Two times in the past year, I’ve had to defend the field of psychology to a graduate student of some other persuasion. The first, a philosophy grad student, commented to me politely that psychology was not science because it was never based in hard fact. I quickly replied that actually, we use many physiological measures nowadays that bridge the gap between incredibly subjective judgments and implicit experience or otherwise undetectable behavioral patterns. Actually, we were at a show at Starr Hill, and we were yelling really loud in order to combat the noise from the band, so I probably said something more along the lines of “naw, dude, we do MRI and shit!” And he said something along the lines of “oh, nice.”
The second time this happened, I had been babbling to a good friend, who happened to be a Ph.D candidate in English literature, about the validity of a certain study that I was working on. After I concluded that we should probably do it a certain way for the sake of the scientific method, he replied, “well, it doesn’t matter anyway, because psychology is not real science,” as he smiled back at me, knowing this comment would get me riled up. I turned to him, my eyes got big, and I got so mad that all I could say was “you read books. You. Read. Books. YOU READ BOOKS!! YOU GET TO BE CALLED A DOCTOR AND YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW CPR!”
I enjoyed this week’s readings because I agreed with pretty much everything that was said in them. Garb (1999) very eloquently begged the psychological community to stop using those darn pictures for anything consequential: “Trying to decide whether the Rorschach is valid is like looking at a Rorschach inkblot.” Sechrest & Coan (2002) admirably argue against allowing the field to give people like themselves the power to prescribe medicine. Coan (1997) told an entertaining, yet disturbing, story about what happens when you have no one rooting for you in the field. Lilienfeld (2007), for the sake of identifying potentially harmful treatments, proposed a “centralized databank that is publicly accessible…[to] increase the likelihood that all relevant results from these studies are reported.” (Open-source data sharing! Woo hoo!) And finally, Dawes, Faust & Meehl (1989) informed us that actuarial judgment always (not sometimes, but always) beats clinical judgment. My favorite quote from this article is a disclaimer that should probably come at the beginning of every research article written: “Lacking complete knowledge of the elements that constitute this universe, representativeness cannot be determined precisely” (p. 1670).
But, hmm. What’s the lesson here? Initially, it might seem that theory and researcher bias has, for various reasons, tainted this science in a way that can only be emphasized by the fact that it is almost 2008 and legitimate psychologists are stilling using pictures of inkblots for diagnosis. Blots of ink, on paper, and a client’s reaction to them, are determining the diagnosis for some poor soul sitting at a desk in a cinder block room. I guess my comment to that guy at Starr Hill was naïve: we’re not all using physiological, actuarial, or even the sparse collection of ESTs available when the need arises. Some people are stuck in a time warp, I guess.
Though Coan (1997) shows that this is not correct: theory can and has worked in the past. A mangy kid, playing a few tricks on his family, can take a hunch and produce actual results – even fun, controversial ones. And this makes total sense! Psychology is interesting because it allows us to study passing, fleeting moments of human behavioral paradox, things that catch our eye and make us think “I want to know a little more about that.” Even though people complain about it, and bash it as not a “real science,” they still desperately want to know what it is that we found out from our studies. Even those who distain going to psychologists still seem to not mind being psychoanalyzed every now and again – because it’s fun to know about yourself and know more about humanity as a whole. The English and philosophy fields talk about it, but we actually do it, and we strive to explain why we do it, and why we might do it again and again! I’m not sure what more you could ask for in a science!
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Like staring at a Rorschach Inkblot
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4 comments:
I'd take it even farther, Cat. Unlike the English major, and in a way that is a bit more publicly verifiable than the philosopher, the best of us stick our necks out there every day--designing studies that, if you think about it, are intended to try and prove ourselves wrong. That is science, psychology or not.
That said, it may be that some of us are not trying hard enough. I sometimes think that clinical psychology is about where medicine was near the end of the 19th century. There was some science, but few if any controls that protected the public from charlatans. This went on for a while longer until, well, pretty much until the government shut the medical schools down, pending their getting their acts together and basing their work on science. Perhaps the same fate will wind up confronting psychology. I rather doubt it.
Cat, I have the "psychology IS science" fight with my engineering buddies about once a week. i really agree with the 2nd pgraph of jim's comment.
Cat, nice to read your interesting thought process. I really like how you cite sources in your blog. If you hadn't I believe I would have been forced by conscience to report your plagiarism to the scientific community.
Thanks for the input, Moondog - though I doubt the scientific community would give two shits about someone like me ranting in the blogosphere. I have absolutely no credentials - I'm not even enrolled in a program to get credentials. I'm just a shmuck! But thanks for the input.
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