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This podcast covers the fascinating world of psychological science through discussing the research behind popular myths related to psychology, such as the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. Hosted by Dr. Karla Lassonde and Dr. Emily Stark, psychology professors, we discuss misconceptions about psychology and how they have been researched by psychological scientists.
Okay. So, today we are discussing a very common misconception about human behavior. This gets referenced all the time, all kinds of people. And this is the idea that the full moon makes us weird or wild or frantic or that it leads to crimes or commitments or any type of extreme behavior that you can think of.
Karla:That's right. It is a pervasive myth, isn't it? And you hear it in doctors' offices, you hear it in schools, you hear it among your psychology friends from time to time. And, you know, what's the deal? We like to explain human behavior in psychology and so this is one way to do it.
Emily:Yes, but you're right, this really does seem universal and people at all levels of education, deep experience in human nature, and then you hear this bubble up, especially when it is actually a full moon. Oh no, be careful, it's a full moon. And we see this mistaken belief being promoted.
Karla:That's right. Lots of fun.
Emily:Let's get into it. My name is Emily Stark and I'm a social psychologist.
Karla:And my name is Karla Lassonde and I'm a cognitive psychologist. And this is Brains Versus Beliefs: Debunking Psychological Misconceptions.
Emily:All right, the misconception that we'll be discussing today is the full moon influences human behavior. And I mean, lots of both ancient and current cultures have specific beliefs about the full moon. So even the word lunacy is derived from the word lunar. So lunar refers to the moon and we use lunacy to refer to eccentric, wild, crazy behavior. And people have rituals around the full moon.
Emily:It's an aspect of how people marked time. It always had an important meaning. I mean, could even look at myths about werewolves, where people become wolves during the full moon as perhaps an extreme case of the moon influencing people's behavior.
Karla:That's right. And even that word lunatic, we see falsely describing mental health. And it's kind of a two for one, right? Both the idea of the way you act around the moon and then the fact that the moon could govern your behavior. There's a lot buried in there.
Emily:Exactly. Yeah. Especially around insanity and full moon. And we see this come up also in the belief of a lot of people, especially people who work in human services. So maybe working in like a psychiatric institution, but also, you know, jails, prisons, hospitals, schools, the idea that people become like more antic or wild during the full moon.
Emily:They're definitely making connection. One study that, this was published in the World Journal of Surgery, and I thought this was so interesting, they asked healthcare professionals, do you think, do you believe that the full moon has an impact on human behavior? And they found up to forty percent of the people they surveyed So that's a big chunk of people working in the profession of medicine showing this belief, Nope, the full moon is affecting people's behavior.
Karla:That's right. And knowledge is hard. And we think of the education that we've had since maybe some of the days that we needed the moon to try to understand how we function, why we function. We don't necessarily need that anymore. We have some knowledge that could suggest otherwise.
Karla:But we do like this really available cause and effect. And we can see that even professionals, anyone, finds that it's a nice thing to be able to connect. Like we connect in the summer, we eat more ice cream. There also tends to be a little bit more violence in the summer. And it's not that ice cream is going to I mean, maybe my kids, when they don't have ice cream, they get a little round, you know, wild.
Karla:Same. Yeah, same, right? I want that ice cream. But, you know, there's that mediating factor that the heat brings people outside. Hey, even might bring people out to see the moon a little bit more, funny enough.
Emily:Yeah. Yeah. We love to explain what we see around us. We want a quick and easy explanation. So it definitely makes sense that the moon is something that is often literally very visible, it's noticeable, and we connect that to people's behavior.
Emily:And also this is reinforced through media. So if you weren't really paying critical attention, you might think this is a very legitimate explanation because you hear it referenced all the time in different movies and TV shows. And I'm going to play here in a second a clip from the movie Hocus Pocus. And you'll hear Dani reference she wants her brother to take her trick or treating. And you'll hear her say, I need you to come with me.
Emily:It's a full moon. The weirdos are out. Guess
Karla:what? You're gonna take me trick or treating. Not this year, Dani. Mom said you have to. Well, she can take you.
Karla:She and dad are going to the party at town hall. Well, you're eight. Go by yourself.
Emily:So again, it's just I mean, it's not a central key piece to anything, but it's just this little aside, like, okay, it's a full moon. That means people are going to be acting in some particular way.
