Academia is starting to look a lot like church: How the need for answers is harming psychology
As a female psychology academic, I found myself in a Facebook group called “Academic Mamas” — a group with tens of thousands of female academics (both mothers and non-mothers), most of whom hold tenure track positions at top R1 universities in the United States. Recently, I had an online “altercation” in the group. The altercation was over the benefits of trigger warnings — I posted a comment that was in reference to the problems of creating a therapy culture, an idea I first came across when reading work by sociologist, Frank Furedi. Furedi and others have argued that trigger warnings promote too great a focus on the fragility of our mental health and create a narrative which ultimately undermines resilience. Trigger warnings may automatically focus our attention towards trauma and negative feelings while the content itself may not necessarily have done so. And generally, therapy culture can be harmful because the heightened attention towards our inner mental and emotional states actually creates greater opportunities for maladjustment given our mental and emotional states are always in flux — something as simple as a moment of unexplained sadness when overly-attended to can be misidentified as an indication of depression. While I know this view tends to be rather unpopular among my demographic (female liberal academics), I was surprised at my academic adversaries defense of trigger warnings. They argued that we know trigger warnings are beneficial, that science has shown this to be a fact and any dissent from this position was therefore heretical.
Similar to the broader academic world, many academics in this group defended their own positions as being correct and fact-like in nature because “evidence says”. One woman wrote that we should be intolerant of positions that we know are wrong, because after all, we are scientists — some ideas are just wrong and therefore harmful when promoted. The truth, however, is that while some evidence suggests that trigger warnings are helpful, other evidence suggests that trigger warnings are not helpful. This should make us at least question what role evidence can properly play to justify the use of trigger warnings and to regulate creative material because of the emotions it might generate in an audience.
The dogma behind “evidence”
I think it has become all too common to believe that evidence is synonymous with fact, and that being on the side of science makes you closer to some inalienable truth. If you replaced “evidence” with “the word of God”, and “science” with “The Church” in that previous sentence, this would be a very familiar historical narrative that we worked very hard to get away from.
Undoubtedly, science and evidence-based approaches have delivered life-changing improvements like antibiotics, but that doesn’t mean that evidence can tell us everything and can replace all reasoning. Let’s consider the possibility that much to do with political ideology, human behaviour and the social world may not be as fair game as we think for this rigid, truth-seeking approach to understanding. In part, this is because there is often evidence on both sides of an argument. This is almost always the case in psychology because the evidence depends on the theoretical basis from which you are approaching a research question, and theory points in many different directions and originates from many different ideological foundations.
The fact-finding mission in psychology
Recently, psychology as a field has come under fire for failing to replicate a number of widely-publicized and peer-review published research. One of the most famous psychological studies and most-viewed Ted Talks of all time, Amy Cuddy’s power posing, is just one example of a study with wide impact that turns out not to be real. A great deal of social psychology research is now seen as being false or at least dubious in nature. There are many questions about why this happened — many people have pointed to bad methodology or sloppy and unscientific approaches to data analysis. But the truth is that not all of these studies which have come under scrutiny are simply a case of bad science. Many of these failures to replicate point to a much bigger and more concerning problem — psychology has lost its way in trying to seek answers rather than ask questions.
A single answer to a question about the more objective nature of our physical or natural world, such as the human body or disease, is difficult to come by — there are often disputes surrounding theories and interpretation of evidence. But a single answer is impossible to come by when dealing with the hugely variable and subjective nature of our humanity. Psychology can deliver many different answers to different questions, but given the material (human behaviour and experience), we should always be skeptical and expect that different answers might be relevant at different points in time. What we think and why, how we behave and for what reasons are questions that have plagued philosophers for centuries.
Forgetting what leaving the church behind really meant
Historically, leaving the rigid thinking of the church meant having the freedom to explore questions and observe the world for many different possible explanations. Somewhere along the line, however, modern day psychology stopped asking questions and started defensively trying to answer questions in an effort to not be a soft science. Now we take the complexities of human thought and behaviour and reduce them down to measurable and controllable variables in the name of science, to produce results that may be as far from the thing we’re intending to understand as religion is from explaining our existence. This makes it unsurprising that we are in crisis, failing to produce meaningful and replicable findings. Just like in the altercation I had with a group of academics, psychology is looking for truths that do not exist in an objective sense because the way we understand ourselves and our existence is always playing out against the bigger, malleable backdrop of our ever-changing socio-political and cultural world, and our own subjectivity.
There are no absolute truths about trigger warnings, much like any other aspect of our psychology. There are arguments — arguments that should be had with the understanding that we may reach one truth at one point in our human history, only to replace it with a completely different truth at a different point. The truth is ours to create, it is not outside of us in some place that contains objective facts about the world — we are the truth, because we are makers of meaning and we are the ones constantly organising and negotiating what is and is not true for us. That starts to sound a lot like what deities have — this omniscient truth that mere mortals have to attempt to access through their obedience and servitude to the church. We get to decide what is right and wrong, what is important or unimportant, and we get to do so by winning the argument. Research can take us further in this endeavor if we stop losing sight of what our findings really mean — they mean something happened against a particular parameter or set of conditions. They don’t give us universal, separate-from-our-own-existence access to something ultimately real. Questioning, arguing, and theorizing are real enough pursuits, and if we are sensible about how an answer we may find is only ever as true as we can understand what something is in a given time and context, then we don’t have to defensively try to be something we are not.
About the Author
This post is written by Nina Powell. Nina is faculty in the psychology department at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Yale-NUS. Her work involves theoretical and empirical research on morality and ethics, the nature of consciousness and human development. She is the co-founder of Cognitive Handshakes.
