this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
-12 points (26.9% liked)

Ask Lemmy

27380 readers
2118 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I don't have a good outlook on psychology as a field. It's all influenced by people for leverage and different countries can't even agree on what qualifies as what (e.g. the definition for social anxiety in one country could be considered the definition for agoraphobia in another). But I think watching Simon Whistler give a very debunked rundown on psychology ten years into his career was the last straw for me this week. Misrepresenting psychology has very annoying implications and it gets tiring to see it done over and over.

To use one example, he mentions the former Axis Power officers in WWII saying they were "just following orders", which led to the highly rigged Stanford Prison Experiment, which has never been able to be replicated with the same results. Why? They rigged it, some say to support those officers. Here is an instance where history clashes with psychology, because near the end of WWII, German officers started recruiting and enslaving the Jews they were capturing to do the very dirty work they previously inflicted on them. Did these poor souls succumb to the wickedness like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the officers who inspired it would suggest in court? No, they were traumatized and went insane, because this was not in their nature.

Modern psychology is littered with these false rules and expectations. I'm sure many of you have heard a number of them. Maybe you remember the Milgram Experiment or Stockholm Syndrome for example. So let's play a game. Look back into your life. Think of all the things you've experienced and how it all played out. Out of all these experiences, which ones can you talk about that you can point to and say "if conventional psychology was right, this event in my life would've never happened how it did?

Example: There is a rule in the field of psychology called the Prisoner's Dilemma. It says that if you question two people a certain way, they will be incentivized to spill beans and betray each other. Me and a friend were once arrested because he got into a fight because someone cheated on his sister and I sped him away. The officers tried inflicting the Prisoner's Dilemma on us, but we're both open books, to the point where we knew the whole point was we were willing to face whatever comes. The cops had nothing. They let us free.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Gieselbrecht@feddit.org 19 points 2 days ago

I think you have some misconceptions about psychology in general. E.G. you name Stanford Prison, and then explain that it has not been replicated. The act of trying (and failing) to replicate those results is psychological research, and then you reference this research as argument against psychology. Also, you seem to suggest like psychology is deterministic (A happens to someone, so they react in way B), while it is a probabilistic science (if A happens to someone, the chance that they will react in way B increases by X% to Y% with a probability of 95%).

One comment on your example: The prisoner's dilemma (the way I know it) is not a psychological, but a game theoretical concept and is usually applied with the assumption of rational actors a one-shot interaction, which means that it doesn't apply to your situation with your friend.

In general, it seems that your disdain for psychology stems from laypersons' broad and biased understanding of psychological concepts.

Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist.