For a Psychology of Social Significance
When a social science is “value-neutral,” it is deferential to the status quo.
Psychology, as a global field of research and practice, has as its center of gravity American psychology. The American Psychological Association is the largest organization of psychologists in the world, and whatever psychological developments occur in the US are often exported internationally.
Yet, despite knowledge of the psychological impact of poverty, psychologists have distanced themselves from public policy. They seem to only provide lip service when it comes to questions of poverty in society, but previously had no trouble taking an active role during wartime, violating their own ethics codes, at the behest of the state.
Let it be said: Psychologists can and do help countless individuals. Severe mental illness, even controlling for particular social context, is real.
But why has psychology become fundamentally confined to laboratories, university departments, health centers, and (often prohibitively expensive) therapists’ offices, despite evidence of the social basis of many psychopathologies? The history of the discipline can illuminate the path.
Modern psychology developed as a laboratory-specific science in the 19th century. Its early practitioners, clarifying their unit of analysis (the individual) and preferred methodology (natural scientific via the laboratory), aspired to physics as an ideal, respectable scientific model for itself. The decision was political in nature: Parsing psychological phenomena into discrete elements and controlling for outside influence in the laboratory proved useful in establishing the scientific status of psychology.
The academic organization of social sciences into divisions creates an appearance of unbridgeable gaps between disciplines. The various ways in which, for example, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists view the world differs in part by how the fields have been organized and specialized rather than by the demands required by the subject/object of inquiry. They have far more in common than it seems, yet their fragmentation remains for reasons primarily social (which have resulted in discipline-specific vocabularies to describe similar phenomena) rather than epistemological. It is interesting to consider to what extent psychology is also sociology, history anthropology, and politics economics — and vice versa (and in combination).
Historian of psychology Thomas Teo (2005) pointed out that the particularization of mental life historically paralleled the development of institutions in the consolidation of modern capitalist societies. If that is the case, the question we ought to ask is: to what extent is psychology a socially and historically situated — rather than a universal, value-neutral, and natural-scientific — enterprise?
Positively Positivist
Psychology’s numerous subdisciplines ask different research questions. The unifying factor across most of them is method. In general, epistemology within psychology is generated through quantitative methodology. The aim is to uncover objective, predictive, and generalizable knowledge. In this way, American psychology — that is, Western mainstream psychology broadly — is positivist: it aims to reduce complex processes to their constituent parts, stripped of context, revealing how they objectively operate. That end is reached by means of quantitative methodology, including laboratory based empirical research similar to fields in the natural sciences such as biology and physics — as per psychology’s historic origins and the decision making involved to determine its status as a new science.
What are some of the epistemological implications inherent in a predominantly quantitative methodological orientation? Quantifying human behavior — action, intention, motivation, thought, perception, interpretation, reaction, etc. — allows results to be turned into data points which, as a mode of presentation, suggests something law-like, unbiased, and predictable. Considering much of psychology privileges method over theory, research has been effectively guided by what can be studied methodologically. As a result, mainstream psychology has been accused of methodologism or methodolatry, having accumulated an immense amount of data absent theoretical coherence. Without theoretical clarification, psychology risks becoming an aimless science, conducting research for its own sake. In this way, psychology lacks social significance.
The Neurocentric Turn
In 1990, the US initiated the “Decade of the Brain.” It was a signal moment which marked the culmination of a profound, decades-long sociocultural transformation of personhood. The change occurred on two levels. As described by sociologist Nikolas Rose, first was
the increasing salience of health to the aspirations and ethics of the wealthy West, the readiness of those who live in such cultures to define their problems and their solutions in terms of health and illness, and the tendency for contemporary understandings of health and illness to be posed largely in terms of treatable bodily malfunctions.
Second, was a transformation in
“the sense of ourselves as ‘psychological’ individuals that developed across the twentieth century — beings inhabited by a deep internal space shaped by biography and experience, the source of our individuality and the locus of our discontents…being supplemented or displaced…[by the] tendency to define key aspects of one’s individuality in bodily terms… to think of oneself as ‘embodied,’ and to understand that body in the language of contemporary biomedicine.”
To the extent we have come to understand ourselves and human problems not through social, political, or economic categories or theories but psychological ones, it can be said that society has been psychologized. Whatever the branch — cognitive neuroscientific, developmental, abnormal, clinical, social, etc. — psychology begins and ends with the individual and, increasingly, the brain.
In a recent interview about his latest book, The Age of Addiction, historian David Courtwright discussed how “global industries, often with the help of complicit governments… have encouraged excessive consumption and addiction.” He connects how addiction, which affects the limbic system, “the part of the brain that’s responsible for pleasure, motivation, long-term memory, and other survival functions that are linked to the emotions” has been “scaled up [and] weaponized” by big business interests. Courtwright integrates the big business of addiction in his concept of “limbic capitalism.”
Tragically, millions of people will continue to suffer the ruinous consequences of addiction because, according to Courtwright,
“the reality [is] that, on the other side of the screen, there are a thousand people… trying to keep your eyeballs glued to [the] screen. You may think you can outbox them…good luck with that.”
Addiction is to a large extent maintained by teams of well-funded engineers and marketing professionals working to expand commercialized vice. The mystification of the social origins of addiction is maintained in part by two features of contemporary life: The first is “neurocentrism,” or the predominantly Western bias in favor of an individualized, psychologized and medicalized understanding of pathology. Second is the enduring ideological legacy of neoliberalism: the conflation of “freedom” with unregulated capitalism.
The Politics of Neutrality
People depend on our questioning the preference for reductionism and quantitative methodology in human science. Asking fundamental questions such as, “is human behavior something that can be quantified?” has important social implications. How useful is experimental quantitative research — which necessarily decontextualizes the subject — at generating meaningful psychological knowledge? Mainstream methodology in psychological science claims to produce objective results. As such, it adheres to the scientific notion of value-neutrality, laying bare its findings as though in a vacuum. In truth, behavioral science cannot really be value-neutral and apolitical, because those positions are political themselves.
By aiming to be value-neutral and objective, psychology is inherently conservative. Focusing on the individual lifts the burden of constructive public policy and social change.
At best, psychology helps countless people. On the flip side, psychology legitimizes a societal status quo that fails countless people. The United States is the wealthiest country in the history of the world, yet it is suffering from problems other countries have tackled more successfully.
Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights found, among the 40 million people in the United States living in poverty, “[a] shockingly high number of children in the US live in poverty. In 2016, 18% of children — some 13.3 million — were living in poverty, with children comprising 32.6% of all people in poverty.” Out of the 36 developed countries in the OECD, the United States ranked dead last in poverty in 2016, and it’s going to get worse.
Mental illness co-occurs with poverty and inadequate access to resources. The converse is also true: People do better when money and steady employment is not a perpetual worry, communities are invested in, education is adequately funded, fresh food and clean water is accessible, infrastructure is maintained, and so on.
If the aim of psychology remains limited to modifying individual behavior, then what does it mean to be well adjusted to an insane society?
