News:

If words could really hurt you, this forum would be one huge abbatoir.

Main Menu

Psychology: I'm not an expert on the subject, but something's wrong

Started by The Good Reverend Roger, January 16, 2012, 03:29:12 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

The Good Reverend Roger

I was browsing through some links based on Holist's weird assertions concerning personal identity, and I've come to notice something interesting.  We have, as a species, had 12,000 years of technology, with almost all of it happening from 1500 AD forward (Hell, most of it from 1985 forward)...But the study of humans themselves is still at the level of alchemy (vs chemistry).

Sociology is a little better off:  There's money to be made by understanding how large groups of people will behave.  But as far as the study of the behavior of individual people, the best we've managed is to hammer them flat with pharmaceuticals when they can't stay in line.

There seems to have been some interesting work done by Timothy Leary (as endlessly harped on by RAW) before he went bonkers, most of which was based on Earlier work done by Freud.  Leary essentially removed Freud's weirdness concerning his mom, and made the information useful.  That information is now extensively used by marketing and government agencies, though they never reference it (not that they reference anything), but it isn't taught in high school, etc...The best I ever go in a psych class was a history of failed ideas.

Now, I am more than willing to be corrected on this idea that psychology is basically stalled in its infant stages...Again, I am not an expert.  If anyone with a proper education or just an insight into the subject has any comments, I'd be glad to hear them.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

navkat

I agree with you. The problem, of course, is hammering people into groups to which you can easily market is way more profitable and comfortable than any sort of true encouragement of functioning diversity.

Triple Zero

Yes, there's not many quality information out there, and what is there is not taught in schools.

And indeed it's mostly used by marketing people.

There's "critical thinking" which is not taught in schools, what's that to do with psychology? Well it's obvious once you realize it's basically the opposite of advertising or marketing. Fravia+ of Searchlores was a big proponent for teaching this.

There's "bias", "influence", "fallacies" which are all not taught in schools. Stuff that's written about in Taleb's Fooled by Randomness or Robert Cialdini's On Influence.

The latter one is based on real solid psychological research.

Showing the kind of human behavioural quirks that if you read about 90% of people falling for some trick, you'll think "That's stupid, I would never fall for that" and then the book mentions "They did a follow-up to this experiment where they first interviewed the subjects whether they thought they'd fall for this trick. It turns out that 70% of the people that say they wouldn't fall for this trick, in fact do fall for it when encountering it in a (set up) real life situation." (I fudged the percentages a bit but they were pretty high) -- real sobering realization, that :lol:
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Sociology isn't about hammering people into groups, nor is it about profit. It's about studying how human-created social systems work.

To address Roger's post:

You are completely right! One of the reasons, IMO, is that alchemy is to chemistry what psychology is to neuroscience; we have previously lacked the tools to really understand human behavior, and worse, we have previously relied on a superstitious sort of thinking about the mind as being somehow separate from and in control of the body, when in fact it's an extremely complex part of the body. I am not saying that psychology isn't a valid or important field of study; but it is a subjective field of study. But just as alchemy gradually became less superstitious and more objective and was gradually refined into chemistry, new tools (very, very new tools) for studying the mental biology of humans are making it possible, a little at a time, to understand more about our brains and our emotions. Behavioral neurophysics will start to explain the human mind on a much deeper and more complex level, and it is my prediction that in time, neurophysics and psychology will merge, and a few hundred years from now the only people who study old-fashioned psychology will be regarded much as phrenologists and wanna-be wizards are today.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Roaring Biscuit!

I do pretty much agree, though there has been some pretty awesome progress in the last 70-100 years, but not usually by people who get much celebrity status (read as:  Freud is the best and worst thing to happen to psychology).  In cognitive psychology there is quite a lot of more "concrete" science (if that makes sense) going on.

I think the main hurdle is the absurd level of complexity of brains.  Although it is sometimes easier to model psychological phenomena than say physical or chemical, they must necessarily be more complex.  I think there are hell of a lot more variables that you have to consider with a psychological experiment, not only that but a huge part of human behaviour is socially based, which makes it even easier to fall into kind of woolly science, as it is basically impossible to test that kind of thing in a lab.

Basically, yeah it's still fledgling, but I think a lot is because the phenomena it is attempting to study are (in my opinion) even more complex than the other sciences it is built on.

Just had a thought while I was writing this also, culture are environment affect cognition, so it could be that even the most basic foundations can/will change over time.  Which is really incredibly unhelpful :)  There was an article I skimmed recently about Facebook use and Dunbar's number (which is the upper limit on the size of a primate social group, correlated with neocortex size, and 150 in humans at the time it was written (70's I believe)).  Basically what I gleaned from it (and I admit, I wasn't looking at it as critically as I should have) was that well, you know those people who have 1000+ "friends" on Facebook, and you just think, there is no way they can possibly be actually friends with 1000+ people?  Well, you can't, but there was a positive correlation between No. Facebook "friends", the size of an area of the brain (hopefully) related to keeping track of social groups (unsurprising), and the size of their actual social group (somewhat surprising), and that those individuals with extremely high numbers of Facebook "friends" also had social groups larger than predicted by Dunbar (more surprising).

