Psychologizing

[stormyserenity]

So I'm taking Psych 101 and it is fascinating and a bit disturbing. Fascination to learn about all the interesting things brains can do and even more interesting tricks people are developing to make them do the right things. Also interesting to me as a person with a mental illness. We now have to write a paper about a journal article with

Comments

[aniaj]

It's been a while since I took any of the social sciences classes, but I tend to take them with a huge grain of salt. Look at how drastically theory and practice have changed in the last hundred years. It's still a human attempt to explain human behavior, and comes with a hefty risk of bias (conscious and unconscious) on the part of the observer, not to mention the problems created in the attempt to quantify and statistically analyze patterns of behavior from data that may or may not have been collected consistently. Psych may be useful in application, but it may not be all that accurate as a theory. Also, correlation and causation are not the same, nor does the former imply the latter.
While psychology may provide one explanation for some of the aspects of your personality, personality is the whole, not the aspects. Whether or not some of your behaviors may at some time reflect certain recognized patterns says more about the methodology behind the creation of those recognized patterns than it does to explain your current behavior or predict your future behavior. With billions of neurons firing, there's always going to be a certain amount of chaos and randomness to human behavior. Not to say that you aren't capable of organized thought and disciplined, intended behavior, just that psychology is better at explaining and predicting behavior at the macro level (say large sample sizes) than it is at the micro level (individuals).
From a statistics point of view, data from most of the social (we called it "soft') sciences was at best a pain in the ass to analyze.
As far as fooling yourself, that sounds an awful lot like a question of philosophy, which I don't even pretend to understand :) I tend to have enough to worry about without bringing existential angst into the equation.

[stormyserenity]

Yeah, the more I read the more grains of salt I'm inclined to take. It's all so interesting but there's this nagging feeling that the whole edifice could be constructed on confirmation bias. Brains are amazing and cool, but then there's stuff like mental illnesses that are real but only appear in some cultures so clearly some brain things are the brains being fooled by themselves in a sort of it's-brains-all-the-way-down thing and then MY brain starts to hurt and I want to go play video games.

Existential angst is a problem sometimes, but eventually I have to go to work which ends my philosophical problems. =)