Encefalus

Hello there guys (and girls)!

It’s been a month and two days since I wrote my last post. I am really short on time, but as you can see I always write when I have the time and an interesting subject on my hands

My hands

What I want to talk about today is the future of training in psychology. I am not talking about clinical or school psychology or any other applied fields here. I am talking about psychology’s standing in science as it is now and as it will be in the future, according to the current scientific trends.

Psychology is not a pure science. While it is true that it has a field of study, that of the behavior and the mind, it consists, nevertheless, of an amalgam of schools and methods, those, sometimes, are very different.

All sciences experience paradigm shifts. Physics, for example, has experienced the leap from Newtonian physics to relativity and then quantum mechanics. However, physics always had a certain tool in its trade, mathematics, and a certain subject, the physical world and the forces that act upon it.

Psychology on the other hand, suffers from the fact that it doesn’t have a predominant tool of analysis and scientific inquiry. Psychology’s methods have ranged from Wundt’s analytic charting of the elements of human consciousness, to Freud’s psychoanalysis, to discourse analysis, to cognitive psychology and computational models of the mind, to statistics, to pretty much anything .

What I am trying to show, is that while other sciences had a specified “toolbox” and a field, psychology has a very wide field, with an even wider toolbox.

Pretty much anything…

Some people might argue that this is good, since the human mind and human societies cannot be analyzed by any single method alone. However, how could someone compare for example, discourse analysis, with a statistical research on the same subject, with psychoanalysis? He probably couldn’t. Many articles and books on such matters will simply mention all the different theories and that’s it.

I believe it’s pretty obvious there is a problem there. In a more concrete and advanced science, we would use evidence, experiments and a certain set of mathematical theorems and proofs to make conjectures about the future course of research and how we can reach a final solution to a certain enquiry.

But this is not the case in psychology where anyone can say anything he likes without any final conclusion. I truly and wholeheartedly believe that science exists in order to find answers, and it uses the power of reason to do that. Instead, psychology seems to find questions, then formulate a bunch of theories about that, and then forget about it.

For about a year I have been thinking about these things and I read quite a lot of books and papers on the subject. I believe that psychology in the 21^st century can already start to walk towards becoming a more complete and concrete science. My view is that in order to advance psychology as a science, we must achieve these goals:

• 1)      Find a certain set of tools that we must use
• 2)      Find a certain method of work that we should follow, towards scientific experimenting
• 3)      The method and tools that we use should be able to adapt in the demands of newer research

Let me explain for a while what I mean.

I am once again inspired by the sciences of the natural world. Let’s talk once again about physics that is the most complete science yet. Physics has

• 1)      A powerful tool in its disposal: mathematics
• 2)      A certain method: the experimental method
• 3)      Both the method and the tool have evolved over the centuries, without changing the core of physics

One the other hand, no-one can say that cognitive psychology and computational models of the mind have many things in common with humanistic or social approaches in psychology.

Science is my ally and a powerful ally it is…

What I describe here is an oversimplification, but I hope I make my point clear. Psychology’s methods and tools are weak, and we need new tools. However, the reason that they are weak is because, according to my opinion, psychology is a thoroughly complex matter that cannot be analyzed by ancient and traditional tools, such as pen-and-paper algebra.

Computers have come to change all that. While computers changed the way psychologists think about the human mind and brain, I believe the greatest change has yet to come, and it will be the tools that psychologists use in order to understand the mind and the brain.

Agent-based modeling, chaos theory, complexity theory, neural networks, all these are modern tools that provide a way to analyze and think about psychology in ways never before possible. While all these tools might seem different, in fact I think that they are simply another way to think at computation, what might become in the future, the main tool of psychology.

So, what all this has to do with the training of psychologists? It’s simple. Psychologists are now trained in a bunch of theories. So, when they graduate, they have a lot of questions, but no answers and no methods to find these answers. On the other hand, graduates of schools like computer science and mathematics, hold in their hands powerful tools and years of training in fields that can’t be mastered in one or two years alone. Yet, the latter ones can deal with problems that psychologists face, while psychologists would never be able to do so.

The results of bad mathematical education

Maybe this explains why many interdisciplinary programs in universities seem so promising, since they combine the skills of some students with the theoretical background of the other half.

However, I really believe that this should change. We should no longer train psychologists to find questions, but search for answers. We should really see how we can turn psychology into a more rigorous science. Psychologists should be trained in mathematics and in programming. We should not treat psychology as if it was one thing. We should provide them the knowledge to analyze psychological problems from a new perspective that belongs to the 21^st century, and not to the two previous ones.

I’d like to see psychologists graduate from the school and the seek graduate programs that deal more with computer science or mathematics, rather than enroll in simple research programs, that will they will provide valuable experience, they will not teach them more advanced scientific methods to deal with problems that remain yet unanswered.

Other science students continue their education by learning more advanced methods and tools, while psychologists will simply drive on some research using the default statistical techniques, reaching one or more uncertain conclusions. It’s time that we consider mathematics and computation an integral part of the sociological and psychological enquiry of the 21^st century and act accordingly.

Related Links:

Society for chaos in psychology : A group of scientists that I share many common thoughts with.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 3:26 pm and is filed under General, Philosophical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.