with it, all very, very exciting stuff.
This caught the attention of Sir Michael Faraday. What I really like about this is that rather than just dismissing it, he thought, “That's interesting, let's have a look at it.” So there are two possibilities here. One is that some external force, possibly a spirit, is moving the table or in the case of the Ouija board, the planchette or the wine glass, or people are pushing the table without realizing it. And Faraday devised a number of ingenious experiments, I'll just mention one of them. Instead of having people put their hands directly on the tabletop, he had layers of waxed paper on the tabletop and they put their hands on top of the layers of waxed paper.
Now, if you think about it, if the table moves to the right, if the tables moved on its own, the waxed papers, the hands will tend to drag behind a little bit and the waxed papers would spread out to the left. If the hands are pushing the table, then the table will drag behind the hands a little bit and the waxed papers would be pushed to the right, but you can guess what he actually found. So even these people who were convinced they were not pushing the table around, actually they were. Again, we know from a number of different studies that that is almost certainly what's going on in these situations.
Mills: What role does inattentional blindness play in having us feel that there are supernatural things occurring around us?
French: I think it's just one example of a situation where because we're not aware of the limitations of our cognitive system, we make various assumptions about how much information we take in, how accurate our memory is, et cetera, et cetera. So inattentional blindness refers to a situation where there might be a stimulus that you're actually looking directly at but you don't see it, you don't perceive it. And the classic example of this is the famous invisible gorilla study, of course. But me and my wife, who's also a psychologist, we looked at this because she was doing lots of research into the topic of inattentional blindness. She contacted me one day to say, “Do you have a copy of a scale that we could use to measure absorption?” Absorption is the tendency that people have to become completely engrossed in what they're doing and to completely cut off the outside world. So the people who when they read a book or watch a film just get completely engrossed in it, hence absorption.
I did have such a scale and my wife was basically interested in the issue of, well you'd expect people who scored highly on this measure to be maybe more susceptible to inattentional blindness. They might not note—If they're in the gorilla study, for example, they might be the ones that because they were concentrating on the primary task to count the number of times the ball was thrown, they wouldn't see the gorilla, which sounded sensible. Now, I knew that absorption correlates with paranormal belief and experience. So I thought, “It'll actually be interesting to look at all of this in one study.” So that's what we did.
We didn't use the gorilla task, we used something that was conceptually similar. My wife programmed the computer so that you saw a display of white letters and black letters moving around the screen. The letters bounced off the edge of the screen as they moved around. And halfway through, a big red cross moved slowly across the background, that was our gorilla. The task was set up so about half the people at the end of the task, if you said, did you notice anything unusual? Or even more direct, did you see a red cross? About half the people would report they had seen it and half hadn't. What we found, as we predicted, was that the ones who didn't see the red cross, the inattentionally blind participants, scored higher overall on the absorption scale, also scored higher on paranormal belief and experience. We replicated this effect in a second study, so it does seem to be a real effect.
Now, bringing that back to more real-life situations where people might think they've encountered a ghost, again, it's maybe worth pointing out here that when people talk about ghostly encounters, I think that's summons up an image of a translucent figure floating and coming through the wall and so on. But typically it's not that, it's more likely to be that people report the objects have been moved and they didn't know how they were moved. Or maybe, like we talked about before, a sense of presence. Or it's a much more subtle effects rather than a full apparition experience.
So someone who for example insists that they've had a paranormal experience because, this is just a hypothetical example, they were in a room and an object move from one place to another and there was nobody else in the room, then well, maybe somebody else was in the room and they moved the object, you just didn't see them. “Oh, but I'm sure I would've done, I would've done.” Well, would you? People don't see a gorilla. They've been so many variations on that basic study that we know that people don't often see things that they are sure they would see. So again, just providing a mundane explanation for an ostensibly mysterious event.
Mills: For those few listeners who don't know the invisible gorilla study, can you just summarize that?
French: Yes. Certainly, yeah. This was a classic study in 1999 by Simons and Chabris. What they did was to show people a short video clip of two groups of people standing there, some in white shirts, some in black shirts. And each group were throwing a ball back to each other. The task was to count the number of times that the people in the white shirts threw the ball to each other, ignore the people in the black shirts. Halfway through the video, somebody walks into the middle of the group in a gorilla suit, stands there beating their chest, and then walks off.
Now, you think intuitively this is something that will be bound to capture your attention, even though it's not what you'd been asked to do, that you would notice it. About half the people who do that test don't see the gorilla. It's a lovely example. Again, they were shocked by the results themselves, they didn't expect that to get such a strong effect. But it's something that has been replicated to the Nth degree, it's definitely real. And it's got real implications obviously in real life. There's a lot of fatal accidents caused by people not seeing something that was right there, they were pointing their eyes at it, they just didn't register it. So it's generated a lot of further research.
