Hello everyone, and welcome to episode zero of Psyconoclasm. Today is April 15, 2009. Psyconoclasm is a podcast where we examine psychology and related fields with a skeptical, scientific eye, trying to determine fact from fiction, educated guess from total nonsense. My name is David Bradley, and I am your host. Today I want to provide a little background on myself and this project. Psyconoclasm is what's known as a portmanteau (and I know I totally botched the pronunciation on that). It's a new word formed by fusing two other words: in this instance, psychology and iconoclasm. In the Intro to Psychology textbook I once read, it says that the etymology, or origin, of the word comes from the root psyche and the suffix -ology. -Ology means study or learn, so psychology is the study of the psyche. Psyche is a Greek word that can be loosely translated as “soul,” meaning the innermost part of life. It comes from the Greek myth of Psyche, which I won't get into here, but I'll link to it on the website, www.psyconoclasm.com. Psychology, then, can be thought of as the study of what it means to be human. Or animal. Or, even, a plant – but that last bit is the subject of another episode, I'm sure. A more formal definition I found in my textbook is this: psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes. If you ever take an Intro to Psychology course, I've saved you the trouble of reading the first page.

Iconoclasm has several meanings. Originally, it referred to a group of people who destroyed the religious icons of their own culture. The word today, then, refers to someone who breaks from or disdains the dogma and traditions of his own culture. Colloquially, the word is used to refer to someone who is a contrarian by nature. What I hope to do is something similar. I want to put rational pressure against all ideas pertaining to psychology, from the mainstream to the fringe, and see what cracks and what doesn't. I want to destroy the icons that are not based in truth. I don't want to be a blind iconoclast, more nihilist than anything else. Instead, I want to expose as false those things taken on faith, and in doing so strengthen those things taken on evidence. I want to be a considered iconoclast in the field of psychology. I want to engage in: psyconoclasm.

I subscribe to a number of podcasts about various topics, including science and specifically psychology. While listening to some of them, I got the feeling that the hosts didn't apply rational thought or the scientific, skeptical way of thinking. They had guests on with fascinating claims and areas of expertise, but I was left wishing that the interviewer had pushed back a little more, if you know what I mean.

Each week or so I'll post an interview or solo content exploring some aspect of psychology. It'll be between 20-40 minutes, unless there's something super-compelling I want to post. Perhaps it'll be an interview with an expert on Emotional Freedom Technique, or someone explaining the usefulness of the Stanford Prison Experiment, or someone debunking claims of subliminal advertising. I may offer up a critique of an article in the popular press that reads more like a press release than a news piece. If anyone has any ideas for show topics or segments, feel free to e-mail me, David Bradley, at host@psyconoclasm.com.

And speaking of me, let me give my credentials: I have none. I graduated from Boston College in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in history. I've taken a half-dozen undergraduate psychology courses. I'm no expert. But, I don't think we need to be experts to examine these topics. We can't be experts in everything, so we need to be able to sift through what real experts say, what fake experts say, what the media say, and what our own intuitions say on a variety of topics. I hope you'll e-mail me to let me know what you think as you listen to this podcast, and let me know when I've neglected or discounted the opinion of a real expert, been taken in by a bad experiment, been too trusting of media accounts, or given my own biases – of which I know I have many – preference over the facts.

Thank you for listening to what I hope will be the most boring episode of Psyconoclasm. Psyconoclasm is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. You can reach me by e-mailing host@psyconoclasm.com, I promise to get back to you. Opening and closing music by Spiraling, from the Podsafe Music Network, available at music.podshow.com. I'll close with a quote from Carl Sagan, appropriate to launch this podcast series: “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.” Talk to you soon.