One of my beefs with conventional psychology, as an academic discipline, is the inordinate amount of time that is wasted on concepts that are likely to have a short half-life.
Psychology, as a discipline, has been estimated to have a "knowledge" half-life of about five year. That is, the body-of-knowledge that is believed to be true will have half of those "facts" rejected in five years.
On the other hand, some tenants that fall within psychology have proven incredibly durable and useful.
Why do I bring up "useful"? Because some bits of psychology are descriptive rather than predictive. They don't point to any variables that parents, managers or people bent on self-improvement can twiddle with to improve outcomes.
The reason I bring this up is that I will be having lunch with somebody who has some influence on the college curriculum of a fairly large on-line university. I have been pondering what items I would include in a "Long Half-life Psychology" class.
My list:
- Operant and Classical conditioning: BF Skinner and Pavlov's dog pre-1940s
- Cognitive Dissonance: Festinger 1956
- Prospect Theory: Kahneman and Tversky 1970d
- Heuristics (Anchoring-and-adjustment, Salience, misunderstanding of regression-to-the-mean) 1974
- Miscalibration of risk/statistics, i.e. the inappropriateness of extreme confidence 1977
- Simplified linear models: (Dawes) 1974
- Pallid vs. Vivid data and how people process it:
- Motivationing vs Demotivating factors: (Herzberg) 1969
Any thoughts about what would be useful?
The stuff you mention sounds useful, but not trendy.
ReplyDeleteA useful course could center around reading those papers and writing a brief essay on each, describing how this influences behavior, with at least one example from recent news headlines.
I can't see a psych PhD wanting to teach a course like that.
Also, it occurs to me that a lot of the same wisdom is found in Proverbs, though it's stated a bit differently.
ReplyDeleteBTW, got links to those papers?
ReplyDeleteScrubbing the kitchen floor on your hands and knees is useful therapy. God gave you eyebrows to catch the sweat; a troubled mind is eased by hard work with instant visible results.
ReplyDeletenice.
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ReplyDeleteERJ, I completely confess to not having much knowledge of psychology post "Things I had to take as breadth classes". That said, I would vote for older established theories simply because we have had enough time to verify they are true. One thing that troubles me - to be fair, as an amateur - is that psychology often seems to fall victim to the "new theory" syndrome on such a frequent basis. Part of it, to me, seems to be due to the fact that psychology is now a justification of culture and thought, not an a explanation for why that it happens.
ReplyDeleteGustav LeBon's The Crowd
ReplyDeleteMaslov's Hierarchy
Useful, is the key.
ReplyDeleteWe have always made up stories to explain what we experience. Some of those stories predict future experiences. Science is a discipline of vetting stories by how accurately they predict the future.
We use the stories because they let us do things we want to do, which we couldn't do before we made up the stories. Most (all?) will eventually fail, and be replace with more nuanced stories.
Truth is never achieved, only approached. The only objective measure of truth is that it does not contradict itself. We never get absolute certainty about truth. We *do* get certainty about lies.
The bottom line, though, which most tend to lose sight of these days, is that if it works, we use it, at least until something better comes along, even when we know it's "wrong".
The problem I have with "psychology", as I understand it, is that it's not a science, it's an art. It's tenets are rarely testable, and then only statistically. Still, if it works, we'll use it. The hard part with psychology, is the inherent difficulty objectively measuring whether it "works".
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