This post was popular enough that I’m writing more seriously. The latest version of this post and everything else I’ll ever write lives here now: https://www.maplemaypole.com/
It’s pretty hard to decide what to study at university when you’re young. You aren’t sure what university really entails, you aren’t sure what you dislike and you’ve gotta choose real soon. I didn’t have a lot of reliable information when I enrolled and did so for lack of a clearer direction. Yes, this isn’t a good reason to enroll in any degree. This also happens to be how most people end up in university.
I finished my psychology degree with H1 Honours, and I’ve written this for anyone that is faced with the same decision. At least now you can read about my experience, observe my varied and grievous injuries, and hopefully navigate the minefield of university with more grace than myself.
I’ve broken this post up into the following parts for navigation if you’re a high-powered, no-nonsense, live-fast-die-young type of person — but it was written to be read in sequence:
- Is psychology even a real science?
- What knowledge do you leave with?
- What’s the culture like in the field?
- Being results driven.
- Is it worth studying? What do I do instead?
If you’re already in a psychology degree and just want to know how to hack your grades higher, skip to ‘Being results driven’.
Is Psychology A Real Science?
The first thing I did when deciding whether psychology was for me was checking Google. After all, people argue that psychology is/isn’t a real science all the time, and what the hell did I know about it? Fortunately, it seems like as a society we’ve really come to a consensus on the state of psychology as a science.
That was actually really easy. I have no idea what the problem even is —
God damn it, internet. Every. Single. Time.
Leave Labels To Wizards.
Ursula Le Guin wrote a famous novel called A Wizard of Earthsea. In Le Guin’s world, one of the keys to power was protecting your true name. Wizards would learn their true name in secret, then use a fake name for the rest of their lives. To let someone learn your true name was to let them have serious power over you.
This has led me inexorably to the conclusion that the people writing endlessly about the status of psychology as a science must all be Archmages from the Supreme College Arcana, because they sure do spend a lot of time obsessing over whether it’s fair to call psychology a ‘real science’.
In fact, almost every article can be summarized thusly:
We can define psychology as something that is, in abstract, a real science and then ignore what people are actually doing. Or we can point out the behavior of a subset of psychologists and laugh all psychologists out of the building. Both of these options are pretty good ways to boost your ego, but not so great for deciding how to spend four years of your life. The truth is that psychology (like most fields) is incredibly varied, and the notion that the entire field can be neatly categorized into either a ‘real science’ or ‘not a real science’ is not an intelligent one.
But what are we even asking when we question the legitimacy of psychology as a science?
Suppose I wanted to determine the orbital velocity of the moon. Well, that’s pretty easy to do, plus everyone says that physics is a real science! I’m going to jot down a bunch of random numbers, and that will probably be close enough.
Alternatively, as during my Honours thesis, I could take a look at particular domains of cognitive functioning as a function of circadian phase. We didn’t do anything too crazy. We just got people to lie still for five days straight in the dark (bathroom breaks were done via bedpan), feeding them the exact same sandwiches periodically to ensure caloric intake did not influence the results (I weighed the butter), hiding the time from them (yawning was not allowed even at 4AM), monitoring their brainwaves for the entirety of their stay, feeding participants pills that broadcast their internal temperature to a laboratory computer, all while repeatedly administering the n-back test of working memory and Go/No-Go tests of response inhibition.
I am very anti-torture but am a hypocrite. Telling someone they have to ‘do their best’ to wolf down their 20th peanut butter sandwich for the day will haunt me for the rest of my life.
So what gives? That was some terrible physics and the psychology seemed (horrifyingly) rigorous.
This illustrates that the topic of one’s study does not determine whether the inquiry is deserving of merit. If someone says ‘Psychology is not a real science’ they’re probably not very well-informed and just trying to signal how superior they are. If someone says ‘Psychology is a real science’ they’re probably not very well-informed and just trying to signal that their degree deserves respect.
What is much more important is the manner in which one goes about conducting that inquiry. The people publishing a dozen articles trying to judge psychology in broad strokes aren’t worth listening to. Even something like astrology can be approached scientifically — although this would probably entail running a simple study, finding it doesn’t work and then apologizing for wasting research money.
