Jargon Alert: 18 Phrases That Can Lead Us Astray

Human language is a wondrous and ever-changing form of expression, allowing for rich and nuanced communication, deep thinking, and fine aesthetic pleasures. Yet language is also delicate and needs to be treated with care. As language evolves, words and phrases may become dated and misused, sowing confusion, obscuring meaning, and unintentionally inflicting pain. Below is a categorized list of phrases and words from the world of psychology that are best used sparingly, carefully, or not at all.

Self-Contradictory or Misleading

1. “Steep learning curve”

This phrase is almost always misused to describe a difficult task when it actually refers to an easy skill learned quickly. Learning to juggle three balls has a steep learning curve. With less than two hours of practice each day, most people can go from not being able to juggle to near mastery in three days. That’s steep. Mastering Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto isn’t steep, but gradual and long. (And Rachmaninoff’s third may be so gradual that it isn’t learned at all.)

2. “Think outside the box”

Anyone who instructs us to think outside the box isn’t. Otherwise, a more creative expression would be offered. And if we can’t invent an evocative metaphor for unconventional thinking, we might as well be direct and literal, and say something like, “Imagine the unusual."

3. “Hard-wired”

When referring to behaviors and emotions, this term implies that we are simple and unwieldy electronic devices, which we are not. It also conflates contextually dependent tendencies with determined traits, while ignoring the great human capacity for learning and change. If anything, our behavior is “soft-wired”—that is, flexible, adaptive, and shaped by the interplay among our genetic endowment, environmental conditions, and personal experiences.

4. “Brain”—instead of “mind”

When people casually attribute behavioral or cognitive tendencies to their brain, they often mean their mind. The brain is a three-pound organ inside our skull, composed of glial cells and billions of neurons. Although there are documented relationships between subjective experience and brain chemistry and structure, we don’t have conscious access to the brain or to these relationships. Moreover, by saying “brain” instead of “mind,” we undervalue our agency by implying physiological determinism.

5. “The exception that proves the rule”

The reasoning is that if there’s an exception, there must exist a general rule that stands in contrast to such an exception. That reasoning makes sense, but the phrasing dismisses the exception as insignificant. A sign reading “Free Doughnuts on the Last Day of the Month” validates the general rule that doughnuts must be paid for during the rest of the month. But for many of us, the offer of free doughnuts is the central and significant message, and one that constitutes its own rule.¹

Unsupported or Refuted by Research

6. “I have a gene for . . .”

Although there are single-gene medical disorders, such as cystic fibrosis, there is little evidence for psychiatric disorders or personality traits that stem from to a single gene, or even a collection of suspicious genes. In general, groups of genes interact with environmental factors in complex ways, resulting in tendencies toward particular behaviors.

7. “Love language”

The public fascination with “love languages” owes to the popularity of Gary Chapman’s book The 5 Love Languages. Yet empirical work has failed to support the book’s three central assumptions: (a) each person has a preferred love language, (b) there are five love languages, and (c) couples are more satisfied when partners speak one another’s preferred language. Love, by way of analogy, is less like a language and more like a balanced diet that requires a full range of essential nutrients to cultivate lasting health.

8. “Learning style”

Although intuitively appealing, there is no evidence that tailoring instruction to a purported way of learning improves retention and application. We all use multiple modalities to learn. The modalities are integrated, they change over time, and they depend on context. You are not a “visual learner” in the dark.

9. “Threshold”

In most cases, moving from one category to another with perception or behavior depends on experience, response bias, and expectation—and not on crossing a hard, absolute border. If we’re expecting an important message, for example, we’re able to hear the faint pinging of our phone in another room that we wouldn’t hear without that expectation.

10. “Learning curve”

For an individual, a graph of performance as a function of practice is a sequence of stair steps, not a smooth curve. Individual learning is a jagged ascent, not a graceful upward slope. The curve only comes about when averaging over different people.

Well-Intentioned Imprecision or Overstatement

11. “Neurodivergent” and “neurotypical”

“Neurodivergent” was constructed to be nonjudgmental, but its inclusive vagueness may obscure diagnosis of more specific disorders and prevent their successful treatment. Indeed, the dichotomy itself sets up an unhelpful contrast of us-versus-them, leaving one term (neurotypical) impossible to instantiate. (What exactly is typical?)

12. “If our intervention helped even one person, it was all worth it.”

If your million-dollar intervention helped only one person, then it was definitely not worth it. Such abundant resources could be used more effectively elsewhere.

13. “I’m obsessed with…”

The casual use of clinical terms waters down their meaning. It’s an affront not only to language but to the people who struggle with actual clinical conditions. You may be preoccupied with Justin Bieber, but you’re not obsessed with him. The same applies to the loose application of diagnostic terms such as “OCD” or “bipolar” to tolerable, everyday tendencies.

14. “Closure”

This term often denotes that some painful issue has been dealt with to completion—and we can now move on. But this belief defies our emotional landscape, placing undue pressure on people who continue to experience psychological pain. Emotional hurts, difficult memories, and painful losses continue to reverberate in our psyche. Their echoes may shift in volume, frequency, and tone, but they do not typically disappear.

15. “You only use 10 percent of your brain.”

In fact, we use all of our brain all of the time. Some areas of the brain are more or less active, depending on what we’re doing. But there are no untapped areas that lie dormant, waiting to be activated if only we could maximize our potential.

Misrepresenting the Implications of Our Probabilistic World

16. “Margin of error”

The closest synonym to “error” in everyday conversation is “mistake.” But in this statistical phrase, “error” refers to uncertainty, not to a mistake. In a political poll, if Candidate H is ahead of Candidate T by 47 percent to 43 percent, with a 4 percent margin of error, that means the poll’s best estimate is that Candidate H leads by 4 percentage points. The 4 percent “error” does not mean the candidates are in a dead heat. It means that there’s the same small chance of a tie as there is that Candidate H leads by 8 percentage points.

17. “Statistically different”

The judgment of statistical difference is based on an arbitrarily chosen cutoff for the results of a given inferential statistical test. Any two groups in an experimental study will give different results. The question is: Does the extent of difference rise to the level of this arbitrary cutoff? It may be more informative not to report an all-or-none decision, but rather the probability that such a difference could happen by chance.

18. Research “proves”

Social scientific research does not prove anything. Proof is what mathematicians do. In psychology, our data supports, or fails to support, a given hypothesis. We can’t know for certain why particular results occur. Alternative explanations always exist. Multiple replications can move us toward greater confidence in our research results, but an increase in confidence is not a proof—and what’s more, high-quality replications are in short supply throughout psychology.

This blog post was written collaboratively with Psychology Today blogger Noam Shpancer.