NOT a Fair Share

I think that psychology is an important and interesting science. You use psychology everyday, and it changes and makes people’s lives. The Nature editorial, “A Fair Share” does not support this view. The author states, “Their (psychologists’) discipline is ‘softer’ than some others” (par 1.) He believes that all psychological research should be revealed to the general public. However, he also makes several valid points on why a psychologist would not want to all reveal their research. The article contains its own opposing view. Because psychology is inherently different from other scientific disciplines, a point readily made by this article, it makes sense that research done by psychologists ought to be treated differently than a chemist’s or physicist’s findings. Sigmund Freud is the most famous and in many ways influential psychologist that has ever lived. Many of his theories and terms of phrase have superseded the psychological and scientific communities (such as Freudian slip, defense mechanism, and the oedipal complex). Part of what made him and psychology so successful was that he was not constantly questioned about every little detail of the methodology behind his findings. That is largely because psychology is not meant to operate that way. This article is pushing for something that would ultimately hurt psychological research. Because it is such a variable science it would be wrong to treat it like the concrete predictable laboratory sciences. If anything, these forms of scrutiny and interrogation would just lead psychologists to keep their findings to themselves, even though the sharing of their ideas could be very beneficial to other psychologists working on the same types of problems.

In this article, the first argument that a psychologist might use to defend the privacy of their results is that because all of their research is based on actual people and their experiences, they would want to preserve the rights of privacy to their patients. Psychologists take oaths similar to the ones that doctors and lawyers to take, to protect patient or client confidentiality. Imagine if your deepest and darkest secrets were revealed to anyone other than the one person you intended to know? Anyone who has ever been betrayed by a confidant can understand why patients would certainly want their private information protected. These are secrets that may not only be embarrassing if revealed, but could cost people their jobs, status, and most important relationships. It is against their code of ethics for psychologists to reveal the information that is told to them in secrecy without compelling legal reasons, such as threats of a violent assault on another person. This is actually a crucial part of many psychological treatments. If a patient is concerned that their personal lives, thoughts, beliefs, or actions may be revealed to others, they will lose faith in their therapist and any progress they might have been able to make would be gone. A psychologist’s first goal is to help their clients, not to justify theories to the scientific community.
The second legitimate argument presented lies with the interpretation of the data collected by a psychologist. Since psychology is such a broad field filled with so many approaches, a member of a different school would obviously not agree with another psychologist’s findings, because the fundamentals of their schools of thoughts are so dramatically different. For example, a Behaviorist psychologist who believes that all human behavior can be broken down to raw scientific cause and effect would have no use for a humanist psychologist’s research about the consequences of people’s choices. In many cases there is no point in psychologists from another field or school reviewing a contrarily minded psychologist’s work. All that would result would be continuing problems between the schools and a reduction in everyone’s reputability. This would essentially be like having a fundamentalist believer in intelligent design review the work of scientist regarding evidence of evolution. It wouldn’t matter what data was presented, the fundamentalist would never agree with or believe what was in the report. It would be a useless waste of everyone’s time.
The final argument is another good one. In many cases, psychology is unlike a controlled biology experiment. Since the human mind and human actions and thoughts are what are being studied, research comes less predictably and in a less controlled manner in many cases. While some specific tests are preformed to draw conclusions, many insights come through simple patient interviews with a noticeable trend that emerges. There is no set scientific methodology, so it is very difficult to report in a way that would satisfy other scientists. There are no specific values to place on each reaction that a person would have in a certain situation. There are no calculations to come up with a concrete answer to a specific question. In psychology there are few hard and fast rules that can be applied to every scenario. This is what makes psychology such a special science. Instead of relying on rules with no exceptions, there are guidelines that can be generally used and insight to be evaluated, but it should be not be subject to the same kind of scrutiny that those other, colder sciences deal with.
While some people might argue that research ought to be revealed in order to make sure that the experiments and findings are ethical and legitimate; it is more important that psychologists are able to carry out their treatments in the manner that is best for their clients. This is the ultimate ethical concern. The average psychologist is not meant to treat the entire country, but rather the individual patients who come to them for help. It is to those individuals the psychologists are responsible, to those that they take an oath to help to the best of their ability and to protect their privacy. Once again, many psychological findings do not come from planned, coordinated experiments but rather through the observations of psychologists as they work. In many cases, findings or theories are based on hundreds of sessions with several patients that can not be reproduced in a laboratory setting. Therefore, this “data” is the only support to their findings, but it would be unethical for these therapists to betray their clients’ trust by revealing the specifics of their findings. Ultimately, while it may seem that it is for the greater good for psychologists to reveal the specifics of their work, that isn’t the case. If patients don’t feel that they can trust their psychologists, the field itself will disappear, because nobody wants their secrets told.