Psychology is the problem, not the answer
Written by Nina L. Powell
I am an academic in the field of psychology but one that has become increasingly concerned at the direction psychology is taking. When I speak my thoughts on the mess psychology has created, many people suggest I should do something else or that I clearly want out. Maybe I could do something else, and the thought of getting out has crossed my mind, but I am deeply vested in the pursuit of psychological questions. And more importantly, advancement of any kind requires criticism and discord not just from those perceiving things from the outside, but especially from those directly involved with things from the inside.
Jonathon Haidt has similarly criticised psychology from the inside and I recently started reading his The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. I’m very familiar with Jonathan Haidt, as he is a top researcher and theorist in my niche area of psychology — the psychology of moral judgments. Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff, both psychologists, argue in this book that three untruths about the world are damaging young people, in particular those attending university. The three untruths boil down to essentially a belief that human beings are fragile, that human beings should trust their emotions and that human beings can be straightforwardly dichotomised into categories of good and bad. The bigger point that is being made is that because of our endorsement of these untruths, we are harming the younger generations in catering to their demands for protection from emotional harm. For instance, administrators agreeing to stop people with certain views from speaking on American college campuses because students demand protection from being exposed to upsetting ideas is actually counterproductive. It is precisely from our exposure to difficult ideas and experiences of discomfort when hearing from opposing others that builds strength of mind, argument and character. While the authors’ perspectives are not unique (similar arguments have been made by academics and journalists such as Brendan O’Neill and Laura Kipnis), what is perhaps uniquely frustrating about the authors of this book, and others like them (e.g., Jordan Peterson) is a profoundly misguided belief that psychology is part of the answer rather than the source of the problem.
How psychology got us here in the first place
The mid-to-late twentieth century rise in popularity of psychology brought with it two fundamental beliefs about human nature. First, the belief that human beings are irrational, weak-willed, and lack fundamental control over their thoughts, feelings and behaviours. And second, that psychological maladjustment and a disordered mind can offer an explanation for the turmoil we experience as a part of our human condition.
The first belief was brought about through the rise in popularity of social psychology. Social experimentation post-WWII grew out of an effort to explain the atrocities that devastated Europe and the Asia Pacific. Studies such as those conducted by Milgram and Zimbardo proved that ordinary well-intentioned people could behave inhumanely when put under the right conditions — so easily were people swayed by the power of an authority figure or by their own perception of power that they would harm, even kill, an innocent person they had met just a few moments or days earlier. Ultimately, this undermined earlier rationalist perspectives that human beings made decisions on the basis of their ability to think and reason and control their behaviour. Now people were seen as being easily manipulated and influenced, too stupid or unaware to know any better, and therefore lacking control over their personhood.
This belief has persisted through to the 21st Century and at least in part contributed to a fatalistic view of humanity that unsurprisingly calls into question the achievements of man. With this fall from grace, humanity starts to look a bit pathetic, a bit ugly, and certainly a bit lame. And this might be a reasonable conclusion to draw based on psychological research if it weren’t for the fact that most of the basis for this view comes from bad research. Milgram and Zimbardo have been heavily criticised for promoting false and widely exaggerated claims from their respective studies, and the whole of social psychology has recently fallen into disrepute due to failures to replicate the results of foundational research.
So what does the psychological support of a misanthropic view of humanity have to do with the current culture crisis on American college campuses? When you combine this first belief with psychology’s normalisation and push of the pervasiveness of mental illness (e.g., anxiety, depression, learning disorders), you get a disdain for humanity coupled with a belief that we’re all a bit unwell. And in efforts to address mental illness, psychology has propagated the belief that all feelings are valid. It’s no wonder that young people feel fragile in the presence of differing views and perspectives if ultimately, they believe that they are suffering from mental illness and are irrationally susceptible to the “power of the situation” as social psychology often phrases it. There is no room for resilience or strength of mind over emotion when you’ve been told that your inner mental life is possibly damaged and certainly easily influenced. Likewise, it becomes easy to dismiss the views of others we don’t agree with as “stupid” or even “psychotic” rather than engage with those views because people are, thanks to psychology, pretty stupid and possibly psychotic. So you now have both a dismissing of others and a lack of belief in ourselves to be strong, resilient and rational in the face of difficulty or challenge, and it no longer seems surprising that college kids are demanding for campus speakers to be banned, and more administrative procedures to be put in place for their protection from words and ideas.
The solution
Part of why we are here is precisely because psychologists like Haidt have argued that human beings are naturally emotion-driven rather than rational, and that being rational takes immense effort or may not even be possible. In fact, as the authors point out, the very idea that exposure to words that we may not agree with causes damage comes from psychologist, Lisa Feldman who suggests that, “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence.” While I support the observations of Haidt and Lukianoff that this perspective is an injustice to young people and the principles of higher education, I think psychologising the problem is not going to get us out of this mess. Haidt and Lukianoff offer a psychological solution to this by further emphasising the possibility for rationality, in particular one that is trained through psychological intervention such as cognitive behavioural therapy. Instead, I offer the possibility that a close look at the history of psychology shows us that this field got us here in the first place, and what we need now is to abandon a psychological explanation for our current culture of fragility.
The psychological explanation undermines free will and rationality, and instead pathologizes what it is to be human. The very psychologists who wrote this book and rightly identify the problems we are facing in education are the very people who have promoted the view that psychology has proven human beings are emotion-driven, biased and fragile creatures who need protection and a therapeutic focus on well-being to survive. What we need is an anti-psychology movement that spends a bit less time on the irrational person. Instead, we need to spend more time on something bigger than the individual that revitalises our belief in collective strength and capability.
