Myths About The Field of Psychology

“Oh, psychology is just common sense”

“Professionals just get paid money for hearing people talk”

“Psychology isn’t even a science”

Sounds familiar?

Psychology is one of the fields that has been highly misunderstood for decades. It has been associated with various misconceptions and I would like to address the same in this article.

First of all, what is psychology? According to the American Psychological Association, psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior and it includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena. The term itself comes from the Greek words psyche, meaning soul and logia, meaning study. Psychology is a heterogeneous field that includes many sub-fields such as cognition, social behavior, sports, clinical, health, human development, and much more.

So, how did these myths and misconceptions begin to show up? We hear a lot of information through the news, social media, word of mouth, and other sources. One desires to find quick solutions to complex problems. Thus, phrases repeated often like “Opposites attract” sounds believable with time.

Some Common Myths:

1. Psychology is common sense

This is most commonly known as the hindsight bias in social psychology or the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. Various experiments conducted have shown that people tend to exaggerate the result after learning the outcome. Why does this happen? We assume that we have so much experience with human behavior that we are naturally experts in the subject. In addition, the information that we hear is what “everyone knows”.

Would you deliver fatal electrical shocks to a stranger just because an authority figure told you to? Common sense might tell you to say no, but psychologist Stanley Milgram famously described in an obedience test that the majority of people can do such a thing

Some other examples of common sense that people believe include:

Working while in high school will help students build character and value money.
Children who read a lot are not very social or physically fit.
People with low self-esteem are more aggressive.
The best way to treat juvenile delinquents is to get tough with them.
Most psychopaths are delusional.
We know what will make us happy.

But psychology requires us to mistrust our emotions and lay aside our intuitions (Lilienfeld, 2010)

2. Psychology isn’t even a real science

First, let’s understand what science is and is not

Main characteristics of science:

Objective
Empirical – uses experiments
Involves control and manipulation of variables
Allows for hypothesis testing
Replication of results

Researchers use the scientific method and psychology does depend on these characteristics to understand behavior. Psychological knowledge is based on the scientific investigation of concepts, theories, principles, and models, as it is in other sciences.

3. People who study psychology become clinical psychologists

As I mentioned before, Psychology is a broad and diverse field and various subfields have emerged as well:

Abnormal psychology is the study of abnormal functioning and psychopathology. This specialization field is directed towards the analysis and treatment of a variety of mental disorders and is connected to psychotherapy and clinical psychology.
Biological psychology (biopsychology) examines how biological processes affect the mind and behavior. This area is intimately associated with neuroscience and uses tools such as MRI and PET scans to look at brain injury or brain abnormalities.
Clinical psychology is centered on the evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment of mental disorders.
Cognitive psychology is the study of human thought processes including attention, memory, perception, decision-making, problem-solving, and language.
Developmental psychology – views at individual growth and development which includes cognitive abilities, morality, social functioning, identity, and other life areas.
Forensic psychology is an applied field focused on using psychological research and principles in the legal and criminal justice system.
Industrial-organizational psychology is a field that uses psychological research to improve work performance and pick the desired employees.
Social psychology focuses on group behavior, social influences on individual behavior, attitudes, prejudice, conformity, aggression, and related topics.

This isn’t the limit. There is so much more.

4. People hear us talk and get paid money

As we see in movies, we believe that psychologists just sit back, scribble something in their notepad while the patient cries out their problems, but this is further away from the truth. Psychologists are actively engaged in communication with the client and guide them throughout the process of healing. While some of them are involved in the cure of psychological distress, others are involved in the business, education, and society as a whole. In addition, area of specialty, educational background, and years of experience determine their salary.

5. Psychologists are mind readers

Psychology is surely the study of the human mind and behavior, but this doesn’t give anyone the ability to ‘read’ someone’s mind. Psychologists can make accurate assessments about you depending on how you behave and certain things that you do but this doesn’t make them psychic. It is purely based on their years of experience with clients with similar issues and the strong knowledge that they developed through the years.

Many more myths do exist ……….

But this isn’t just the case with common people. In an article published in the “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology”, an interesting notion was presented that even undergraduate psychology students enter university with inaccurate beliefs and may sometimes finish their final year with these beliefs intact. To measure what psychology students know about the subject, a test called ‘The Test of Psychological Knowledge and Misconceptions’ was used. The results varied depending on the format of the questions presented such as a Likert scale, true/false questions. A majority of them didn’t admit that they didn’t know the answer. Students were generally overconfident about their answers and students performing poorly were even more overconfident than the others.

Psychology has had a huge impact both on the individuals and society as a whole. Most of it has been to the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness but that’s not it. It has helped us in understanding why people behave the way they do, how one can improve their productivity, the different factors that affect the human mind and behavior, and much more. Psychology is rather a young science and there is much more to be discovered and learned from this area of science. One requires constant learning and updates in information to reduce the spread of these myths and beliefs.

REFERENCES

Lilienfeld, S. O. (2010). Confronting psychological misconceptions in the classroom: Challenges and rewards.

Bensley, D.A., Rainey, C., Lilienfeld, S.O. & Kuehne, S. 2015, “What do psychology students know about what they know in psychology?” , Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology

https://www.verywellmind.com/myths-about-psychology-2795594

https://www.verywellmind.com/psychology-4014660