A Semi-Defense of Psychology

My response to Debbie’s interesting comments about school and psychology took on such length that it was easier to make a new post out of it.

Either the field of psychology (or the undergraduate curriculum of the field, since there's always a lag) moved drastically in 10 years, Debbie’s professors had a weird idea about what to teach, or ... I don't know, something. Her experience of psychology courses is very different from mine.

Of course, other than intro (which is a class that perhaps doesn't necessarily have to suck, but I suspect usually does, due to being disorganized and dissatisfyingly general) and my industrial-organizational psychology course (another lower-level course), my classes did not tend to use multiple choice exams. It's easy to have a superficial understanding (as Debbie points out, from being a human among humans) that certain phenomena exist, but it's harder to cogently explain what's actually going on with them, contrast the various theories / hypotheses about them and the evidence for them, critique the methodological approaches used to support specific research findings, or whatever.

That’s one reason I dislike multiple-choice exams – they do not reward more full or nuanced understanding of the material but frequently come down to (as Debbie and her friend experienced) an ability to see through a trick, identification of a more plausible answer, or employment of other content-irrelevant multiple-choice-test-taking skills. In some cases, I suspect that these multiple-choice exams for low-level courses (perhaps in many disciplines) are used as much as a measure of whether the student read the book as anything else; even when it’s something “everybody knows” about, you probably did have to read the book to consistently recognize what specific theories / phenomena are called in the literature. For instance, you may “know” that people who have one positive trait (e.g. are good-looking) are often assumed to have other, unrelated positive traits, but if you didn’t read the book, you may not be able to identify this as being called the “halo effect.”

A particular multiple-choice question type that I hate, which is perhaps more common on exams developed from the textbook publisher test bank, is the one that tests your memory for some very specific example in the book. Something like "The story about Eldritch the Dog that opened Chapter 7 illustrated which of the following phenomena..." you might have at least a chance at, since that's a part you probably did read and are more likely to retain due to its nature as a narrative. But something like "The experiment by Rudy and Jones [completely obscure researchers who may or may not be personal friends with the textbook author or on the author's tenure committee] described in the 'Contemporary Research' box found which of the following to be true..." is tough.

I agree that the GRE subject test does appear to be oriented toward "name the theory / name the researcher" type questions, but at this point, very few programs require or even care about this exam from people with a degree in pyschology. My understanding is that it's mostly recommended for people wanting to enter a psych grad program without the undergrad degree to demonstrate some base level of knowledge of the terminology / major theories / important researchers that is needed to make sense of the literature.

For instance, I have read that one of the reasons that economists and psychologists have difficulty making sense of each other is that economists define their theories using math and psychologists define their theories with reference to other theories, using terminology that has specific meaning within the field. This justifies to a certain extent a preoccupation in psychology with this kind of “factual” knowledge about the history of the discipline, its jargon, and its well-known researchers. I mean, we have to keep those economists at bay somehow.

Maybe some people find the theories in experimental psychology more “obvious” than I do. However, I think that people in general often rely on an understanding of psychological processes that is very shallow, woefully insufficient, or downright wrong. I wouldn’t even know where to begin listing all the things people misunderstand – how memory works, what prejudice is and how it functions, how attitudes are formed and beliefs validated, the way they themselves make decisions, the extent to which perception does not capture “reality,” how to motivate others, etc. I only know a little bit about these things myself. Even top researchers in the various specialty areas do not understand these things very well.

I know that since this is my field, I am apt to be protective of it. I need to believe it to be intellectually rigorous. I need it to have something to add to human understanding beyond what your grandmother “knows” after a lifetime of observing people's behavior and watching Oprah and its ilk. No one wants to believe their own field of endeavor is nothing more than writing up obvious truths in fancy language and diagrams. But I do think that a lot of the subtlety of academic psychology is easily lost on people. Experimental psychologists can't just see some phenomenon in the world, then turn to each other and say either "Birds of a feather flock together" or "Opposites attract"; such post hoc pseudo-explanations don't get you anywhere scientifically, though most people seem happy to settle upon any neat explanation whatsoever and smugly move on.

But it’s one of the crosses social scientists have to bear: everybody thinks they already know, from their own experience in the world, 80% of the important things the discipline has to say, and they think the other 20% is wrong (or at least, may be accurate when talking about other people, but not themselves).