Comment by disgruntledphd2
1 day ago
> Tbph, I don't get how someone with a PhD in psychology doesn't just defend this industry, but actively works for it. You must know some of the damage being done, after all those years in school.
Honestly man, I went and got my PhD because of the GFC (no jobs), and aimed to be able to provide myself (and potential family) a stable income.
My options were 1. pharma (my PhD was on the placebo effect so this would have been easiest). Super evil though
2. Finance (also super evil, and responsible for the GFC)
3. Tech (which back then wasn't perceived as evil).
So I picked tech, and honestly given the options above, I'd do the same today (although I now work for a fintech so fml).
And like, I (with a PhD in psychology and many years in advertising) don't understand why so many tech people hate advertising. Like, our society is messed up for a bunch of reasons, of which advertising is one of the least dodgy.
I think that people find it easy to blame societal problems on external influences, and advertising is a good scapegoat for why people behave in ways that one finds inexplicable.
Like, if you work for a fossil fuel company, are you equally unethical? What about finance? I'm sure that basically everyone in those industries can tell you a story about how their company or industry makes the world better, and most of those stories have some truth.
Honestly, if I could give us all (including myself) one piece of advice is to stop looking for single explanations. Basically everything interesting is caused and driven by lots of complicated stuff, and nothing is purely good or purely bad. We all just make different tradeoffs, and out of those tradeoffs we build a culture and a society.
(Note: back when I was an undergrad I would probably have agreed with everything you say about advertising, but it just doesn't rate as that impactful to me anymore, given the weak evidence that it does much).
It sounds like you rationalize that work a lot... But there's a whole lot of self-contradiction and logic abuse going on.
* "Pharma is super evil. Finance is super evil." But also, "nothing is purely good or bad, we all just make different tradeoffs." You see it, right? No?
* Tech "wasn't perceived as evil" when you made your career choice? After 2008? Buddy. And what happened to it all just being tradeoffs?
* "If you work for a fossil fuel company, are you equally unethical?" - this is what's known in the field as the false equivalence fallacy, if you remember that one. Also, yes, if you work for one of the companies which have used advertising to spread climate change FUD for 50 years, then I personally consider you ethically sus.
* "Basically everything interesting is caused and driven by lots of complicated stuff" - appeal to complexity.
* "our society is messed up for a bunch of reasons, of which advertising is one of the least dodgy" So you acknowledge it's one of the reasons... Until, at least, you again claim there's "weak evidence that it does much".
* "people find it easy to blame societal problems on external influences" - Oh, the critics are oversimplifying? Are there no sophisticated critiques out there based on psychological research that might identify specific harmful mechanisms? You studied this shit, so I know you must have at least heard of them.
* "I, with a PhD in psychology... don't understand why so many tech people hate advertising" - Idk man, feels like someone with a PhD in psych should be able to understand that just fine. Really dunno what you're missing there.
Taken together, these contradictions suggest to me that there's a lot of post-hoc rationalization going on. There are more consistent ethical frameworks out there than 'shit is complicated' and 'well, nothing is pure evil or pure good anyway'. They might not be super popular right now, especially in tech, finance, fossil fuels, advertising, pharma, etc - but they're out there.
A lot of psych research connects to that old quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". Cognitive dissonance? Moral disengagement? Motivated reasoning? The bias blind spot? ... Idk man, I'm not a psych PhD.