An Egotistical Rant: It’s Lonely At The Top
June 24th, 2008
Here is the major problem with doing psychology for a job: everyone thinks they know it all already. Everyone is a person, everyone has relationships, therefore everyone figures they have inter- and intra-personal dynamics figured out. This is totally logical and in fact true to a point – we are all amateur psychologists, and we need to be to get through life. Okay. But people’s amateur psychological skillz are usually not much more than this: heavily biased heuristics, general guesses, and hypotheses that may (or may not) be right, some or all of the time. Generally speaking these theories are good enough for folks to get by, with greater or lesser degrees of adaptation, and therefore act as reinforcers. You have some idea of why people do things, and it’s good enough to let you function in life, so that means you must be right. Right? Only sort of.
In some ways it’s really frustrating to be learning a lot about psychology because, by its very nature, people figure they already know it. It’s not uncommon at all to hear people pull out their pet psychological theories and, while I am by no means an expert, I know a lot more than your average layman. Some of the stuff people come up with is pretty bad (by which I mean wrong, or misguided, or incomplete, or shamelessly self serving, etc.). I don’t even bother to say anything most times because as I have learned the hard way, people are attached to their theories and aren’t really interested in what the research says. That’s fine, I don’t want to go through life teaching people all the time (okay maybe a little), and I am, as I say, not yet an expert. But sometimes it is hard to swallow when someone goes off with great authority about their theory that is dead wrong and I want to bang my head against a wall that people think they know this field simply because they are in possession of some folk psychological know-how.
It’s hard becoming an expert in a field where most people don’t even realize there can be experts. I doubt nuclear physicists have this problem.