But hold on a second, we’re missing something here.
If you went to a school for astrology, it would not simply consist of running a basic study, finding out astrology does not work, then closing the whole thing down and claiming a refund. Plenty of people believe in astrology and there are entire journals dedicated to it. These people are not constantly publishing that astrology can’t predict anything. It seems that while any field can theoretically be treated as a science, there is a culture associated with most fields that determines what the average practitioner is doing.
The right questions for a prospective psychology student are “What am I going to be learning for four years?” and “Am I going to be in a culture and around people that will make me better?”.
Your interest in the former is pretty obvious: learning is a big part of university. The latter is a little less obvious, but it’s very important to surround yourself with positive influences when trying to develop intellectually. If your ego can take it, you want to be the dumbest person in the room at all times, though hopefully smart enough to learn from the smarter people.
With all that said, the bit I wrote just above this, about how rigorous my Honours thesis was? Yeah, put down the enrollment forms because psychology doesn’t come out of this looking too great.
Note: Some students won’t care about any of this, and will instead have thoughts along the lines of “I don’t care if this works, I don’t care if I scam people, I just want a career that pays well.”. No judgement from me — but psychology is still the wrong field for earning large sums of money. Getting through a cruisy undergraduate degree then doing an MBA would require a lot less thinking and land you better pay.
What Knowledge Do You Leave The Degree With?
There is a general perception that psychology students leave with some extraordinary insight into the human condition. They are presumably hired in the context of marketing because they understand how customers are thinking. They are deferred to as some sort of experts with regards to predicting how people will behave across many situations. Most painfully, they are also constantly asked to judge whether someone’s uncle is insane at parties.
I’ve definitely benefited from this perception when I entered the workforce.
The only thing is that I didn’t learn anything like that during my degree. I just keep quiet because I benefit from the misconception and it’s too hard to explain the problems with the degree. I don’t even know of a course that touches on these things. Perhaps some elite American institutions with very specific marketing labs might give you something like this skillset, and even that would be under very specific conditions.
Here are the main things that were emphasized across most of my psychology units:
- Freud said a lot of weird things.
- There are three types of photoreceptors in your eyes.
- The Stanford Prison Experiment (terrible experiment), Asch Conformity Experiment (described results as literally the total opposite of the real findings) and Milgram Experiment all happened.
- The names of random parts of the human brain.
Yep, money well spent.
“Hold on!”, I hear you cry. “That has to be an exaggeration! What about the clinical stuff?”
Ah, you’ve got me there. It would be wrong of me not to touch on this. The main draw of undertaking a psychology degree is getting into a clinical psychology program. About 5% of students from my cohort of a few hundred students was allowed to get into Honours, which is basically the only good way to get into a clinical psychology program in Australia. This doesn’t guarantee entry into a clinical psychology course, it simply makes it possible to apply with a serious chance of getting in.
Here are the things about clinical work I learned.
- They’re called clients now, not patients.
- Don’t sleep with your clients.
And that is almost the entirety of what I was taught by the psychology department. I’m sure I picked up one or two other small facts, but the truth is that the degree was so lax that I genuinely can’t remember anything else. I leave this disclaimer here only for the sake of complete transparency. I must have learned at least one or two more things that I simply can’t recall, as they were useless outside of my exams. Everything else that I use on a daily basis — epistemology, statistics, general critical thinking, I learned elsewhere.
You also generally don’t get clinicians as lecturers. If you’re lucky you might get a clinician to lecture you for an hour or two now and then, but they won’t tell you anything useful while you’re an undergraduate. If you’re even luckier, they’ll even understand how clinical rigor works. I’ve met so many clinicians that have admitted to working hypnotherapy into their routine because they think it’s an interesting break from their normal routine. Can you imagine how royally pissed you would be if your GP selected therapy based on how interesting it was to him personally? Most of them will even admit they mostly dabble and aren’t really experts when pressed — how would you feel about your GP making a similar claim?
A great deal of psychology literature is pretty similar to my first job out of university: Totally pointless, but it’s considered bad form to point this out and get everyone in trouble.
