This month, in their Monitor on Psychology magazine, the American Psychological Association published an article called ‘Storytelling strengthens the impact of psychological science’ by Tori DeAngelis. It opens with the words “psychology is perhaps the science discipline best positioned to help people navigate 2026’s complexities”. It makes a point about how vital it is that psychologists share their findings, and why they matter, in a way that connects with large numbers of people.
I had this article in the back of my mind throughout Psychology Month this year, because it has a similar thesis to our theme of “This Is Psychology”. That being that psychological science, more than most any other scientific discipline, has something to contribute in nearly every facet of our everyday lives. And communicating that to the public, to decision-makers in organizations, and to policy-makers in government, is imperative.
Just knowing something shouldn’t be an end unto itself. There is little point in accruing knowledge if that knowledge doesn’t encourage positive change. Psychologists know, for example, that the Meyers-Briggs personality test is about as reliable and scientifically sound as astrology. And yet, it is used by all kinds of major companies in their hiring processes and in their internal organizational structures. In fact, it’s used by the majority of Fortune 500 companies, even though we (psychologists and those who research personality) know that the Big Five test is far more accurate.
Why do they keep doing it? Have we just not told them? Are they just ignoring the data that demonstrates the ineffectiveness of their method?
Here’s the thing – psychological science can inform a Fortune 500 company as to why using the Meyers-Briggs is a futile exercise. It can explain why that company is resistant to altering their practices. It can also show why that company might see benefits from what they’re currently doing even if the data doesn’t support those conclusions. It can even suggest ways that a person who wants to change that company’s practices can effectively make the case and be convincing about it.
The central problem, as I see it, is that of those various ways that psychology can contribute to that company’s work culture, efficiency, and even their bottom line, the weakest of them all is the most essential. We (although I am not a psychologist myself, I am going to use the word ‘we’ from here on out for the sake of convenience) are great at figuring out why people do things. We’re not so great at convincing them to do other things.
We nibble around the edges. We figure out ways to nudge people toward recycling more at their office, but we don’t have a great way to convince politicians to take significant action to fight climate change. We can tell the world that referring to youth by their chosen pronouns, and providing gender-affirming care to all people, has great health and wellness outcomes. We don’t have a great ability to convince school boards, governments, and the public to follow that science.
The thing is, we actually know how to do it! We study public response to rhetoric. We understand the way a message can be framed to have the greatest impact. Some of it is right there in the title of Ms. DeAngelis’ article. Storytelling strengthens the impact of psychological science. How do we have so much data on how to do it, but few of us want to be the ones who do?
Every year (and by that I mean last year and coming up again this year) I do a presentation at the CPA Convention with our incoming President, Dr. Janine Hubbard. It’s about speaking with the media, and I look at it as a call to members in the profession to get out there. My central message is usually to academics, and it is this – if not you, then who? People are going to be speaking about your area of expertise, but you are the expert.
Janine’s message is more one to practitioners (the psychologists who work in clinical practice and see patients). She points out that all psychologists do a lot of schooling, and know a heck of a lot about a lot of things. You may not be THE expert on post-traumatic stress, but you know enough to talk to the nice folks on the evening news about it for two minutes. You are equipped to provide the community with a little more understanding, and maybe a sense of comfort, in the aftermath of a tragedy. Most psychologists have some experience teaching students, and Janine thinks of a media appearance as an opportunity to teach the public about a subject. She draws on her experience as a child psychologist, explaining complex issues to kids and their parents on a regular basis. She says,
“All clinicians have to use appropriate language to meet their target audience. The same is true when reaching a larger audience.”
Janine herself kind of fell backward into this kind of work, and now not only has she become something of an expert at media appearances, she also sees the tremendous value they bring. A regular segment on the evening news in Newfoundland made her a familiar face in the community. That familiarity led to trust. That trust meant that Janine would be believed when she was speaking about something that really mattered.
