Is psychology really effective?

Some people criticize psychology as if it were a monolithic set of dogmas.

Psychology has always been at the center of a hurricane of debate and discussion.. The different theories and hypotheses that have emerged from it directly challenge us as human beings, and that is why, in many of the topics it deals with, it is difficult not to convert certain personal beliefs and feelings into an intellectual stance.

For example, when Sigmund Freud proposed his first theories on psychoanalysis, such was the controversy that arose due to his pessimistic and brutalized vision of the human being that he went so far as to say: "Progress exists, since in the Middle Ages they would have burned me, and now it is enough for them to burn my books".

This constant rubbing and clashing of views about how we behave, act and feel, added to the fact that there is not and never has been a unified theory of psychology, makes some wonder.... Is psychology really useful? Do we psychologists add value, or are we just arguing among ourselves about theories that are not grounded in reality?

Why psychology is useful

Not only is psychology useful, but in fact it is so useful that its domains are expanding more and more. If at the beginning it started out as basically a discipline of mental health and the study of perception, today the implications of research in this scientific field affect disciplines as diverse as economics, marketing, education, design, sociology and neuroscience.

Psychologists have the virtue of being at the crossroads between biology and the social sciences, applied to all facets of our lives. applied to all facets of our lives, and therefore address all aspects of human behavior and mental processes (emotional and cognitive). And they do so both by bringing these sciences and disciplines into contact with each other and by contributing their own psychological theories.

Changing the perception of the human being

One example of the effectiveness of psychology is research in cognitive science, which is helping us to learn more about how we make decisions and plans. This field of research, which is closely related to behavioral economics, tells us about the extent to which we are driven by mental shortcuts when it comes to making choices. and how we make up our perception of this fact by justifying our actions with false rational arguments about why we have acted as we have.

Similarly, psychological phenomena as curious as the Dunning-Kruger Effect reveal that we survive despite having a very unrealistic view of what we know: the most ignorant people in a subject overestimate their competencies, while the people who are most knowledgeable in a certain field of knowledge underestimate their abilities.

Another valuable piece of knowledge available to us thanks to psychology is, for example, the way in which we modify our perceptions to best fit our beliefs. This process, described by the theory of cognitive dissonance, reveals that we are not the objective observers and experiencers of reality that we take for granted.... and knowing this helps us not to let our guard down at times when someone may offer us a comforting lie that overshadows an uncomfortable but empowering truth.

Little pieces of knowledge like this, having to do specifically with psychology and not so much with neuroscience, not only break down the common sense of who we are supposed to be, but also help us understand how we can play our cards to live life as we would like to live it.

What about clinical psychology?

Another "front" from which psychology receives some criticism is the field of mental health.

On the one hand, psychotherapeutic approaches emerging from this branch of psychology are sometimes accused of ineffectiveness, and this is often due to the ignorance of assuming that non-scientific proposals such as family constellations or Freudian psychoanalysis have a guarantee of efficacy "bought and advertised" by psychologists.

This is not the case: the forms of psychotherapy and treatment tools that have empirical support are not all those offered under the umbrella of the word "psychology" and, in fact, are rejected by the colleges of psychologists.

What is certain is that psychology does have tools that have proven their effectiveness, such as Cognitive Cognitive Therapy (CCT).such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, biofeedback or Mindfulness, each of them for certain types of mental problems and disorders.

Nor are the accusations that psychology reduces people to stigmatizing labels well-founded: the denunciation of this kind of use of diagnostic categories is perfectly compatible with psychology. A diagnosis is not a word intended to absorb the whole identity of a human being; it is simply a tool with which to work. Mental disorders are not adjectives, nor does clinical psychology pretend that they are.

Psychology is not a religion

Thus, the valuable criticisms towards psychology in generalwhich are perfectly legitimate, will be useful as long as they do not stem from a straw man fallacy and knowledge.

As is the case in any science, all beliefs and theories from which one starts in this discipline are questionable... but this does not imply accusing psychology as a whole of being ineffective, because psychology is not a religion. is neither monolithic nor does it contain fundamental dogmas.. It is not a religion that depends on a single presupposition that must be believed at face value. It is only a colossal and coordinated effort to build tools and theories that are useful.