Karla:That's right. I'm thinking of a Friends episode.
Emily:Yes.
Karla:And Lisa Kudrow, she's amazing, but she may not be the most scientific, reasonable person on the Friends show, although she is lovely. There's a specific episode where Joey develops romantic feelings for Rachel, and that's a little bit on, she says. Like, oh, it's got to be a full moon, Nizal.
Emily:Of course.
Karla:And as you said, there's countless examples of this very same thing where you're using that phrase, It must be a full moon.
Emily:So yeah, when we keep encountering this in media, it tends to reinforce these beliefs. And also, I mean, sometimes people will take this a step further and have some type of theory about how is the full moon influencing behavior. So, some people talk about the tides. Well, okay, the moon influences the ocean tides. And so clearly it's affecting things on earth.
Emily:Like why not human behavior?
Karla:Why not?
Emily:And that's due like through gravity and that's because oceans are really big and humans are really small. So the mechanism does not apply to us, but right, like, so you're seeking this explanation and others, I think this one has a little bit more weight to it. This idea that, oh, the full moon, it's brighter. So like you said, people might be more likely to go outside. If people are outside interacting with other people, maybe that is what's leading to aberrant behavior or other types activity.
Emily:So not only is this belief ingrained in individuals, but we've also created some general explanations that maybe even help justify this belief or gives us the mechanism for how we think the moon influences us. Makes sense, Emily.
Karla:So, Emily, we've gone through a lot here. We know this is a pervasive myth. Why don't we look at some of the psychological truth to this?
Emily:Yes. This is a myth or belief that there has actually been a lot of research that has investigated this. And this is also not incredibly difficult to research because we keep track of the cycles of the moon. So we know when a moon is full, we can pin that down to a specific night. And for many different places in our society, we are already keeping track of behaviors.
Emily:Like we can access records of crime reports or who was admitted to jails or who was admitted to different hospitals. And so that's been the main approach of this. This is called archival research where you don't have to set up separate study to say like monitor behavior in different phases of the moon. We can just find data that allows us to do that. And in this case that can be beneficial because we are getting right at the real world data.
Emily:So we are claiming that the moon affects behavior in these real world settings. Well, let's go to those settings and check. So when we actually track it, we do not see a connection between phases of the moon and people's behavior. So an older study, this is from 1978, they looked at other work that had been done and they tracked behaviors in settings including a psychiatric hospital. They looked at emergency calls as well as police reports and then they compared that to the moon cycle.
Emily:And throughout this systematic comparison, they found the phase of the moon was not influencing behavior. So there's no relationship between any of those records and whether or not the moon was full.
Karla:Got it. So to be clear, the moon is going to do its thing predictably, right? And so that is being held constant. And we can use that as our guide. This is going to happen.
Karla:We know when a full moon will develop. And so we can then take these archives people do and we have this natural way to hem them together and see, is there something that's happening more or less related to that moon cycle?
Emily:Exactly. We're just systematically looking at these records of human behavior, comparing it to the moon cycle. This approach can be called a meta analysis when researchers are taking a number of studies that have been done and then they can statistically combine them. And then that gives you even more power. It's a stronger way to demonstrate is there an effect?
Emily:And a study, this is a slightly more recent study, but still just from 1985, they pulled together 37 different studies that did this type of compare phases of the moon to people's behavior. And again, they had hospital admissions, they had psychiatric disturbances, crisis calls, all different types of criminal offenses. And again, what they are finding over and over is that the full moon is not influencing behavior. It's not causing an increase in any of these aberrant things that people can do.
Karla:So this makes it pretty clear. Mean, 1985 is a little bit further back. We were both around then. Maybe some of our audience will not be. However, when we look at research, it holds up.
Karla:There's going to be some research that we could find a little bit closer to today. But being able to kind of clear the air of this a few decades ago sets us up for why we can see this be like more pervasive as the truth coming out. Exactly. And sometimes when you see these older research studies and if you're thinking, well, that's outdated. Well, sometimes when all the studies are agreeing on a finding, you don't need to keep doing the research.
Karla:We
Emily:can go back and look at these and it's very clearly demonstrated. Yeah, the full moon is not influencing behavior. So these are still some of the major reports that tie into this misconception. And it's because there's no there there. There's no other way to keep approaching that in the field of psychology at least researchers have put this idea aside and because it is not bearing any weight that the moon's influencing us.
