Hi Bobby, no you are not being nosey at all, I like talking to someone about it as I have noone to talk to in my department and my friends still think that psychology is that woman on tv trying to give advice on divorces etc.

First of all, the atmosphere in my department is very competitive. We are 10 PhDs in my office and we ve never been for lunch together or something and noone really knows what the rest do! People are very very focused. The guy opposite me works 10 h per day SOLIDLY!

When I decided to do the PhD I thought that we would be a research group or at least people would be interested in what others do, exchanging ideas etc. Thats not the case at all! Even people who have similar topics dont talk to each other and needless to say that noone asks anyone for help with something (e.g.statistics, how I do this, how I do that). That has as an effect that we all independently spend so much time learning something that we could easily learn by someone else who has already spent weeks learning it by himself. So, we are all less effective and slower (collectively)

Another thing: my department expects each of us to have all the skills under the sun: being photoshop specialists, programming in every language they want etc...! I really believe in division of labor That is if I spend 3 months learning JAVA just to program an experiment in the way that my supervisor wants, I am 3 months behind thinking about my PhD. There are some people in my department that they LOVE programming and give me the feeling that they should have been computer scientists instead.

Furthermore, my department loves long models and hides behind terminology! Also the questions they try to solve are way too boring! Thats why my udergrads compalain that they thought that psychology is something different! I understand that someone has to do the boring stuff as well but my department (ALL of it) is focused on the detail of the detail of the detail of human behaviour. Students only learn about pitch of sounds, why we see verdical lines faster etc which I understand its called cognitive psychology but it cant be the whole interest of a department and especially teaching undergrads ONLY that!

Imagine that a guy who teaches EVOLUTIONARY psychology said in class that his political beliefes dont let him believe in sex differences (and he is the chair of the department)! So it would be better not to have this course at all or name it something different at least! By the way, lets say that my concern is not what undergrads learn. These unis are research oriented anyway and students have 50% of the courses dealing with stats! It just discusses me the way they think they are PROFESSORS just because they chose the safest and easiest way to be ones.

I ve studied psychology for 8 years and I tend to have a lower and lower opinion of it. A bunch of people arbitrarily choose to do something in a specific way and the others have to follow. Mayjor goal is to collect data! As many as you can! I have lost belief in studies long time ago. Ok maybe it is me who is weird but I really dont believe in studies anymore. They are so many, so contradictory with so many gaps, not to mention that they are only laboratory manipulations that very rarely do happen in real life.

I know you will have many objections and you will say that that is cognitive psychology all about. But psychology is also understanding human behavior (WHY things work the way they do). Being in a room and responding to blue and red lights that appear on the screen for 1 hour for me is not psychology. It should be called brain science or something else. Not psychology. If I dont know how a car works I do not start searching by measuring the gravity or the air or the colour of the car! I start by the engine! Or at least I try to break down questions that HAVE TO DO with the engine.

I think I need a blog to say what I want to say! Anyway, I will wait for your objections, I am sure you have many! But if I can help in some way through this forum, I can only advise psychology students to write papers with the minimum terminology (Stephen Hawking wrote his complex theories about the universe in a way that my gran can read, so dont fool ourselves that these psychology professors are just more clever than him) and those who are thinking of starting a PhD to try to answer a question that really matters about human behaviour! I think its a shame to do the most straighforward thing just to get the Dr title! Psychology (with all the mathematical computation following it) has turned out to be a huge joke! Thats why noone respects the field (and rightly so).

To make myself more clear, I will explain by giving an example. Cognitive psychologists will tell you for example that in the supermarket if you put a product on the upper self, the probability that this product will be chosen increases by an X percentage. Ok, I accept that and I believe it. But FOR ME this is an absolutely minor, trivial detail. What I want to know as a psychologist is WHY people will choose this product in stead of another. Why we like coke, why we like sweet and salty food etc. Now, if I know that, I dont care at all if the probability to pick it will increase by 1% if you present this product to me to the left or the right visual field!

Now, I understand the implications of cognitive psychology. Back to the previous example, advertisement can use this finding to present the bottle with coke to the left visual field so that people wont process it in a serial way but in a holistic and therefore the chances increase that they will want it without "judging" why! But is this psychology? By the way, since you asked, I published a paper after my masters and during the first 3 months of the PhD. My paper deals with "why the mind is designed to kill" which contradicts completely with my departments view that nothing is innate, everything is context-specific, learnt etc.

Now during this PhD I changed from the "why we kill" to how we perceive the offender which is 50% less interesting for me. i think the most major contributions would be the answers to: why are we designed to be aggressive? Under which conditions and why? What type of personality is more likely to commit a crime? What is the role of religion and fanaticism, psychopaths and crime etc. To sum up, I think we should focus more on core issues than minor details. Hemispheric asymmetries for example (my BCs thesis) is interesting but it is not what it makes you dream and love and kill! You will learn much more if you just print out a simple questionnaire with a single question asking: What do you like in a partner? Simple questions give so much information! But we want to make big models that noone understand (or cares to understand) just to call ourselves professors!

I am also doing psychology and agree with scamp 100%. People try to make psychology a hard science (simulating everything, creating shiny mathematical models) and they use less analytical skills. Its a pitty!
And the worst thing is that all the funding goes there, thousands of pounds are spent for research that we could do without instead of investigating areas that would be of the benefit of the society in so many ways! When I told my supervisor that what I would really want to investigate is the effects of religion (terrorism, suggestibility etc), he just said: Jesus!

I am not doing psychology, so I never thought of the things that scamp mentions here. Scamp you seem to be very passionate about it. I understand what you mean though. I think that psychology people have not been taken seriously by hard-science people (like DanB ), so psychologists try to make psychology more mathematically oriented to describe-predict behaviour. You seem to ve a fan of evolutionary psychology and this is the only area I know since I quite agree with the idea of coming from a common ancestor and that we are animals (it make sense, doesnt it?). So our behaviour is in a way designed". However many people are not ready to accept that! I ve heard many people saying over this debate: We are not animals, we have brains, logic, reasoning or whatever you call it!!!

And birds have wings and fly. This doesnt mean they are not animals!

But my point is not to make every psychologist an evolutionary one. I understand that not everyone believes in this field and I respect them. My point is that departments are biased (dont give you the choise to see whats around so that YOU can choose and not just have the illusion of choice), professors expect you to follow THEIR beliefs and they are so close minded when it comes to something "different".