Is teaching psychology a waste of time?
Is teaching psychology a waste of time?
By Ross Pomeroy | Published: 2024-12-23 14:14:00 | Source: Neuropsych – Big Think
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Daniel Kahneman was perhaps the world’s leading psychologist. He died in March of this year. A Nobel laureate and professor emeritus at Princeton University, he may also be the first guru in the field. writing Thinking, fast and slow “Psychology” has either been on the bestseller list or not far off the list since its publication in 2011. However, despite his status as a professor, Kahneman has publicly considered that teaching psychology may be a complete waste of time.
What fuels this realization is not doubt or depression, but data. For Kahneman, it is a particularly classic experience. In 1975, social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Eugene Borgida of the University of Michigan told students about the famous (and somewhat unethical) “helping experiment.” In that study, several people were led into individual opaque cubicles in close proximity to each other and asked to talk to other people about their lives and problems via an intercom. Each participant took it in turn for two minutes to participate. Simple enough. Except the point of the experiment wasn’t just to give participants a forum to discuss their feelings, it was actually to see how people would react if they thought someone in their midst was dying. At one point, an actor who was participating in the experiment and stationed in one of the booths, pretended to have an epileptic seizure while speaking over the intercom, screamed for help, and then apparently collapsed.
Considering how one of their compatriots seemed to be in mortal danger, you would think that the people in the other booths would have jumped in to help. Most of them didn’t.
“Only four of the 15 participants responded immediately to the call for help. Six of them never left their room, and five others got out well after the ‘epilepsy victim’ apparently suffocated,” Kahneman described.
After detailing the procedures of the “help experiment” to the students, Nesbitt and Borgida had them watch videos of two people who allegedly participated in it. The videos painted a kind and gentle picture of the supposed participants. After watching the videos, students were asked to guess whether or not the individuals filmed had rushed to help the seizure victim. Half of the students were informed of the results of the Help Experiment and the other half were not.
Now, you might think that the students who were informed of the grim results of the experiment would have been more likely to guess that the individuals in the video did not rush to help the seizure victim. But they weren’t. In defiance of the facts, both groups maintained their rosy view of human nature.
“For psychology teachers, the implications of this study are depressing,” Kahneman wrote. “When we teach our students about the behavior of people in a helping experiment, we expect them to learn something they did not know before; we want to change the way they think about how people behave in a given situation. This goal was not achieved in the Nisbet-Borgida study, and there is no reason to believe that the results would have been different had they chosen another surprising psychological experiment.”
Interestingly, Nisbett and Borgida found a way to get their students to internalize the message they take home from the Helping Experience: feeding them compelling tales. They told a third group of students about the “help experience” procedures, showed them the videos, and then said that the two people in the videos did not come to help the seizure victim. From this information, participants accurately predicted the low proportion of people who helped the seizure victim.
So psychology may not be a waste of time, but general facts and real statistics will never outweigh solid anecdotes. In many ways, this is even more frustrating.
this condition Originally published on RealClearScience. Written by Ross Pomeroy, a regular contributor to Big Think.
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