Anyway, I'm sure most of you can see the flaws in that experiment straight off, just think it's interesting, the idea that brain function is modulated by technology and culture, and the implications that has for people trying to study the brain (how much can we rely on past evidence, what kinds of things are modulated by culture that we need to watch out for, what kind of time frame can those changes occur within, what constants are there if any?  There probably are constants, btw)

Yup, think that's all I've got for now,

xx

edd

P3nT4gR4m

Yup. That's about the long and short of it. Psychology is pretty much a pseudoscience that works but with very little knowledge or explanation of the underlying mechanisms. Like when there were 4 elements instead of all the proper ones. Everything still worked back then but there was no prediction or theoretical aspect. Like with modern psychology - we know if we poke him with a stick that 'x' will happen but no one has the slightest inkling of what happens when we poke him with a carrot until we try it out.

Psychology is essentially a programming discipline but with little or no attempt at a semantic language with which to interface with the hardware. So they're dealing with a great big complicated computer by standing around taking notes whenever something comes out the printer. It's black box. You might as well have magical water memory or tiny little elves inside there - psychology would work as well as it does either way.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

navkat

Psychopharmacology is sort of hit-or-miss. The problem isn't that psychology doesn't really know what it's doing (I mean, it's not perfect but it does at least try to approach the problems using a scientific method) but that when you add the human factor--the free will factor, you're pretty much reducing your double-blind approach to a crapshoot.

So much of psychology breaks down to 101: Classical Conditioning. As adults, we have to make the personal choice to recognize which things in our lives are bells ringing and making us salivate, then come running for food, but also to make the cognitive choice to continue to refuse to come running despite feeling hungry and the discomfort of breaking the habit and to keep refusing, consistently until the urge subsides. Taking a substance to reduce the urge can help if you're at that level of cognitive determination but will actually serve to make the habit more ingrained if you take the substance and continue the behavior in spite of the ↓urge/reward.

Jasper

Dr. Zimbardo has some interesting research going on lately;  The Heroic Imagination Project aims to take all of his previous work (famously the Stanford Prison Experiments) in the opposite direction.  Specifically, we already know what factors in situations can facilitate the worst in people, so his aim is to see what kind of situational factors can be employed to bring out the best in people, if there are any such things.

Social Psychology (distinct from sociology in that it focuses on addressing interpersonal group dynamics rather than society as a whole) is a much more strongly empirical field than most of the humanities.

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Jasper on January 16, 2012, 05:29:20 PM
Dr. Zimbardo has some interesting research going on lately;  The Heroic Imagination Project aims to take all of his previous work (famously the Stanford Prison Experiments) in the opposite direction.  Specifically, we already know what factors in situations can facilitate the worst in people, so his aim is to see what kind of situational factors can be employed to bring out the best in people, if there are any such things.

Social Psychology (distinct from sociology in that it focuses on addressing interpersonal group dynamics rather than society as a whole) is a much more strongly empirical field than most of the humanities.

Okay.

Like I said, the study of groups has some support.  But I maintain that you have to study both the group and the individual to understand either, and we're not really doing that.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Jasper

I don't quite agree that we have to get both to get either.  You can understand something about carburetors without understanding metallurgy.  You can know driving without understanding carburetors at all.  Knowledge comes in parts, and the mind is too complex to understand all at once, and groups of minds are that much worse.  The best we can do is watch people and ourselves, then draw conclusions about human nature, the mind, and society.  Once we know enough to start patching together a whole understanding of the situation, we'll try. 

navkat

I HAD A POST AND IT GOT FUCKING EATEN.

Back button, forward didn't work.

ARRRRRGH.  :argh!:

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Jasper on January 16, 2012, 05:49:05 PM
I don't quite agree that we have to get both to get either.  You can understand something about carburetors without understanding metallurgy.  You can know driving without understanding carburetors at all.  Knowledge comes in parts, and the mind is too complex to understand all at once, and groups of minds are that much worse.  The best we can do is watch people and ourselves, then draw conclusions about human nature, the mind, and society.  Once we know enough to start patching together a whole understanding of the situation, we'll try.

Humans are pack-oriented creatures.  You can't really understand them without understanding the pack structure in which they live.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Jasper

That's a somewhat misleading label though.  Dogs are also pack oriented, but they don't have huge portions of their brains dedicated to the evolved necessity of using words to justify their ideas and actions to the rest of the pack to ensure selective fitness. 

We are similar to pack animals, but we're more evolved around keeping the pack from tearing us to shreds, as opposed to serving the pack above ourselves.  We're social, but we're unlike other pack animals in some key respects.

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Jasper on January 16, 2012, 06:06:31 PM
That's a somewhat misleading label though.  Dogs are also pack oriented, but they don't have huge portions of their brains dedicated to the evolved necessity of using words to justify their ideas and actions to the rest of the pack to ensure selective fitness. 

We are similar to pack animals, but we're more evolved around keeping the pack from tearing us to shreds, as opposed to serving the pack above ourselves.  We're social, but we're unlike other pack animals in some key respects.

What I meant was you have to understand OUR pack structure, because yes, it is different.

" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Jasper

I don't know of any research into human society as it compares to other social creatures' pack structures.  You have a point though, I'd love to read about any there may be.

I suspect that the key to human packs is in the differences that make a difference:  language, culture, our unique cognitive powers (counterfactual reasoning, induction, etc) that cause our pack dynamics (good word for it, I think) to be different from other pack types.