[ExI] Fan of Sci-Fi? Psychologists Have You in Their Sights

[William Flynn Wallace]

John Grigg wrote:  But, while psychology may not exactly diagnose fans as
mentally ill, the insinuation remains – science fiction evades, rather than
confronts, disappointment with the real world."

What do you think?

As an experimental psychologist, and not one of those silly clinical
people, I think they should get serious about mental illness.  This ranks
right up there with college English courses devoted to pop music lyrics.
Scifi is escapism:  ditto everything on TV, the movies, video games,
novels, most hobbies, and so on.  Just junk 'science'.  I wish sometimes
the clinical people would stop calling themselves psychologists, but I
can't think of a good alternative.  I would not vote for tenure if they
were on my faculty.   bill w

On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 10:19 PM John Grigg via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> "Psychology has often supported a dismissal of the genre. The most recent
> psychological accusation against science fiction is the “great fantasy
> migration hypothesis
> <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4651513/>.” This supposes
> that the real world of unemployment and debt is too disappointing for a
> generation of entitled narcissists. They consequently migrate to a land of
> make-believe where they can live out their grandiose fantasies.
>
> The authors of a 2015 study
> <https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0142200>
> stress that, while they have found evidence to confirm this hypothesis,
> such psychological profiling of “geeks” is not intended to be stigmatising.
> Fantasy migration is “adaptive” – dressing up as Princess Leia or Darth
> Vader makes science fiction fans happy and keeps them out of trouble.
>
> But, while psychology may not exactly diagnose fans as mentally ill, the
> insinuation remains – science fiction evades, rather than confronts,
> disappointment with the real world."
>
> What do you think?
>
>
> https://getpocket.com/explore/item/fan-of-sci-fi-psychologists-have-you-in-their-sights?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB
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