Psych Gripes: Introduction and Overview

As a social science, psychology has been failing the general public for years. I don’t have enough hubris to try to precisely quantify any figures relating to that claim, but I’ve plenty to invest in exploring it.

I took my first psychology course in high school and thoroughly enjoyed it. It touched on many questions I’d had in childhood and left me longing to learn more. When a zoology lab in my sophomore year at university made me realize that major wasn’t a good fit, it took virtually no thought to change to psychology. And I didn’t look back. At some point, my career goal shifted from earning an MD to earning a PhD in experimental psychology. I knew there was an element of naïveté in thinking I could make a significant contribution to the field, but I thought I could at least advance our basic understanding in some way.

And perhaps I have. At the time, my doctoral dissertation was one of the first fairly rigorous, thorough attempts to understand how people attend to, perceive, and remember various simplistic musical accent patterns. But graduate school both challenged and frustrated me… much more the latter. By the time I finished my dissertation’s experiments and had only to write it up, I was so burnt out (due to both personal and professional factors) that I no energy left to try to get any published journal articles out of it. So it isn’t well known—and my inability to land a tenure-track position meant I had no easy way of doing any subsequent work.

Arguably my most substantive contribution to the field has been my teaching activities, which began in graduate school and ended a few years ago. Those years of teaching various psychology courses—mostly Introductory Psychology and Developmental Psychology—are primarily what led me to conclude that some enduring premises in the field of psychology and the way the material is usually taught at the college/university level have led to serious problems.

In this series, I aim to identify and explain them. I don’t have an extant list, so I don’t know how long the series will run. Some gripes will be very broad; some will be quite specific. There will be a lot of interrelationships. All are based on my ideas of what psychology should be doing, where it went awry, and the best way to help people understand its relevance in their lives and in improving humankind.

I am likely wrong about some things. Some of my big gripes may apply more to the scientific method as it’s been used in general than to psychology specifically; if so, I hope I’m corrected. This is more an exploration of ideas than me dispensing truths and expecting everyone to defer to my (dubious) expertise. I am actively seeking respectful conversation and criticism.

Future posts—lists of gripes—will very likely be limited to just three gripes maximum per post. I’ve invested a lot of thought into each over my years as an experimental/cognitive psychologist, and I don’t want to dilute their impact and/or overburden any readers who stumble across this place. I also don’t intend to call out specific individuals, other than important historical figures.

If I modify or add to these ground rules, I’ll update this post. I’ll also try to remember to update it with links and a descriptive summary of the contents of posts in this series, although the “psych gripes” tag should encompass them all.

PG 1: Two Biggies — insufficient differentiation; and my first go at rationalism and mind–body dualism

PG 2: Three Teaching Problems — inadequate course time; scattershot textbooks; and lack of theoretical/research grounding