Psychology Is Dead. Or Is It ?

The recent article in The Onion about (http://www.theonion.com/articles/psychology-comes-to-halt-as-weary-researchers-say,36586/)  loudly sounding the death knell of Psychology, is a piece of sparkling wit that seeks to unearth a few uncomfortable truths about this discipline, which, for most people, holds a charm that is at once fascinating and slightly forbidding. And why wouldn’t it – for it’s about people and seeks, for its part, to unearth quite a few uncomfortable truths about people.

I loved the article for its tongue in cheek and mildly caustic depiction of ‘weary researchers’… The Amercian Psychological Association’s unruffled rejoinder was characteristic of the long suffering equanimity of the seasoned psychologist.

I don’t blame the Onion, although its underlying grouse reveals a narrow understanding of the field. But before coming to that, here’s my personal take on 3 ways in which psychologists make themselves effortlessly irritating:

1. I am a psychologist, because I like working with people and am drenched in empathy from head to toe.

Wrong. Reason. Yes, the unfortunate truth about psychology, according to me, is that the field often attracts all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. You do not need to apply emotion to study the root causes of emotions. Like any other science, you need keen, relentless logic, coupled with sharp intuition to be able to look at a human being as an object – a very real, live and often irrational object powered by self-awareness. An accumulation of a lot of wrong people for a lot of wrong reasons invariably leads to a perpetuation of glib platitudes on ‘positive thinking’ and tired, time worn clichés about the inherent goodness of human beings and what not. I firmly believe, that social skills (getting along with people) are as important to a behavioural scientist, as mewing skills are to a veterinary physician.

           

 2. The truth about seeking safety in numbers

Then there are those in the field that believe statistics to be the panacea to all of its ills. The obsession with quantification sometimes reaches such gigantic proportions as to render the final objective largely irrelevant. So you’re often tingling with excitement over your multivariate analysis of variance; so what, if it was only to demonstrate that passing a coffee shop makes people happy ? This numeromania is also sometimes responsible for mistaking correlation for causation (Increase in the level of A leads to increase in the level of B, hence A causes B) – which is probably the reason, why you get to read a new article everyday about how coffee causes everything ranging from intense anxiety to uncontrollable happiness. My additional appeal to all psychological theorists is to desist from diagramming highly self-evident theories – really, that maze of arrows with everything pointing to everything else succeeds in confusing, rather than clarifying.

3. Self-help does not help

Nothing undermines the credibility of psychology like an exposition of ’10 ways to be interesting’ or ill founded and exaggerated accounts of ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ individuals. It is distressing to see the ‘Psychology’ section in most bookstores bedecked with self-help books. It must sadden several honest, intelligent researchers in this field, who spend years studying phenomena like development of self-concept or morality among children, language acquisition, cognitive biases in individuals, decision making in groups and so on – true researchers, who are primarily interested in asking the right questions, rather than suggesting miraculous, alliterative quick fixes.

‘Asking the right questions’ – that brings me back to the Onion and its recommended remedy to the field of psychology. The Onion suggests that psychologists refocus their effort and resources to the study of the physical sciences – physics, chemistry and so on as an antidote to the ambiguity involved in the human mind studying itself. There is a small problem with that – when we are studying ‘hard, observable’ phenomena in the natural sciences, aren’t we ultimately studying the sensory representations of these in our brains… and that is why steering clear of the ‘inescapable enigma of consciousness’, as The Onion characterizes it is easier said than done. However the more important and relevant point to consider is - While latest psychological research is becoming increasingly inter-disciplinary and seamlessly connected with the study of biochemistry, neuroscience etc., we do need individuals with the logic and intuition to ‘ask the right (and well thought out) questions.’ We need individuals who ask, ‘Why do people tend to conform to group norms ?’ or ‘Why does being observed by someone make your performance improve in some situations, but decline in others.’ Biology and physics and neuroscience will be key tools to answering these questions, but you need ‘psychological’ insight to make the relevant hypotheses in the first place. At the risk of oversimplifying the problem, I would say, that in many cases, you need psychological thinking to ask the ‘why’ questions and the physical sciences are crucial tools in demonstrating the ‘how’ part of the solution.

(Disclaimer: I was a psychology student a very long time ago, so a lot of my understanding may now be vague or erroneous, however, I can cheerfully claim that I have never stopped asking questions.)

Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years ?

