Can Psychology Be Taught?

Janov's Reflections     (Click to access!)

Psychology and Ideology.  By Peter Prontzos (3/6)  

My comment:

Can psychology be taught?

In your 1/6 you referred to Daniel Kahneman (awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics) and his fascinating book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. In one chapter, he is describing experiments, which show that people will not draw from base rate information, which in turn may lead to the uncomfortable conclusion that teaching psychology is mostly a waste of time.

I will try to boil down the Kahneman chapter (which can be recommended in its full version!). In the renowned “Helping Experiment” each one of a number of participants was to talk in turn for about two minutes, over the intercom, about their lives and problems. A stooge said he felt a seizure coming on and asked for someone to help him, and he faked a fit.

Only four of fifteen participants responded to the appeal for help. The others felt relived when they knew that others had heard the request for help.

Videos of interviews with people who had participated, showed they were nice, normal, decent people with entirely conventional hobbies, spare-time activities and plans for the future. After watching the videos the students guessed how quickly the particular person had come to aid the stricken stranger. Using two test groups, one knowing the outcome of the original test (that 27% of the participants were immediately helpful) the other not, the predictions were identical. Both the test groups predicted that the interviewed individuals would rush to the victim’s aid. Please note that the second group knew both the procedure of the original experiment and its result. The interviewed people they had just seen had not helped the stranger!!

Students exempt themselves (and their friends and acquaintances), quietly, from the conclusions of experiments that surprise them. Being presented with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. However, being surprised by individual cases - nice people who had not helped - they realized that helping is more difficult than they had thought and first then their guesses were accurate.

Subject’s unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.

Most of us think of ourselves as decent people who would rush to help in such a situation, and we expect other decent people to do the same. Even normal, decent people do not rush to help when they expect others to take on the unpleasantness of dealing with a seizure. And that means you and me too!

Jan Johnsson