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.)