People watch, and they listen. They listened to Janine when she talked about gender-affirming care. They listened when she talked about holiday stress, or the effects of the wildfires that terrified Newfoundland. And when she encouraged them to get vaccinated by talking them through needle fear, and encouraged them to follow public health guidelines by providing reassurances and sharing strategies to increase comfort with nasal swabs, viewers of the local news were indeed reassured. They trusted her credibility as a scientist, and as a familiar face.
I understand that this does not come naturally to many psychologists. It did not come naturally to Janine either, but recognizing the impact of doing it allowed her to grow into the role. I believe there are two effects from the scientific rigour that becomes second-nature to psychologists as they pursue their degrees.
One is a feeling that language must be extremely precise. They don’t feel comfortable saying, for example, that peeing when you’re not supposed to is far more common among five-year-olds than it is among 15-year-olds. Instead, they might have a tendency to say that enuresis affects between 5-10% of five-year-olds, and there is a difference between enuresis and nocturnal enuresis, and it happens in around 1% of 15-year-olds, but in their case it’s much more likely to be nocturnal…we know this kind of language loses listeners. But we would sometimes rather be precise than be heard. Thankfully, when she spoke to me for Psychology Month on the subject, Dr. Jen Theule drew on her experience explaining enuresis and encopresis (peeing and pooping where you shouldn’t) to children and explained it to me in a simple and straightforward way.
The second effect is the idea that when there is someone who knows something better than you know that thing, then it is not your place to speak about it. And if you do, the impostor syndrome metre starts peaking.
Janine told me a story once about trying to find other psychologists to do a segment on the news. She reached out to a number of her colleagues looking for someone to speak with a host, and all of them said no. It wasn’t their specific area of expertise, and they felt as though it was outside their scope, and so they declined. The subject they were being asked to speak about was impostor syndrome.
I say this to every psychologist I can. You know more about human behaviour, in most every aspect, than the people you will be able to reach by speaking up. I write about this discipline and psychological science, and have every day for the past six years. You still know more about every aspect of human behaviour than I do.
Almost two years ago, Dr. Steve Joordens wrote me to propose a podcast episode about the scourge of sports gambling. It was the first time I’d considered how dangerous online sports gambling really was for young people, and I was happy an immediately intrigued once Steve brought it to my attention. A short time later, Steve wrote a letter on behalf of the CPA, and soon would be speaking in front of the Senate to urge action on the advertising of sports gambling. He did a webinar for the CPA on the subject. He will be the guest editor for an upcoming behavioural-addiction-themed issue of the CPA magazine Psynopsis.
Steve is passionate about the dangers of gambling for youth. And in some ways he’s AN expert. He isn’t THE expert. But he knows more about it than most of the senators he was speaking to. And more than I know about it. THE expert might be Dr. Robert Sapolsky, and I know this because Steve had a little fanboy moment when meeting Dr. Sapolsky for the first time for this article we were working on for Psychology Month.
I, on the other hand, had never heard of Dr. Sapolsky before that moment. I suspect few psychologists would say the same. They might be as surprised to hear of my ignorance as I was when I found out my 26-year-old daughter had never heard of Bad Bunny before the Super Bowl. Dr. Sapolsky is, deservedly, a really big deal in psychology circles. But those circles are also bubbles. We all live in our own personal bubbles, and the psychology bubble is real.
In Ms. DeAngelis’ article, she quoted Dr. Myra Fernandes, a professor in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo in Canada and associate editor of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology (CJEP), talking about how the journal system could do better connecting with the public. Dr. Fernandes says journals could require brief, lay-friendly public significance statements that explain a study in simple terms, including how it can benefit society. CJEP is one of the journals that asks for these statements, which is a good start. But an additional step is needed, I believe. That is one of intention.
When you publish that journal article, it’s entirely possible that the public impact of it is opaque, even to you. That can make writing a public impact statement feel like another box to check – an irritant more than an imperative. Maybe your study won’t directly affect the public or impact policy. But it will inform science going forward which will contribute to bigger changes that could well make a huge contribution to the well-being of the public. The public impact statement can be something that looks forward.
