Unless you’re a physicist, mathematician, computer scientist or something else of that ilk, you’ll have heard this before: “Oh, you study X now, do you? And what job are you going to get with that degree?”, said in a suitably derogatory tone. It’d be hypocritical for me to say that I’ve never indulged in a bit of academic snobbery- who’s never had a joke at the expense of the drama or media arts students?
However, there’s a clear difference between a bit of light-hearted subject-differences banter and genuine disdain for degrees that apparently aren’t ‘pure’, ‘scientific’, or ‘difficult’ enough to merit mutual respect. I’ve experienced this most often online, where some students are happy to hide behind the protection of their cum-stained computer screens and deride psychology as being unscientific and even pointless.
These true academic snobs, who utterly believe their own (ironically) uneducated spoutings, like everything to be factual. If it isn’t objective and quantifiable, it isn’t worth studying. A knee-jerk reaction from many psychology students is to point out neuroscience, biological psychology, all that jazz, as being examples of true scientific merit. Yet the naysayers insist that this isn’t really psychology, but biology.
If there’s one thing that I’ve learnt from this degree over the past couple of years, it’s the importance of levels. No, not that fantastic Avicii track, but levels of analysis. To a certain extent this is lacking not only in other degree courses but in other subject areas generally; nothing can tackle different levels in the cohesive and unifying way that psychology (potentially) can.
To clarify, the point I’m making is that social psychology is not as different to neuroscience as these purists would like to think. It’s just studying the brain on a different level- in the case of social, on a more gross level, looking at humans as individuals influenced by other humans. One could argue that the higher levels of psychology could be reduced down to the nitty gritty stuff, neurons and dendrites and firing rates and hormones and so on. But in this process of reduction, you lose a lot of valuable and relevant information.
If there is one thing I might critique in terms of my degree, it might be that although different levels of study are often considered within, say, a biological psychology module, these levels are not considered across psychology as a whole discipline. Yet the current direction psychology seems to be heading is all about how the higher level stuff (how good a musician is at playing an instrument, for example) is represented in terms of the lower level stuff, such as brain imaging data, crossing these crumbling borders between different ‘modules’ of psychology.
It is very tempting to think of such studies as being unidirectional- the lower level stuff explains the higher level stuff. The bidirectionality is subtle yet apparent; even just considering the plasticity of the brain and how our real world experiences can manipulate its structure demonstrates that this relationship is not as simple as it first appears.
So how does this all relate back to the issue of academic snobbery? Well, those who study biology should be well aware that their subject is, in effect, applied chemistry; those who study chemistry are simply studying applied physics; and those studying physics are, of course, just applying mathematics. Does this mean that biology is less valuable than physics? That physics is less valuable than maths? Of course not. So why can’t this appreciation of scientific subjects be extended throughout all levels of academic knowledge- if biology, chemistry, physics and maths are the ‘neuroscience’ of psychology, why aren’t the social psychology equivalents, the humanities and arts and so on, which are inherently linked via different levels, also considered valuable?
paucis verbis 