A huge amount of the research in psychology does not replicate at all, and many of the most popular claims are obviously ridiculous. However, careers depend on us pretending they aren’t ridiculous, so there is a culture of simply pretending that everything works and ignoring inconvenient results. I’ve even met a lot of psychologists that have managed to successfully self-delude themselves even though they know they can’t understand the statistics involved (though as I have now added to the last section of this post, I now believe this happens in a lot of fields).
Warning: I’m about to list a bunch of random psychology fields. You don’t have to look them all up unless you’re interested.
Consider the famous ‘Power Poses’ TEDtalk — now cast aside by one of the original authors. Oo, wait, what about Paul Piff’s studies showing that rich people behave more unethically than poor people? Nope, nice try though. The famous Stanford Prison Experiment? Nopestanbul. Positive psychology? Not even sure how people fell for this one. In fact, so much of the stuff I was taught at university was untrue that I realized very quickly that I could just read the paper for almost any study in my textbooks (the exception being the neuroscience textbooks, which we weren’t actually tested on anyway) and find some horrible problem with the study, or no one else was able to create the results again.
I came across a problem while writing this up. I was originally going to churn out an even longer list of poor studies that managed to slip into my course but realized that this would be stupid for two reasons. Firstly, some readers would correctly note that there are so many studies being published in every field, it would be easy to make any field look bad if all I had to do was name a few random studies that sucked. Secondly, if some readers didn’t pick up on this because it’s only an obvious objection to nerds (like me), I would be misleading them into agreeing with me.
Instead of taking my word for it, I encourage anyone looking at getting into psychology to crack open any textbooks they can find and have a read. Feel free to message me about anything you find that seems interesting. Maybe you’ll show me a few cool things I didn’t pick up on while I was studying. I think it’s much more likely that we’ll discover the study was flawed, has failed replication, or draws crazy conclusions from fairly unremarkable results. You can try this neat quiz after reading (I’ll link it at the bottom so you don’t forget) to see what kind of studies sneak into good journals.
You will definitely find out that you’re not going to be doing the interesting stuff during an undergraduate degree. And please do this research before enrolling — you’re going to find it much harder to honestly decide if the field is worth your time after investing thousands of dollars and years of your life into it. If you’re already enrolled, do some research and have second thoughts, don’t worry. As someone that isn’t in psychology anymore, I promise there are good alternative pathways for anyone willing to work a bit.
All Right, Smart Guy, What About The Culture?
Firstly, listen, ease up, okay. ‘Smart guy’. I have a psychology degree. I’m shooting myself in the foot by admitting that it wasn’t a good investment.
Anyway, let me tell you a couple of stories about my experience in psychology that might explain what the culture is like.
In my fourth year, the university invited a fairly popular speaker on mindfulness therapy onto the campus to give a talk to the Honours students. At the time, Honours students represented the top 5% of the psychology cohort. We kicked everyone else out after the 3rd year. So we’re all led away from our normal pursuits to enter a little classroom on the north end of the campus.
It is a fairly small room, not particularly well-lit. There are probably around twenty students sitting around. Instead of regular desks, we have four large, circular tables that we sit around. A few minutes pass as we chatter aimlessly before the speaker enters.
He’s a pretty charismatic guy, but I’m irritated already. I had already read enough to not be very convinced by mindfulness research and this was a total waste of time — I had a thesis to write!
Either way, I’d heard of him before, so at least I’d probably learn something.
“93% of communication is non-verbal”, he begins.
The class seems okay with this. He’s clearly okay with this, since it’s his stock presentation. I am considerably not okay with this.
Let’s think about this for like five seconds.
How would you even begin to quantify non-verbal communication? If I tell you the time, then shrug, what percentage of that communication was the shrug? What does this claim even mean? This doesn’t even make any sense!
He notices that I have quickly Googled this claim on my phone and shown the results to a friend sitting next to me. Eventually he drifts over and asks what I’m so interested in. I politely explain that I was so interested in the first claim that I looked it up, and it turns out wow, it isn’t true! Crazy, right? Haha…ha…
He seems unsettled and defensive about this. He quickly moves away after some unconvincing comments. I guess his “I’m a professional that has been caught regurgitating something I heard once when I was 12” sense was tingling. This tragic condition occurs when bitten by a Freudian during the full moon. I’ve been told he’s still very popular on the speaking circuit, and still opens with the same ‘fact’.
