Psych Dreams

“I tried to look up if there is psychology research on stereotypes about psychology, but I haven’t found anything yet. Ironically, psychologists study stereotyping and psychology, but not stereotypes about psychology.”

Restructure!, in this comment.

I’d be really fascinated to see this, and not just on a psychological level.  I have theories (wild theories, of course) that the hostility and stereotypes toward psychological studies likely arose around scientific scenarios similar to the Milgram experiment and the Stanford experiment.  Or when results point to the toxicity of constant exposure to stylized violence.  There are a lot of studies in psychology that focus on how power and information affect people, and it would be very hard to be an impartial consumer of all these elements if you understood and processed psychological studies critically on a regular basis.

And by critically, I don’t mean the popular form of criticism — basically finding something you semi-understand, and then stabbing at the rest of the elements around it because their presence makes your knowledge feel less cemented.  By critically, I’m thinking that people would be more interested in the history of how things came to be, and they would study the parts and the whole with more intent and purpose to see how they fit together to form whole ideological landscapes.

Maybe I’m being idealistic.

May 15, 2010

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