which part of psychology do you not like

Question: which part of psychology do you not like
- Keywords:
  enjoyment
Asked by anon-286523 on 8 Mar 2021.
- anon answered on 8 Mar 2021:
  
  Hi Safna Abdul Majeed,
  
  This is an easy one for me – Freud and psychoanalysis! It gives psychology a bad name.
  Most fundamental to science is empiricism – supporting or refuting claims with proper scientific evidence. So when Freud claimed that we have unconscious desires, he literally just made it up without any science nor educated theoretical attempts. Whilst all of his (strange) theories have mostly been discredited with science, his ideas have seem to have stuck to psychology even now, making people misunderstand what psychology actually is – which, as a scientist is quite frustrating!
- Dennis Relojo-Howell answered on 8 Mar 2021:
  
  Hi Safna. There’s one particular aspect of psychology that I hope will improve soon. Many psychology research relies on university students as research participants. There’s one finding that shows that 67% of psychological research uses university students. This also means that many of the participants are adolescents. There’s actually a name for this – WEIRD is the phenomenon that affects a lot of psychology and other social science research. Research participants are overwhelmingly Western, educated, and from industrialised, rich, and democratic countries.
  
  I did my bachelor’s and my first master’s degrees in the Philippines. And as a student, I find it weird that the overwhelming number of textbooks and research papers that we read only came from one country: the United States. During my undergraduate, we had one module called ‘Filipino psychology’; that’s the only time I had to read a book which was not from the US.
  
  This is the reason why during my MSc, I invited my participants from the Philippines. Now, for my PhD, I will invite participants from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand.
  
  Hopefully, by the time you choose to kickstart your career in psychology you would have an opportunity to read more diverse textbooks, a more diverse set of research papers, and of course psychologists (and role models) from diverse backgrounds.
  
  Good luck with your studies, Safna! And I hope you will be part of the process of improving psychology as a field. 😊
- Alex Baxendale answered on 8 Mar 2021:
  
  Hello! The biggest problem I have at the moment is based around how our work is monetized! Scientists can do research from our own pockets, or by being given money by groups and businesses. Once we have completed our research we want to share it with the world, so to do that the only real way is through publishing it in special books (called journals) about psychology. We have to approach a journal and give them our hard work for free, where they publish them for us for a crazy amount of money. For one person to access a single experiment it costs around £30, and we need to read hundreds of them! On top of this, the researchers don’t get any of the money, we are allowed to keep a copy of our own work and hand it out to people that ask us personally for it, but that is all we’re allowed to do!
  The big problem with this means that our work gets stuck behind a pay wall that every day people can’t afford, and it sucks!
- Lisa Orchard answered on 8 Mar 2021:
  
  Being completely honest it would be biopsychology – purely because I find it so complicated and difficult to understand! I spent so many hours trying to learn all the different parts of the brain! I just don’t find the bio side interesting. I like psychology when we can see it and relate to it!
- Harry Piper answered on 9 Mar 2021:
  
  Ohh, this is a really interesting question!
  One thing I don’t like, which I don’t think is necessarily specific to psychology is the issues with participant recruitment. Getting the numbers and also finding the money to pay participants can be really tough! Again, not specific to psychology, I don’t like the way scientists write! When we write for colleagues, we write in an almost fanciful language to try to make us sound as smart as possible. Science should be accessible to all!
- David McGonigle answered on 17 Mar 2021:
  
  I like Dennis’ answer below, and I would completely agree with him – there are so many classic experiments in psychology that use ‘WEIRD’ participants (its a great acronym!). When we use human participants, we are supposed to make sure we get a good ‘sample’ of the population we want to generalise to. So, for example, you might recruit 100 people for your experiment and make sure that it’s equally possible that they could be men, women, old, young, etc. We don’t tend to control for the fact that people with the time to reply to these adverts will tend to be ok financially, have a bit of free time, and be living near to a university. A recent study showed that 50% of behavioural economics papers (the kind of work where scientists try to predict how people share, or invest, or sympathise with others) came from only 5 cities in the USA! Worrying… But I guess my big issue with psychology and science, in general, is the ‘wow’ factor: if your work seems cool, or it tries to solve a question that lots of people think is important, you will tend to get your work published a lot quicker, and a lot easier. It hurts the idea that science is ‘impartial’: these kinds of things shouldn’t influence it. But they do…oh wellllll!

Question: which part of psychology do you not like

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