I guess it doesn’t really matter what he says, since only 7% of his talk is verbal anyway.
One of my lecturers was very invested in the role of fairy tales in childhood development. She told us the Big Bad Wolf represents adversity, and the brick house built by the three little pigs represents resilience.
She reads part of the story to a room of fully grown adults.
I write it down because it might be on the exam.
Help.
Somewhere along my second year, I noticed that one of my tutors was advocating for a particularly bizarre branch of psychoanalysis with a study using very sketchy methodology. I noted that the study made a lot of very outlandish claims before reaching its conclusion, and required absolutely all of the underlying assumptions to be true for the theory to work at all.
I.e, if you claim a lot of things and they’re all pretty far-fetched, you’re more likely to be wrong.
I hadn’t yet learned the rules of the game, so I mention it politely at the end of a class with no one around in case she found it embarrassing to have a study she likes critiqued. She smiled awkwardly and said “Oh, you’re one of those numbers guys.”
I’m a numbers guy now, but at the time I had basically picked psychology to get away from numbers. Also, it says something when someone near the end of their PhD thinks that noticing some stupid claims makes you a ‘numbers guy’. I thought it was the bare minimum for being competent! The entire process of raising the red flag in my brain went:
“Huh, this guy is saying that he can talk to someone for an hour and access their deep subconscious mind, then alter it through talk therapy.”
“Why don’t they teach us that? That seems like it would be a superpower. Nothing else in the field would even really matter if we could work this way. You could take over huge companies! Customers would do anything you wanted!”
“Oh right, they can’t teach us that because it doesn’t work.”
In my next assignment I chose to review that study because I found it interesting, and presented the same argument and discussed the generally weak logic behind a lot of psychoanalysis. The essay literally included statements to the effect of “If you make more statements, that gives you more chances to be wrong”.
I mysteriously got the lowest grades I have ever received on an any piece of work during all my time at university. The contested points were basically all to the effect of “You pointed out this extremely basic flaw in this paper. I don’t like that, so I demand more evidence than I would ever require of another student (you still only get 2,000 words though), thus making this wrong.”.
This last one actually helped me figure out how to ace the rest of my units, and helped me finally figure out what you’re actually meant to do if you want to excel in a psychology degree. Probably quite a few other degrees too. I’ve making most of my money while studying by teaching students how to hack the degree, and right now have a waiting list for students long enough that I just refer everyone onward.
Being Results Driven.
I’ve left out all my strange run-ins with hypnotherapists. I’ve left out my brother’s accounts of how the business faculty brings in a bunch of psychologists who tell them all ridiculous things (i.e, thinking about playing the piano is about as effective as actually practicing). I’ve left out all the stories I’ve heard from friends about how their first X psychologists (where X is some unacceptably large number) did things like get creepily sexual about non-sex related issues. Surprising number of Freudians out there!
This is all weird enough that I should also specify that I studied in a first world country, and the institution is well-regarded there. I wasn’t just getting crackpots in the middle of nowhere. Entry to this place was competitive, especially Honours. As some of the statements below rely on my teaching experience, I will further clarify that I have taught students across several institutions, and have friends across numerous countries, in addition to being an international student myself.
The most damning thing about the general culture in undergraduate psychology can be seen in how I tutor students. I help a lot of students get into Honours or otherwise boost their grades. I’ve gotten pretty good at it, having had to boost my own grades quite aggressively in my third year. The thing that tipped me off was losing so many marks when I took a firm stance against shoddy psychoanalysis.
I have never seen an undergraduate psychology student be marked down for making a bad argument.
I have almost never seen an undergraduate psychology student be marked down for failing to do adequate research.
Barring poor English, I have only ever seen students be marked down for failing to write with ‘flow’. As far as I can tell this seems to mean “Everything in here seemed all right, but I can’t give everyone that writes well a super high grade and it’s considered bad form to criticize studies” or possibly “I was in a bad mood when I marked this”.
