Seeing Eye to Eye: Why Psychology is Mostly Garbage

by Theodore Dalrymple
Taki's Magazine
Feb. 08, 2016

Of all the subjects of academic study, psychology is probably the most useless, or at least the most useless by comparison with its pretensions to use. In a century and a half, it has not told us anything of undisputed value. It is subject to absurd fashions, and its published experiments, even when they are interesting, are often either not reproducible or their relevance to life is unclear. The overall cultural effect of psychology is negative, insofar as it tends to alienate people from their own direct experience and causes them to speak of themselves as if they were mere objects. They then attribute their actions to forces or things other than their own decisions, one of the popular explanatory forces or things at the moment being neurotransmitters. This is a boon to drug companies but not necessarily to the population as a whole.

An article in Scientific American describes research into the length of eye contact that we humans find pleasant or supportable. This is an interesting subject, on which we all have instinctive opinions.

For example, the managers of various institutions in which I worked were often very bad at eye contact. If you met them in the corridor they would often sidle past you quickly as if blown by some invisible wind, their eyes averted to the not-very-interesting wall next to them so that they did not have to acknowledge your presence. I concluded not only that they were up to no good, but that they knew they were up to no good, and that they knew that I knew they were up to no good; but they had to do as they were told and were only obeying orders. Even at meetings they could not look you in the eye. In a way, I felt sorry for them, as they lived in fear of other people’s eyes.

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