Is psychology really effective?

Psychology has always been at the center of a hurricane of debate and discussion.. The different theories and hypotheses that have arisen from it directly challenge us as human beings, and that is why, in many of the issues he deals with, it's hard not to turn certain personal beliefs and feelings into a position intellectual.

For example when Sigmund Freud proposed his first theories on psychoanalysis, such was the controversy that arose because of his pessimistic and brutalized vision of human being who came 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 brushing and clashing of points of view about how we behave, act and feel, added to the The fact that there is not, nor has there ever been, a unified theory of psychology, makes some ask... Is psychology really useful? Do we psychologists provide added value, or do we only dedicate ourselves to arguing among ourselves about theories that do not have our feet on the ground?

Why psychology is useful

Psychology is not only useful, but in fact it is so useful that its domains are expanding more and more. If at first it began as basically a discipline of mental health and the study of perception, today the implications of the research in this scientific field they affect disciplines as diverse as economics, marketing, education, design, sociology or neurosciences.

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

Changing the perception of the human being

An example of how effective psychology is is research in cognitive science, thanks to which we know more about how we make decisions and plan. This field of research, closely related to behavioral economics, tells us about to what extent we let ourselves be carried away by mental shortcuts when choosing options and how we disguise our perception of this fact by justifying our actions with false rational arguments about why we have acted in this way.

In the same way, psychological phenomena as curious as the Dunning–Kruger effect reveal that we survive despite having a very unrealistic vision about what we know: the most ignorant people in a subject overestimate their competencies, while the wisest people in a certain field of knowledge underestimate their capabilities.

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

Small pieces of knowledge of this type, which have to do specifically with psychology and not so much with neurosciences, not only break the common sense of what we are supposed to be, but also help us understand how we can play our cards to live life as we would like to.

What about clinical psychology?

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

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

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

The truth is Psychology does have tools that have proven their effectiveness, as the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, he biofeedback or the mindfulness, each of them for certain types of mental problems and disorders.

Nor are the accusations that psychology reduces people to stigmatizing labels have any foundation: the denunciation of this kind of use of diagnostic categories is perfectly compatible with the psychology. A diagnosis is not a word that tries to absorb the entire identity of a human being, it is simply a tool with which one works. Mental disorders are not adjectives nor from clinical psychology is it intended that they be.

Psychology is not a religion

So that, Valuable criticisms of psychology in general, which are perfectly legitimate, will be useful as long as they do not come from a fallacy of the straw man and knowledge.

As in any science, all the beliefs and theories from which this discipline is based are questionable... but this does not imply that psychology as a whole is ineffective, because this It 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's just a colossal, coordinated effort to build useful tools and theories.