by Pavel Podolyak

Created on: June 28, 2009

Today's Psychology Has Roots in Studying Misery Instead of Success and is Thus Shunned as a Field

Psychology is a very young field. It began to blossom productively once the power of the field's 19th century founding fathers declined. Psychology only started to integrate real hard science of biology (and the corresponding physicality of pharmaceuticals) half a century ago.

Fundamentally, nothing seems more important than the study of our mental faculties, constructs to better explain why we think or feel the way we do, and thus finding ways to modify ourselves more to our liking. We've heard the ancient suggestion "know thyself" many times but we still treat psychology as the co-equal of other soft sciences like sociology, economics, or cultural anthropology. Surely all those are important, have connections with psychology, and should be studied alongside it in an integrated manner.

However, as Nietzsche put it, psychology is the mother of the sciences and we need to prioritize study of ourselves over groups and interest rates. We, as humans, (and our thoughts and personalities) are more important and more physically tangible than concepts of marginal tax rates, legislative structures, and cultural evolution. Understanding how we think and feel, learning to augment and modify ourselves, and to think in new ways obviously has direct effect on how we approach and view other sciences.

So why the socio-cultural neglect of psychology? The answer, besides the relative youth of the field, is that being labeled crazy, dumb, and different often got you killed (often horribly) for most of human history. Psychology did a lot of classification of human behavior and has labeled much of that behavior maladaptive and in need of change. Most humans have a difficult time thinking in shades of gray so anything different or maladaptive is viewed through the binary lens of normal/abnormal, healthy/sick, self reliant/dependent, good/evil, crazy/sane etc. Nobody wants to be on the other side of the absolutist fence. In most of the world, you either buck up and survive long enough to have kids or you might as well not live at all.

Reality is much more complex. Human population varies greatly in how much personal power individuals have. Personal ability to influence the environment directly affects how many resources one will have, how one will be treated, how likely one is to combine one's genes with a really good mate, etc. The more influence one has over surroundings, the more one

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