Mills: We cover a broad range of psychology topics in this podcast, and I'm struck by the common themes that have come up in recent episodes. We've done episodes on conspiracy theories, superstition, science denial, memory errors, and many similar issues that seem to emerge in terms of how our biases and other cognitive glitches can lead us astray. So do you see a connection between anomalistic psychology and research on these other topics like science denial and conspiracies?
French: Oh, very much so, yeah. Conspiracy theories, I've seen in recent years our research in terms of the areas that we've been actively researching, there have three main ones. One has been sleep paralysis, one has been false memories, and the third has been belief in conspiracies. They all are linked to each other quite strongly. It's really, I'm fascinated by the whole topic of weird beliefs and where do they come from. There are many conspiracy theories that do have an explicitly paranormal angle to them. Obviously they don't all have. But so many links between the factors which influence whether or not people believe in conspiracies, whether or not people believe in the paranormal, the supernatural, alternative medicine, the list goes on. I'm an atheist, so I would even put religious beliefs into that category. These are all what I would classify as examples of magical thinking. And interestingly, they all tend to increase our tendencies towards magical thinking, tend to increase at times of stress and uncertainty. And that seems to go across the board for all of them. But there are a lot of other parallels as well, which is fascinating.
Mills: You've done research to directly test whether paranormal claims might be for real. Can you talk about some of these studies? So how do you test, for example, whether ESP exists?
French: With respect to testing ESP, there are a number of established ways of doing it. One technique, which I've never actually used personally but one which is still something of a challenge for skeptics to explain away, I'm not convinced overall, otherwise I wouldn't be a skeptic, but the so-called “ganzfeld technique.” This is based on the idea that if there is such a thing as ESP, then it's maybe a very weak signal, which is usually drowned out by all the processing that's going on in our brains at the time. Now, if there's anything in that idea, that the things you do would be to try and dampen down the background activity so that the ESP signal or telepathy signal can come through.
So what people do is you get a sender and receiver, two people taking part in the study. The sender relaxes on a comfortable couch, wears headphones, over which you play white noise, they have half ping pong balls over their eyes with cotton wool around them and maybe a red light bulb so if they open their eyes all they see is red. And basically you're trying to—it's like perceptual deprivation. And it's a very comfortable position to be in. People typically report that when they're in that situation, they enter a very relaxed state and their mind fills with imagery, which is quite a common thing if you're just lying there on your own couch. The hope is that this is a state that would be conducive to being able to receive these weak ESP signals.
So at prearranged times, you have somebody in a distant location who randomly selects, it used to be pictures that people would look at, often art postcards, that kind of thing, these days it tends to be video clips. You randomly select a set of typically four, let's say video clips and then randomly select one clip from within those and that person, the sender, watches the video and tries to telepathically transmit the information back to the receiver.
There are variations on a theme, but essentially what would often happen is that the experimenter who is with the receiver would record everything that's said. The experimenter who must not know what the target is themselves in case they give away any unconscious cues, may be at the end of the session they go over it and say, “You said something about triangular shapes, could you just describe that a little bit more clearly.” Just to get it all clarified and all recorded. But the clincher is when either the receiver or independent judges say, “What is the best match from the four available video clips to the imagery that the person was describing?” Now, you would expect by chance people to get a hit rate of 25%, but it was claimed that people were getting hit rates of more like 33%. So not a massive effect, but statistically significant. That's one example.
Now, there are issues, which again, we would probably need another three podcasts to talk about. Which means that the evidence there is quite interesting and worth taking seriously, which a lot of skeptics don't, and I think they should. I think they're missing a trick there. There are studies like that, there are techniques like that where you can statistically analyze the results, where you can try your best to be as methodologically sound as you can. And not all of those results can be just dismissed by the skeptics.
Mills: That leads me to the idea of how your thinking has evolved over time. You were a believer in parapsychology when you quite young and then you change your thinking at one point, you thought parapsychology was a pseudoscience, but now you don't think that. What went through your—how did you reach this point?
French: For me, discovering the joys of skepticism, it was a very exciting time in my life, I have to say. I had always had an interest in these kinds of things, not an overwhelming passion. But I'd always had an interest in ghost stories and UFOs and just weird stuff generally like a lot of teenagers. And pretty much everything I'd read was very uncritical, it was very pro-paranormal. So why should I question it? It was only when I was doing my PhD at Leicester University in a completely different area, nothing to do with anomalistic psychology, someone recommended a book to me, it was by James Alcock, it was called Parapsychology, Science Or Magic?and that book basically changed my life, it opened up the doors.
