Part of a series exploring how economic thought leads to cognition and cognitive behaviour
Sometimes somethings just don’t make sense to you.
Typically we have two reactions; we either dismiss the case at hand as being wrong or annoying or difficult, or we take a pace back, take a breath and try and understand something in the world which we hadn’t before.
In the latter we attempt to align our self to the environment. In the former we think that it should orientate itself with us.
I had one of these moments with psychology.
Not an aspect of it or an interpretation. Not a finding or an experiment. The whole field. All of it.
When you lack experience your expectations are prone to be dashed. I’m happy to admit that my experience of psychology was slight. I assumed that just as though you would use an electrician who understood the topic to have the answers needed to wire your house, a psychologist would have the answers to how the brain produced mind and orchestrated our behaviours.
I was wrong.
Whereas other sciences have theories about the tenets in their field which they can backup, psychology doesn’t – or at least doesn’t seem so to me.
In physics we have concepts such as length, mass and time. We can observe the interplay between them and deduce the relationships formed.
We could come to an explanation through our reasoning.
What happened to me with psychology was I was never able to access an explanation given to me by a psychologist. Instead of an explanation reducing a problem to its constituents, it always seemed to expand it. Like a will-o’-the-wisp the answer was always just out of reach, and needed another theory or explanation that stood on nothing more that the need for another theory or explanation, that could only be resolved by speaking in ethereal tones or those that indicated exasperation that I didn’t get the concept.
I may be naïve in my understanding of the field, but to me psychology should be about our behaviour and how it is produced by our mind. Psychologists never seemed to be studying behaviour, but more so abstract and exotic concepts. Rather than answering why we feel joy or anger, why we can become depressed or why we persist I could only find experts studying our reactions to niche concepts that had little to do with the environment we evolved in or face today.
I need to be careful here to say that I am not dismissing psychology as junk or completely without merit.
It’s just that the questions being asked by researchers have become so.