Psychology is a Science and its Scope is Narrow

Feb 9, 2022 | For Therapists, Mental Illness

What psychology fails to understand is that if you want all the privileges of a being a science you also have to shoulder all the responsibilities of it. That includes the admission that while what you prognosticate is based on science it only applies to the subjects experimented upon. The people experimented on are generally middle to high class, from western developed countries, educated, and mostly white. You can’t make generalizations to the population at large based on these experiments just like I can’t say my research on a COVID vaccine applies to an AIDS vaccine.

Platitudes thrown around in a culture steeped in modern psychology like, “by and large social risks and vulnerability will pay off”, “humans basically want to do right by each other”, “sex is pleasurable physical fitness”, “I am happiest when I express my identity to the fullest extent”, “people want to talk to me” sound nice rolling off the tongue. And all these phrases hold true for the demographic psychologists experiment on but far less for those they don’t. It’s like a vaccine that works far worse on variants.

Additionally practices like setting boundaries backfire for the large proportion of the marginalized who are generally in exploitative or abusive situations. In most of the world one must mute their identity just to survive. You can’t be out and proud in Afghanistan or anywhere Pentecostal Christianity has taken power. Also individualism is a luxury of rich countries. In poor ones you are stationed in webs of interdependence and if you were to go it alone you wouldn’t make it very far.

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