It was written by a social psychologist who was very informed on parapsychology but was a skeptic. And he was presenting basically non-paranormal accounts for a range of ostensibly paranormal experiences. And I found it all very, very convincing and really interesting. That's when I first became a skeptic so to speak. I obviously then realized that there were skeptical books out there, there were people like James Randi and Ray Hyman and all these other great people doing really interesting stuff. I shouldn't blame them for, one aspect of this was that I initially had the impression that parapsychology was a pseudoscience no better than astrology in that respect and various other kinds of attitudes, that all parapsychologists were incompetent, they didn't know how to design experiments or analyze data or any of these things. And various other attitudes, which I would now say were too negative, too extreme.
It was only over the years as I then gradually got to actually meet a number of real-life parapsychologists I realized that this wasn't actually true. Again, one person that I would particularly know here would be the late Professor Robert Morris, Bob Morris at Edinburgh, the Koestler chair in parapsychology and his protégé who is now the current Koestler chair Caroline Watt, who's a very good friend of mine. Two people who were, certainly Bob and maybe less so Caroline, but Bob was definitely more of a believer than a skeptic. But he was very open to listening to what skeptics had to say, I really liked that kind of open-mindedness.
Also there are two strands to the work, there was looking to see whether maybe things like telepathy, pre-cognition, et cetera, et cetera, really did exist. That was one strand, and that's probably what the major emphasis of that unit was about. But also a second strand looking at why people might sometimes think they've had a paranormal experience when in fact they hadn't. Bob’s first PhD student was my good friend, Richard Wiseman, who is one of the leading skeptics in terms of all this stuff as well. So as I say, for many years in my lectures I will talk about science, pseudoscience generally, but when I talked about parapsychology, it was as pseudoscience as I then saw it.
Then I came across a paper where somebody had to put this to the test empirically by looking at the typical criticisms in terms of the criteria for pseudoscience that skeptics direct to parapsychology. And it basically said, well, are they true? By looking at three journals from mainstream science, including the British Journal of Psychology, three journals from fringe sciences including the Journal of Parapsychology. And really on that basis, it didn't look like these were fair criticisms, the vast majority of them. So on that basis—and ultimately science is a method rather than a body of established facts. You can look at any issue either scientifically or non-scientifically. But if you're looking at an issue scientifically using mythological controls and statistical analysis and so on and so forth, why would you not say that's a science?
Again, one final argument, people like myself, Richard Wiseman, James Randi, a whole host of other skeptics have sometimes directly tested paranormal claims, in which case we're doing parapsychology, and I would hope we're doing it scientifically. So parapsychology at its best I think it has to be described as a science. This is not a popular view amongst skeptics, a lot of skeptics would disagree, but that's my position now.
Mills: But essentially if you design a study scientifically, you could potentially study anything as long as you're following the prescribed method. But that raises another question in my mind, which is that there have been studies that have been published in esteemed journals, peer reviewed journals about parapsychology. And some of them have indicated in existence and then some of them have been retracted. So why is that happening? Is that because we're not skeptical enough?
French: I think it is one of those obviously hugely controversial areas and people emotions are high on both sides. Of the most recent episodes would be Darryl Bem's controversial paper on pre-cognition. And that was published in, I think it was 2011. Again, without going into all the details, Bem, who has obviously been around for many, many decades, very respected figure within psychology, but also, unusually for a psychologist, known to be very sympathetic towards parapsychology and paranormal claims. And he had already done this before with respect to the ganzfeld studies. Rather than publishing in parapsychology journals where the mainstream science media wouldn't even bother to read the stuff, he'd made a point of trying to publish in really the top journals in psychology and succeeded on at least two occasions. It's interesting when somebody does that because it raises all kinds of issues.
Just to summarize, he published the more recent study, the studies of pre-cognition. There were nine experiments over 1,000 participants in total. Basically he was arguing that he had found pretty compelling evidence for the reality of people being able to sense future events before they happen, pre-cognition. One of the very good things that this paper I hasten to add had been through, I think, it was half a dozen different referees adopted the standard refereeing process. And at the end of the day, the editor had felt they had no choice other than to publish even though he probably knew that it was going to be a very controversial paper.
