2023-08-01 09:00:13
Nick Brown. OLIVIER BALEZ
“Before the age of 50, I had never read a scientific article. » Nick Brown, who now has twelve more, has caught up well: over the course of his reading, he has deflated a number of scientific balloons, pinning down renowned researchers, to the point of having made a reputation for himself in the small world of “fraud hunters”. “We are talking more about errors, it is more appropriate from a legal point of view”quips this mischievous Englishman, who alternates understatement british and great bursts of complicit laughter in the face of anything that may closely or remotely resemble « bullshit » scientist, against whom his flair has been honed over the years.
Nick Brown is all the more free in his criticisms as he is an outsider, left early in early retirement, and that he has no “nothing to fear for [s]“academic career”, crowned later by a critical thesis on positive psychology, defended in 2019 at the University of Groningen (Netherlands).
Trained as a computer scientist, he worked in this field at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, before moving to human resources in 2009, responsible for training. “The people who gave them seemed strange to me, endowed with a certain charisma, using interchangeable formulas, as in horoscopes. A pastiche of psychology. » His curiosity was further piqued when he met British psychologist and magician Richard Wiseman, who told him about the growing success of positive psychology.
To find out more, Nick Brown decides to enroll in a master’s degree in psychology at the University of East London, and remains amazed during a presentation in 2012 on the work of Barbara Fredrickson (University of North Carolina) and the consultant Marcial Losada, published in theAmerican Psychologist. They establish that a ratio greater than 2.9013 positive emotions for a negative thought is the guarantee of good mental health and fulfillment in life. “Weird”immediately thinks the polyglot, who is quick to find flaws in the equations of fluid mechanics used to establish this conclusion.
He then spoke with Alan Sokal, author in 1996 of a resounding hoax published in the journal Social Textwho had seen nothing but fire, accepting gibberish mixing “hermeneutics of quantum gravity” and reverence for postmodern authors. Their criticism of the heralds of positive psychology, published in 2013is devastating. “It had an impact because there was Sokal, but also a guy who didn’t even have a master’s degree in psychology.says the person concerned. The emperor was naked. »
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