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The Diametrics of Psychology Today
In today’s world psychology comes in four distinctive versions.
Posted January 9, 2015
The diametric model of cognition suggests that there is an important distinction to be made about the different types of psychology that exist in today’s world. As the cladogram left illustrates, psychology in general can be sub-divided into opposed sub-types:
- scientific psychology, which is objective, experimental, fact-based, quantitative, rational, systematic, refutable, and universalistic but incomplete; by contrast to
- folk psychology, which is subjective, experiential, belief-based, qualitative, intuitive, unsystematic, credulous, particularistic and eclectic.
Alternatively, and in terms of the diametric model’s twin modes of cognition you could say that scientific psychology is mechanistic, but folk psychology is mentalistic. Indeed, as I pointed out in a recent post, there is now good evidence from neuro-imaging that the distinction between mentalistic and mechanistic modes of cognition is not simply theoretical, but reflects real “anti-correlated,” reciprocally-inhibitory neural networks in the brain. If this is so, then folk and scientific psychology may differ diametrically not only cognitively, but in terms of how they are actually processed in the cortex.
Another way of making much the same point would be to say that whereas folk psychology is according to the diametric model an evolved, genetically-based adaptation symptomatically deficient in autism and hyper-trophic in psychosis, scientific psychology is an acquired, learned, culturally-based and consciously-elaborated academic discipline. Indeed, high functioning autistics sometimes compensate by being better than average at intuitive, every-day folk physics, which differs from formal or scientific physics in exactly the same way that folk psychology differs from scientific psychology.
Additionally, in modern Western societies you could distinguish between
- popular psychology, understood as the folk psychology of the majority of the population, by contrast to
- official psychology, understood as the folk psychology of the ruling political, media, and academic élites.
Popular psychology in modern Western societies is the product of tradition, education and indoctrination, and is expressed in collective wisdom, urban mythology, and popular literature. Official psychology, however, is socially, culturally and legally enforced; disseminated by education, the media, and political propaganda; and is dogmatic, but often ambivalent in the way it is expressed. To put the matter another way, you could say that official psychology is the ruling elites’ attempt to mould and manipulate popular psychology in ways which serve their various agendas.
These differences emerge in the following comment by Kingsley Browne, an academic and lawyer who specializes in sex differences in employment, remuneration, and achievement. According to Prof Browne, “The assumption that humans possess a sexually monomorphic mind is pervasive in the social sciences and the public-policy literature…”—or what I am calling official psychology. He goes on: “This social-science dogma stands in contrast to the common-sense intuition of the untutored’’—or what I would call folk psychology—“that there is a fundamental difference between male and female. Recent scholarship in psychology, biology, and anthropology”—scientific psychology, in other words—“has cast substantial doubt on the view of the intellectual establishment and confirmed the understanding of the ‘man on the street’”—or popular psychology—“that the … two sexes differ in important ways.”*
These comments also cast light on the ambivalence I mentioned above as a characteristic of official psychology. This stems from the fact that, like popular psychology in the modern world, but much more so, official psychology attempts to integrate aspects and findings of scientific psychology that fit its political, social, and administrative agendas, while denying, ignoring, or anathematizing those that do not. Once again, Kingsley Browne provides a telling example relating to sex differences in cognitive skills:
Female superiority at a given task is generally not something that people feel required to explain, justify, or remedy. I am unaware, for example, of initiatives to decrease the “verbal fluency gap” between girls and boys. However, on those tasks at which males excel—such as mathematical reasoning—once again comes the insistent search for a social cause and demands for intervention. Someone must be to blame for the “mathematical reasoning gap,” although not for the “verbal fluency gap.”**
Another example might be official psychology’s use of IQ test results which endorse its dogmas while denying or disputing those that seemingly contradict them. Perhaps the most striking case is the widely reported Flynn effect, which suggests that IQ has risen throughout the twentieth century in modern Western societies, and is indeed rising increasingly throughout the developing world today. Yet when exactly the same tests reveal ethnic differences, they are ignored, denied, and their authors stigmatized as "racists" by politicians, the press, and academia. This is doubly ironic because, in the first place, Third World IQs would have to rise from a lower level to reveal a Flynn effect just as they did in the West. And secondly, this in turn suggests that ethnic IQ differences are much the same as those between us in the West today and our great-grandparents, as I argued in an earlier post.
This selective, self-serving and prejudicial use of science by official psychology means that, by contrast to scientific psychology, it is complex in the sense defined in a recent post. In other words, official psychology confounds and confuses mentalistic and mechanistic, folk and scientific, psychologies. Indeed, as I pointed out in the same post, official psychology is littered with what I called cognitive complexes understood in the Freudian sense of “complex.” The IQ controversy is one of the most notable, but others are the nature/nurture controversy, particularly as applied to ethnic or sex differences, as we have just seen. Indeed, the bio-phobic denial of genetic factors in group and individual psychology and the dogmatic insistence on social, economic, and environmental determinism seen in modern Western official psychological doctrine is worryingly reminiscent of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, described in an earlier post.
But what of popular psychology, for existence as exemplified in leading magazines such as Psychology Today? Unlike official psychology, popular psychology like that seen in the pages and on the websites of such publications is notably less self-serving, domineering, and dogmatic than its official counterpart. On the contrary, popular psychology in a supposedly democratic, open society ought—and indeed often does—reflect diverse and widely differing points of view and angles of interpretation. Ideally, it ought to be in a position to integrate scientific findings much more easily than its official sibling, and to tolerate a much wider spectrum of theoretical perspectives.
* Browne, Kingsley R. "Women at War: An Evolutionary Perspective." Buffalo Law Review 49, no. 1 (2001): 51-247.
** Browne, Kingsley R. "Law, Biology, Sex, and Politics." In Law & Evolutionary Biology: Selected Essays in Honor of Margaret Gruter on Her 80th Birthday, edited by Lawrence A. Frolik, 73-86. Portola Valley, CA: Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, (2000).