I consistently get all my students high grades by simply guiding them through some basic rules on scientific writing and then advising them to avoid making any halfway intelligent arguments. Don’t touch psychoanalysis because a serious critique might lose you marks. Don’t say anything bad about something that is trendy. Avoid mindfulness unless praising it. Just write something that can not possibly offend anyone by refusing to critique anything and you will score well. You’re not writing to find truth. You’re not writing to help anyone. You’re writing to reach 2,000 words without making your tutor expend energy on thinking. The only place you can gain marks is on writing style, not science, and if that’s the case then you should just do a writing course. You can lose marks for engaging in serious science because you run the risk of your marker disliking your justified conclusions.
Funnily enough, I did learn quite a bit about human psychology during my course. I keep track of all the current tutors and note how they respond to the writing styles from my various students. I keep very close track of exactly what misconceptions they have so that my students can deliberately get things wrong to score extra marks. I generally have all my student write in to their tutors asking for advice on how to get their marks higher (this means the tutor has to choose between deciding their advice was bad or awarding some free marks — guess which one they pick!). The key thing is that doing well has nothing to do with learning psychology.
Psychology students, including myself at the time, consistently get results by undertaking their studies this way. It is a soulless, boring process, but the fact that it works suggests that the world view informing it actually has some credence to it. If it was totally wrong, we would have expected me to fail out in my third year for failing to make substantive arguments rather than passing near the top of the cohort!
Minor note: I had an amazing third year statistics lecturer and fourth year abnormal psychology lecturer. I got to write nuanced arguments, wow. Too bad the first lost his job that semester and the other is only for the top 5% of students!
So What Should I Do Instead?
This entire article was actually written up in mid-2018. I’ve spent some time in another field, and I want to make a small note here.
I’m undergoing a Masters in Data Science now. This means I do a lot of programming and mess around with a lot of statistics. I’ve since realized that the average student in pretty much every course is clueless, although my new area is still leagues ahead of psychology in terms of what I’m actually learning. Funnily enough, I’ve learned more about rigorous psychology now that I know enough about statistics to read about things like Item Response Theory.
So while I don’t think psychology is super-ultra uniquely mega bad as a degree, I still very strongly recommend against it. I would just also add that I probably strongly recommend against most degrees. Pick something that is going to challenge you and just make sure the course is rigorous. Almost every degree allows most students to pass assuming that they start all the assignments a day before they are due. You’ll surprise yourself with how easy it is to beat your classmates in most (not all) ‘difficult’ fields by using common sense. I think lots of fields are going to be as bad, if not worse, than psychology. The big issue is that psychology is a ‘default’ unit for young people without clear goals in mind and lots of societal pressure.
I strongly recommend avoiding psychology courses. Philosophy courses will cover work on consciousness and the scientific method more comprehensively. The statistics department will cover the relevant mathematics and inferential methods much more comprehensively. The biology and neuroscience departments will typically outperform the psychology department whenever these topics arise. Indeed, there is little reason to do a psychology degree, save one — the work is so simple in many cases that it gives you a lot of free time to study other things. This benefited me a lot, but I’m sure there are still better options even if you’re seeking free time. Perhaps a full philosophy degree, where you can be relatively free and actually learn something during the course. As long as you’re accomplishing goals it doesn’t matter whether the learning is ‘hard’ unless you’re a masochist and enjoy inefficiency. If you want to be really sure you’ll learn something useful, maybe computer science, but I’m not going to suggest someone study a topic they dislike. Just please study something that isn’t a waste of your time. Remember what you want to accomplish and pick something that lets you accomplish that. If you don’t know what you want to accomplish either don’t go to university yet or if you can’t convince yourself that’s okay, pick something rigorous.
I have met some good psychologists, who are genuinely interested in good science, although they many of them dabble in other fields. For example, the Honours thesis I mentioned had more to do with biology than psychology. Some psychologists really do perform work good enough that I wouldn’t hesitate to call ‘real science’.
And lots of those psychologists were awesome clinicians. But almost anyone that has had mental health issues can tell you how many bad psychologists they had to go through before they found someone halfway competent.
There’s some real stuff in the field. Especially at the postgraduate level if you’re lucky enough to get a great supervisor (RIP if you didn’t though).
But that’s not what you’re going to be doing all the way up to your PhD. So who cares?
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