Five Theses Regarding Erroneous Perceptions of Psychology

A sample from the ink blot test.

I’ve decided that I want to talk about erroneous perceptions of psychology (as I brought up in my previous post about hot spots in psychology). There are a lot of things that the public thinks about psychology that, while catchy and interesting, aren’t important to the practice of psychology today. One example might be Rorschach ink blot tests. This test was created by a psychologist to see if individuals with schizophrenia would view things differently than a person without schizophrenia. It has now entered the public sphere as something we use to tell us interesting things about people’s personalities, but they are totally invalid and unreliable tests. I feel like when we take things like this out of context, or attempt to boil a complicated issue like personality into a small number of discrete types, we turn psychology into something close to astrology.

I hope to talk about why it is important that we try harder as a society to understand the nuances of topics within psychology because the more we know about psychology the more useful it can be. I think about how much stigma was associated with mental health treatments in the 50s and 60s, how people who went to see a psychologist were “crazy” or you can even watch episodes of Cheers (a show from the 1980s) and listen to them talk about sending Diane to the “loony-bin”. Today I think we are much better about helping people with mental health issues, but I think that as the public continues to really understand things about psychology rather than just picking out interesting tidbits we can see psychology more like a science and less like a mystical art, and people will be better able to use it to get better.

[Evaluation:]
Despite a growing knowledge of psychology among general audiences, many topics are misunderstood or oversimplified, leading to an inadequate understanding of complex ideas, because topics in modern psychology are more nuanced than many expect.

[Causal:]
While people increasingly seek to use psychological principles to make decisions, there many psychological tests or ideas that are misapplied because their use within psychology is not fully understood by those seeking to use them.

[Policy:]
While public perception of psychology has changed greatly in past decades, and understanding of psychology has greatly improved, popular misconceptions should be corrected so that we can better apply the science of psychology into our lives.

[Definition:]
Psychology is the most important science that impacts our daily lives, and as such it is important that we understand it properly.

[Comparison:]
While there are important differences, psychology can be similar to religion in that it affects many aspects of our lives and people can often try to oversimplify it or take things that they like out of context and diminish its usefulness.

I can think of a lot of ways to make causal, evaluation, or policy claims about my topic, but comparisons and definition claims seem more difficult. I don’t know for sure which type of claim best frames the issues I want to talk about, and I would love any feedback you guys could give me about that. That being said, I think my strongest claims are my policy and evaluation claims.

Image credit:"wp-content-uploads-2007-12-rorschach5.jpg" by metalkpirate1day is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0