I think there was an excellent example of a well-crafted public impact statement in a recent journal article in CJEP. The article was published by MacMillan, Churchill, and Hourihan, and it’s entitled ‘Effects of valence and list composition on memory predictions, performance, and beliefs’. The abstract for the article assumes in the reader an understanding of terms like “metamnemonic”, “mixed-list design”, “pure-list design”, and “valence manipulation”. Another psychological researcher reading that abstract would absolutely understand those terms. (I assume – I don’t myself understand them well enough to say for sure.) This was the public impact statement that accompanied the article:
“Little is known about how emotions affect our sense of what we are likely to remember and what we are likely to forget. This study found that people believe that emotional words are more memorable than neutral words, especially when neutral and emotional words are studied together. Understanding the nature of this relationship can help improve the learning strategies we choose both in educational contexts and in daily life.”
That, in my estimation, is a very good public impact statement. I immediately understand what it is they did in the study, and I understand how the results can contribute to future research or inform a larger educational program in a small way. And I was able to glean that from one paragraph, without wading through definitions for metamnemonic valence manipulation.
When I write articles (like this one), I aim to create something at around a ninth-grade reading level. Not because I think that’s the level of the average reader – in fact, I believe that almost everyone reading this article is likely to have a greater competency than ninth grade. I do it because the easier it is to read something, the more people will be willing to read it. Why make people work harder than they need to, if your goal is accessibility? I bring this up because the way I determine this is a simple tool in Word that shows you your document’s reading level. I used that tool recently to review about 30 public impact statements from the CPA’s three journals, including CJEP. The average reading level was Grade 16. I don’t even know what grade that is. Fourth-year undergrad in psychology? First year Master’s? Some of them were so dense that the tool couldn’t even give me a reading.
Dr. Fernandes is right, and the intention is good. But it’s entirely possible that the impact statement is written from within psychology’s bubble. It may seem very straightforward to the researcher who is writing it, and to all of their colleagues. But not to the public. Not to journalists or writers or members of parliament or to me. A researcher publishing psychological research is presumably invested in the possibilities opened up by that work. The best opportunity for impact comes from visibility. And visibility without accessibility is pretty rare.
An example of what I mean is Dr. Fernandes herself. A wildly accomplished researcher, a journal editor, a respected star in the world of cognitive neuroscience, and a terrific science communicator. When I Google her name, the top result is the University of Waterloo, which stands to reason. The second is Google Scholar, also understandable. The third result is a podcast. (In fact, it’s the CPA podcast episode of Mind Full where Dr. Fernandes told us about her research into the connection between music and memory.) I thought it was likely that my algorithm was a little different than others, and made it more likely that the podcast would show up for me (after all, I go to that link quite often). I got a couple of friends to do the same Google search, and they got the same result.
In the communications world of social media, the central metric that matters to us when we collect data is “reach”. Yes, it matters how many people interact with our content, and click on the links we provide, and watch the videos we post. But what matters most is how many people have the opportunity to do any of those things – which means we have to reach them first. Most TV has more reach than most radio which has more reach than most newspapers which have more reach than most podcasts which have more reach than magazines which have more reach than social media. Your Bluesky or LinkedIn page has more reach than a journal article.
The way I see it, psychologists are one of very few groups who can reach inside the majority of those bubbles. And that means getting out there. In newspapers, magazines, blogs, podcasts.
Dr. Bruce Hutchison is an expert on emotional contagion, who has put his expertise out into the world via his Substack. That Substack currently has 39 subscribers. But every entry and essay he puts there is one more chance to be seen by more people.
Dr. Elena Antoniadis is not THE expert on memory. But she does teach about it. She puts some of her lessons up on her YouTube channel, and it was there that I discovered her video about memory. Her way of explaining it was simple, direct, and easy to understand, and I was delighted when she agreed to walk me through it for Psychology Month.