Karla:Right. And I mean, that's really fantastic because if there's one thing we know about science is that it's iterative. We're constantly updating what we know. That can make some people uncomfortable for reasons that we do like to explain our own behavior by what we see in front of us. And it can be a little disconcerting when someone says that, Oh, I'm wrong.
Karla:Yeah.
Emily:We don't like to be told we're wrong or to No, think
Karla:we don't like that. But I really love this idea that, as you said, we can let it lie, we can let it go to bed. This is something where the book has almost been closed, but the irony is this constant rehashing in the media. And it just seems like it's charming. There's like a storytelling element.
Karla:And so that leads us to wonder, this is a common saying, right? And why do we just want to do this so badly?
Emily:It's the people who discuss this and use this and again, if you work in some type of human services, if you know someone who does, you've heard this said. And when you ask people like, or sometimes I'll be that person who says, you know, the full moon doesn't actually influence people's behavior. But the thing is people seem so sure of it because they feel like they've personally witnessed it. To them, they have conclusive evidence because, and they might say, well, no, it was just a full moon last week and the kids were insane. If you're talking to like an elementary school teacher.
Emily:So, and we use this all the time. We tend to trust our personal experience and we should most of the time, but our brains are not automatic statisticians. This is why you have to learn how to use statistics and design research to understand human behavior. One of the cool things that our brain does is it has a tendency to see patterns that aren't really there. This is called illusory correlation, if we want to be fancy about it.
Emily:So if you even think there's a pattern, if you think that the full moon influences behavior and now you notice, Oh, it's a full moon. You know, maybe people are talking about, oh, it's a supermoon or something noticeable. And now you're paying attention to behavior. So anything that seems a little bit out of the ordinary, your brain is connecting those two. It's making a pattern and saying, Yep, you're seeing it, it's a full moon, so that's key to this behavior.
Emily:And what you aren't thinking about is you are not paying attention when it's not a full moon. So you're noticing when it relates, you're not noticing when it doesn't relate. This is also this might be a separate podcast episode, but this is why we sometimes notice when our horoscopes match on to our day. Like the ones that tell us, here's how your day's going to go. You're like, oh my that's exactly what happened.
Emily:You know, if you checked your horoscope every day and kept track of all of your activities, you would not find a connection. But we only see when things connect. We don't see the times that they don't. And again, like I said, that's what I tell my students, like, is why you have to take statistics and research methods classes to be a psychology major because we don't do this on our own. We have to force ourselves to be systematic when we think about behaviors in the world.
Karla:Yeah. And that pattern recognition, the things that we like to do, I mean, really it's something we call context. And if we wake up in the morning and we see that the horoscope says we're going to have a bad day, primes us, which is this idea that it puts it in the forefront that, hey, maybe we really can lean into this type of thing. And we hear that in this word confirm. And I think on another show, we'll probably talk a little bit about the confirmation bias loop that we really enjoy when our thinking and our behavior is reinforced.
Karla:It makes us feel more competent and capable as human beings.
Emily:Exactly. If we think the full moon influences behavior, we pay attention to behavior only during the full moon. We see something weird. And yes, that is that confirmation bias. Our brain says, Yep, there it is.
Emily:The full moon influencing behavior. And we move on to the next thing. That's really key and that underlies a lot of these misconceptions confirmation bias. It keeps these beliefs active and influential.
Karla:All right, Emily, tell us what the key takeaway is here, please.
Emily:To be clear, the full moon, it does not make us act differently. So even though this belief commonly pops up across media, across general folklore, across our stories and the people that we encounter, research evidence shows that the full moon is not influencing people's behaviors and that researchers have found no actual difference in a really wide range of applied settings between when it's a full moon and when it's not a full moon. Nice. So next time you hear someone say, Everyone's acting crazy today, must be a full moon. Now you know that's really not what's going on.
Emily:You heard it here on Brains versus Beliefs.
Karla:You can learn more about this podcast on our website called communicatingpsychologicalscience.com. You'll find references and a link to the episode. Feel free to contact us on our website with any comments or ideas for future episodes, and follow Brains versus Beliefs wherever you find podcasts. Thanks for listening.