Psychology has the distinction of being both the oldest and the newest science known to man. Oldest, in that humans for millennia have gossiped, theorised, analysed, and diagnosed all manner of psychological ailments; newest, in that only in the last hundred years has the field really professionalised into something that calls itself a Science.
There is a distinction to be drawn between a science, which is based on careful hypothesisation, observation, and analysis; and a Science, which is based on grant applications, painstakingly incremental advancements, and a great scrabbling amongst the Scientists to beat each other to academic tenure. Science has become, unfortunately, an institution without which a field is deemed irrelevant. To be “anti-scientific” is the new scarlet letter.
Psychologists, naturally, enjoy feeling respected and having a stable job like the rest of us, and hate being sneered at by physics professors. And so they strive desperately to legitimise the field under the umbrella of Science, applying all manner of process and statistics to end up with graspingly small effect sizes and tenuous conclusions. Incremental knowledge is important: the next breakthrough comes on the back of the inexorable growth of a fact-base that triggers the right association at the right time. But there are two problems when the psychologists try it. One — unlike physics or chemistry, the ceiling for the field’s potential is so far off, and so much about the human mind still alien, that to achieve meaningful progress in this way would take hundreds of years; and two — the facts they’re generating seem to be wrong. The replication crisis touches upon all fields, but it does seem particularly enamoured by psychology. When 64% of studies don’t replicate, we can assume one of two things. Either psychologists are inherently worse at their jobs than any other scientist, which given the complexity of the human mind seems unlikely, or there is something unique about the field on which the Scientific process becomes unstuck.
Psychology is fundamentally squishy, because humans are fundamentally squishy. Psychologists want to “elevate” their area of research to a hard Science because collectively we’ve decided that Science is more valid or useful than non-Science. But by doing so the field is diluted into a shadow of its potential. A field which looks for insights into one of the most complicated structures ever to exist, the human brain, needs visionaries with exceptional insight, and the scientific method doesn’t exactly welcome those visionaries. In fact the cult of Science rewards sustained mediocrity.
The most useful insights of psychology so far have come from a handful of great visionaries. Freud, the Buddha, Jung, Adler: great individuals who almost-singlehandedly invented new disciplines of therapy and insight.
The obvious objection is that many of their theories aren’t correct. This is true — there are indeed many questionable concepts to be found in the work. But in a field which has such a direct impact on the way we live day-to-day it ultimately doesn’t matter — a theory can be, has been, and will be useful even if it’s completely wrong. Psychoanalysis is now considered pseudo-scientific quackery, but it remains to this day extremely helpful to many people. So quackery by what measure?
The visionaries derived their theories from hopelessly compromised and subjective observation, from “N-of–1” experiments. The world is still unpacking what Freud discerned from talk alone during his thousands of psychoanalytic sessions. Their theories are characterised by a force and originality which almost necessitates a singular visionary behind it, and its hard to see how they could be derived from the careful, solid, and incremental studies so revered by Science.
The other fields of Science, which so look down their noses at psychology, forget that in their own early years the orthodox establishments valiantly insisted that the Earth was flat and sat at the centre of the universe. It took exceptional individuals to break the stupor and shunt the fields into action. They ran so that modern physicists could crawl — and it’s time to let psychology run too.
The problem with psychology isn’t that it’s not a Science — it’s that it’s trying to be one.