Madeline Springle also makes great use of YouTube, where she created a channel dedicated to her area of expertise as a Ph.D candidate at the University of Calgary. @MasterYourInterview has more than 60 videos about preparing for and nailing a job interview, and much of that content informed our article about job interviews – an article that also included THE expert (or maybe one of a very few who could claim the title) Dr. Nicolas Roulin.
In my role as communications specialist at the CPA, I run our various social media channels. More and more, I’m seeing psychologists speaking out about the issues that matter most. Racism, xenophobia, climate change, psychological regulation, domestic violence, healthcare, gambling, the opioid crisis, self-care, transphobia, fascism, corporal punishment, conversion therapy, the housing crisis, disinformation, AI, the importance of sleep, compassion fatigue, the questionable science behind Myers-Briggs, the benefits of light therapy, strategies to combat bullying in school, intergenerational trauma, the benefits of harm reduction strategies, the compounded trauma of refugees, workplace harassment…and so on.
They’re sharing their expertise at a time when it really matters. Sometimes it’s tentative. It’s understandable to be hesitant, especially in today’s environment where social media trolls and bots can make engagement unpleasant. It’s especially hard when you think that putting yourself out there risks judgement or criticism from your peers and colleagues in your profession. Dr. Jenn Vriend, a child psychologist in Ottawa, posted on LinkedIn about a recent decision in Ontario to change the standards for who can call themselves a psychologist. She put into words the sentiments of many:
“This process has been heavy, and at times honestly a little frightening to be part of.
What has stood out most to me is the courage and integrity of so many colleagues. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just steady, ethical, and deeply thoughtful.
I know how much fear can sit behind even a simple post or re-post. The hesitation. The second-guessing. The vulnerability hangover after speaking up.
And yet, people are still choosing to stand by their ethical responsibilities and their concern for the public. That has been incredibly grounding to witness. And, in many ways, it has helped me find my own steadiness too.
Quiet bravery is still bravery.
And there has been a lot of it.”
If not you, then who? If not now, then when? We are at time in our history that, prior to now, was relegated to…well, history. The rise of global authoritarianism, the rejuvenation of fascism, accelerating climate change, the mainstreaming of racism and homophobia, an increased threat from pandemics and formerly eradicated diseases, incel culture on the rise alongside femmephobia and toxic masculinity, the ripple effects of social isolation. There is a long list of threats to people around the world – and for the first time in many of our lives, those threats have not been relegated to distant parts of the world, but have come to our doorstep.
If psychology is equipped to understand why, it is equipped to understand how, and uniquely positioned to help others understand. We know how to build trust with the public. Let’s do that by appearing on their radios and TVs and podcasts and in their newspapers. CPA members can start with the Media Guide we created for this purpose. We know how to persuade individuals of objective truths. Let’s do that by persuading elected officials of the things we know to be true. CPA members can start with the Advocacy Toolkit created by Glenn Brimacombe, our Director of Public Policy. We know how people become convinced of falsehoods through disinformation. Let’s be a bulwark against that like Dr. Jonathan Stea, author of the book Mind The Science. We have significant expertise to share, and many of us do so in plain language to teach others about it through videos, or fact sheets.
I’m keenly aware of the somewhat circular logic of trying to write something in an effort to persuade psychologists to use their vast expertise to persuade others. What I am hoping to do is to make us all aware of the opportunity that lies before us, and the urgency of seizing that opportunity to centre psychology in as many areas as possible. That involves, in many ways, storytelling.
We can tell the stories of the people affected by wars and climate change. We can relay anecdotes about PTSD and bipolar disorder and toxic work environments. We can combat healthcare and mental health “wellness” grifters by walking people through the ways we arrive at data-supported and evidence-based treatments. We have the ability to help craft a narrative around our collective responses to antisemitism, gender diversity, conspiracy theories, or social isolation. When psychologists tell stories, they are telling the stories of people. And that, as we know (from psychology), connects with more people.
My job, as I see it, is to tell the stories of psychology. Psychology’s job, as I see it, is to tell the world the stories of its people.