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“Where do you see yourself in five years” has to be the most notoriously inane question most of us have ever been asked.
This is that classic portion of an interview, where you are expected to gaze in a dreamy, wistful way, while efficiently offering up a platter of wholesome, ready-to-eat (and SMART – duh) goal statements.
After I started working, I was placed in the unenviable position of having to both answer and ask the golden question (there – I never saw myself here 5 years ago and yet – ta da – here I am!)
And at this point I noticed a jarring disconnect in all the verbiage surrounding the “Where do you see yourself” question:
How many of us have flipped the question and asked:
“Where do you see me in 5 years ?”
This flipped question invariably attracts the time worn truisms (that are, nevertheless true), such as:
“The onus is on you – you are the architect of your development”
“We are in a dynamic environment; be prepared to adapt to changing expectations”
These declarations are not at all false, but they point towards an inherent imbalance - So, organizations, with all the strategic thinking and predictive analytics at their command find the question above to be impossible to answer and more important, irrelevant. However, one tiny little person during a campus placement interview is expected to play soothsayer, confidently anticipating what the world will look like five years from now, the various alternatives available to him/her in that “World of Five Years From Now”, determining which of those alternatives seems at least mildly interesting and doing a force field analysis of how to jump from here to there – to that fascinating “World of Five Years From Now”
All of this smacks of an inordinate emphasis on the individual’s ability to predict and influence outcomes regardless of changing contexts and worse still, often puts blinkers on our tendency to explore fresh, widely diverging, even seemingly crazy ideas of what the future could be.
I have never understood why it was so incredibly important to “see” myself in a particular place in five (or whatever number of) years – I have never done it and have ended up in newer, exciting and challenging places (where I never expected to be) all the same. To this day, I resolutely have more than four ‘possible’ ambitions (researcher, writer, linguist, manager and more)...
What, then is the more relevant question ? I never ask, “Where do you see yourself in five years ?” in an interview
All I ask, instead, is:
“What is your passion / What are you crazy about” – after all, that is more interesting part, isn’t it ? Knowing someone’s passion is like knowing the ingredients that will eventually make up that heady mix of what they will be five years from now. The same set of ingredients can be mixed, flavored and treated in various possible ways and will potentially be sharpened or blunted by different environmental conditions to derive various possible outcomes – but it’s the ingredients that matter. The rest works itself out. Or doesn’t. Who cares ? For all you can know for sure is the ingredients.

Where have all the words gone ?

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In a regular workday, we often need to make a point. And what better hope of deliverance from the struggle to make a point than Power Point ?
Now, I have always been partial to words – I simply like them infinitely more than shapes or colours or numbers. They make me feel so understood. Staring in satisfaction at a phrase that perfectly sums up your thoughts is like looking at a best friend winking back at you over a joke that only the two of you understand. Unfortunately for me, words are anathema to the world of work. Reading, assimilating, interpreting – who has time for that. Who is stupid enough to traverse a white paper, when they could content themselves with looking at a pretty picture on a slide ?
In the three and a half years that I have been working, I have seen countless employees around me squinting at their screens trying to embellish their Power Point presentations with colours, shadows, pictures – a dash of this and a smidgen of that, all of these, of course, purely superfluous to, but apparently ‘accentuating’ the point they are trying to make. But let me ask you this – do you REALLY need that picture of a pile of coins to know that I am talking about ‘compensation’ and do you seriously need to see the photograph of a multi-ethnic classroom to know that I am talking about ‘learning’ ?
Why, then, are we perpetuating this hackneyed tradition ? Don’t get me wrong – sometimes a picture articulates an idea just as well as a word; it’s about choosing the medium one is comfortable with. What I wish to decry are two factors that I think underlie the working world’s eschewing of words:
Firstly, often a picture or an ‘effect’ of any kind does not serve to accentuate a point, but rather substitutes the point itself.
The second aspect is symptomatic of larger malaise – a general laziness, when it comes to reading, and rapidly diminishing attention spans.  I have also often heard – XYZ (usually a senior leader) will not go through all of this (where ‘this’, for instance, is an explanation of the pros and cons of two approaches) My question is – Why not ? And, mind you, labelling anything that features more than two words as ‘gyaan’ is not a good enough excuse.
I choose not to lean on the phrase ‘studies show…’, but am inclined to think that the gradual decline of the reading habit has moderate to serious implications for our cognitive and emotional development – on how well we conceptualize, imagine, articulate, empathize and so on. In our world, however, progress up the echelons of management sometimes increasing immunity from reading.  It might be pertinent to ask ourselves – How many man hours are expended every week to ensure that one person does not have to go through tLink to FB Notehe trouble of reading ?