Take it from a criminal justice major who ended up going into student loan debt because I felt like I just downright “needed” to get it from a university. NOTE, I’m not saying don’t go to college, I’m saying unless you are majoring in one of the fields I named, you’d be better off enrolling at a JUCO or Community College. Now if you have a scholarship then that’s a different story. I was originally in a community college but ended up transferring because that school only offered associate degrees (my other excuse for leaving lol). College as a whole is way too fucking expensive to begin with but I feel as though it would be more worth it if you were in the majors I mentioned. I do realize that there are many graduates who have majored in other fields and feel content and that’s great.
We’re talking about widely known psychology results. TED talks, articles in the New York Times, interviews on daytime TV. We’re not talking about whose textbook is most well known in psychology departments.
Ok. I guess you think I’m being an elitist, so I just asked an LLM “What are the most popular concepts in psychology understood by the overall population, and what metrics do you use to determine that?” Chopping down the responses, I got: Cognitive Dissonance, Confirmation Bias, Personality Types (like Myers Briggs), Freud’s Psychoanalysis, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Behaviorism, IQ and Intelligence Testing, Positive Reinforcement, Depression and Anxiety, and Mindfulness and Meditation.
That’s based on search engines trends, social media mentions, media representation, surveys and polls, academic citations and book sales.
A few of those are outdated concepts, but it takes time for the general public to catch up. So, I’m not sure this supports how people in general might be skeptical of the field. It’s healthy to have some skepticism, but I was referring to people that will take one example and act like it discredits the whole field. That is some poor critical thinking that I doubt many actually believe. The same people I’ve argued with on sex/gender will also gladly talk about the benefits of some of the stuff the LLM brought up, too. There’s just a lot of societal indoctrination and sexist reasoning to try to discredit that specific theory.
Sorry I’m going a bit into AuDHD mode here. I like talking about this stuff but if it’s too much I’ll stop