Refashioning Psychology

I have had a couple of ideas that just keep going round in circles so I am going to try to make sense of them by writing about them.

Some of the impetus for this come from the ideas around decolonising the curriculum and how this might impact on psychology. Some of it comes from the ways that potential therapies became reshaped within societies, from psychoanalysis to mindfulness, the reshaping has often been to promote changing the individual and ignoring social change.

I am imagining that this will be a short series of blog posts rather than one long post. My attention wanes with longer posts, and I imagine the same is true of readers. So the purpose of this post is to sketch out the major things I think I need to cover.

Mainstream psychology is a colonising force

 By mainstream psychololgy I mean the core of academic discipline as taught in psychology degrees in the English speaking world. The strong claim that I am making is that this psychology is a particularly USA psychology (and comes from a particular consituancy within the USA), however it is sold as a univerisal psychology. This has had many and varied impacts and I am going to try to give evidence that is has changed the way we think about ourselves, and was one of the forces that led to late 20th century neoliberalism, or the ways that capitalism represents itself currently.

The psy-complex as an amplifier of this colonisation

The psy-complex refers to all the various professions that try to treat and regulate the human psyche. I first came across the term in the writing of Ian Parker, and he cites Nikolas Rose. I am including the bits of psychology taught as if they were true found in other disciplines that deal with people, from business studies to teaching in the psy-complex.

Popular psychology is also complicit

 The relationship between the academic discipline and popular psychology is, at best, fraught with difficulty. Even if popular psychology does not reflect academic psychology, however, the focus on individual change rather than social action does.

Methodological mutterings

I do not believe that quantification is bad, and qualitative methods are good. There are, however, some questions to answer, for example given that the two main statistical tools, linear regression, and ANOVA were invented by eugenicists to what extent does this infect the whole discipline with a particular world view?

Should we try to be scientists

I am a big fan of science, but is psychology a suitable subject for scientific understanding?

My alternatives

Finally my refashioned psychology.

So that is, at least, six parts, although if any post needs a couple of thousand words I might split the post over two or more posts.


 

On brain scans and data visualisations

A friend shared this image on their FB newsfeed.

Under the image was the following text

"
"This is the world’s first ever magnetic resonance image showing a mother and child’s bond.
The image is of neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe kissing her two month old son.
The child’s brain appears to be smoother and darker. This is because it has significantly less white matter. White matter is comprised of myelin, which is fatty tissue that acts as insulation for the wires that communicate messages inside your brain."

It looked wrong to me. It is unusual for an magnetic resonance image (MRI) to show activity. So I did a Google reverse image search, Google is not my search engine of preference I use one that doesn't track you for marketing purposes, but there is functionality in Google  not available elsewhere. I found several links to the same story.

Follow the link above and it is the scientist who made the image giving her account, she is also the mother in the image. Note the difference, no activity graph.

This is one of the most famous activity graphs from fMRI. This Wired article explains the story (note the website tracks you and only allows 4 free article views a month).

The researchers scanned the dead salmon's brain as the salmon "reacted" to various images of people interacting. They then compared blood flow as the fish 'looked' at different images. The graph above shows the statically significant differences they found.

The researchers deliberately did not use any techniques for doing multiple comparisons within a set of data, which is what gave the false positive result. This was done some time ago, and it was meant to be a wake up call to researchers in the field to do their statistics more carefully.

Conclusions

A data visualisation is not a scan. By calling it a 'scan' it makes (at least some) people think it is an unmediated picture of reality. When I used the dead salmon in a seminar at least one student could not see beyond the image, she asked if the researchers were sure the salmon was dead, as the 'picture' of the brain clearly showed activity.

I strongly believe that people in general have a bias towards biological explanations rather than psychological explanations. The image without the fake activity graph is cute, showing a proud scientist and her young child. The picture with the fake activity shows "a mother's and child bond" as biological reality.

The mixing of fakery with more factual text (everything after the first line, although the biological bias continues) seems like a particularly pernicious way of lying.