December 26th, 2006 Posted in Psychology

Authority and Credibility

As I approach the end of my Psychology degree, I am in a bit of a philosophical pickle. We are encouraged to reference everything we say in an essay or report. Understandably, we are still new to psych, so probably haven’t got enought knowledge to come up with our own ideas. Sprinkling references to published words through my work gets me lots of marks. There is however, a problem with this.

Many of the books and journals I have read are pure crap.

Psychology is trying to be a science, to cash in on it’s credibility and get funded. So speculation and making things up is frowned on. Untestable, theoretical stuff like Freud is now demeaned. This switch to experiemental, scientific psychology sounds like a good basis for objective, non-confrontational research and discussion. If only.

Many of the authors I have had the misfortune of encountering make things up. Many of the Great Theories that we are taught are made up to explain our behaviour. They then become “knowledge”, and we can reference it as if it is true. We can make whatever argument we like, no matter how ridiculous, if there are published people in the Right Gang to back us up. This bothers me in the extreme.

Let me expand on “crap”. They argue like children, calling each other names in prestigious journals (see Kahneman & Tversky vs Gigerenzer, 1996). They get all emotional and rhetorically abuse each other in books (Pinker, 1994). They blatantly make stuff up to fit their personal viewpoints (David M Buss, 2005, Robert Winston, 2002, and most other evolutionary psychologists). They write such dense, dry and boring articles that no-one can actually get through it, never mind critique it.

The point of all this? I want to make my own theories. I want to be able to write what I want, without having to hide behind other published work. I want my research to stand or fall on it’s own, without any emotional and personal digs from other authors. I want scientists to act like scientists.

This will become a much larger, much more detailed article at some point, as it is causing me big problems….

References

Buss, D. M. (2005). Handbook of evolutionary psychology. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons.

Gigerenzer, G. (1996). On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A reply to Kahneman and Tversky. Psychological Review, 103(3), 592-596.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1996). On the reality of cognitive illusions. Psychological Review, 103(3), 582-591.

Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct (1st ed.). London: Penguin.

Winston, R. M. L. (2002). Human instinct. London: Bantam Press.