One of the good things about what Bem did was to say he wanted other people to try and replicate the effects and he would make his software available. We decided to chase up on that. We being in this case Richard Wiseman and Stuart Richie. I must admit we had a slightly ulterior motive here, we didn't really expect to replicate the effects, but we did think this might be a relatively easy way to get a paper in a top journal, that was our hope. But anyway, it still took a lot of work. We each did an independent replication of Bem's experiment number nine. I can go into the details of what the experiment involved or if you like, but just at the time being, I'll talk about the fact we didn't get the same results as Bem. We weren't surprised.
We wrote it up, we sent it into the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and it was rejected without being sent out for peer review. And that's what really annoyed us because Bem's paper had had huge coverage right around the world. So it's important whether these effects are real or not, and we'd fail to replicate. But the attitude was, “No, no, no, we don't publish replications.” We were a bit cross about that but we tried two other high impact journals and got the same treatment. Again, we weren't saying, “You must publish this.” We were saying, “Send it out for peer review.” The British Journal of Psychology did send it out for peer review. One referee really loved the paper, the other one had concerns and wasn't too keen. We could recognize from what the concerns that were expressed were, we thought, “We think we know who this referee is, we think is a certain Daryl Bem.” We asked him and he confirmed it was him. So clearly there's a conflict of interest there, we'd found-
Mills: How is that even possible that the editor would use him as a referee?
French: That's what happened. So again, we said, “Well send out to a third reviewer.” “No.” Long story short, we published it in PLOS One, which as you'll notice is an open access journal, which turned out to be a good move because at one point we were getting 1,000 views a day, which is amazing for a scientific paper. It also fed into the ongoing discussions and debates about the replication crisis in psychology. Because this was a situation where say the paper had gone through the normal process of being reviewed and so on and so forth and it had been published. Now, some people took the attitude of, “Well, the reason is it can't possibly be true therefore, how could this happen? There's something wrong with the whole process, the whole of scientific publication.” Others were more open minded about whether possibly the results might be true or not.
I think what it did, it made me think long and hard about the ways in which spurious results may end up being published and the pressures that are on. And now the debate has advanced to the extent that we all recognize that what we might call questionable research practices, not fraud, much more subtle than that, but just giving yourself the benefit of the doubt, knowing that you've got to get any fact that's just below that 0.05 level of significance. Otherwise the editors won't look at it. Then it really highlighted how those issues can basically distort what ends up being published. And maybe particularly in what we would think of as the top journals. Because they have a bias towards not only saying, “Well, we don't publish replications because they're not interesting enough, we don't publish negative findings.” So all the negative findings and all the just boring old applications just don't ever see the light of day. Or usually in this case, as I said, we actually managed to get it published.
Mills: Although that may be changing, I think there's more of a tendency now to-
French: I think it definitely is, and I think it's a healthy thing. People talk about the crisis in psychology, I just see it as a healthy period of self-criticism. I must admit I feel slightly guilty about it because I can look back now and see papers that I have published in the past and think, “That probably wasn't a real effect.” Things that I published and then tried to replicate myself and failed. If you've even try to send off a paper that's about these failed replications, even though it's your own work, you're trying to say, “No, I don't think that was real after all.” You can't get it published. Whereas now I think, as you say, things do seem to move in the direction where that's going to be easier to do. So yeah. So it's been a good outcome there I think.
Mills: I know you do a lot of writing for the general public about the work that you do. What is one lesson that you'd want people to take away from your research? I think what I just heard was part of it, that science is evolving and that people should understand that we all need to keep an open mind. But what would you say to just our average listener about what they should be thinking, say about the paranormal, whether they believe in ghosts or think they've been abducted by aliens? What would your best advice be?
French: I suppose, if you can maybe allow me two or three little nuggets here rather than just one. One thing would be that I think it's best to base your beliefs about the way the universe operates on that solid empirical evidence, preferably from well-controlled studies, rather than personal experience. Now, for most people, personal experience is the gold standard. Even still in the legal system, eyewitness testimonies given them far more credence than it should be given what we know about the way memory works. So I think that would be one piece of advice that I think I'd like to pass on.
I think the other thing is, as you've hinted out there, that science is not an established body of facts, it's something that evolves. And scientists will sometimes change their minds on issues, and that's a good thing. It's a pity we don't have more politicians who are able to do that. But because of the way political systems work, it's political suicide to change your mind on an issue. That's how we've ended up with Brexit and maybe how you ended up with Trump. But I actually respect people greatly who stand up and say, “Actually I realized I was wrong about that.” I think it's a good thing to do. Whereas there is still this tendency for people to see that as being wishy washy and you can't make your mind up, and that's a mistake.
Mills: Well, this has been a fascinating exchange. I really appreciate you joining us today, Dr. French. Thank you.
French: I've enjoyed it. Thank you very much.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org. We're on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.
