Comment by 7thaccount

8 months ago

This is a little blunt, but I knew a lot of people who went into psychology and got degrees. They were not very gifted academically (C students in highschool) and went into psych as it was an easy major that let them coast and party for four years. I'm sure this isn't the case for all psychology majors of course, but it was very different on average than what I was used to in engineering or the hard sciences where you generally had 4 years of excruciating math classes including calculus and differential equations that weeded out most.

Psychology is very dependent on statistics and experiments. That can be complicated and after going through those classes I simply don't trust the majority of students (or their professors) to get any of that right. It's why I roll my eyes every time the radio guy talks about the results of another pop psych study. I knew some psych majors big into new age crystal stuff and legitimately believed it all as well as a bunch of additional pseudoscience garbage. That kind of thing is a lot more rare in say physics where it's really hard to get through the program without a rational brain.

Again, there are probably some brilliant folks drawn to that field who knows how to do solid research, but my experiences suggest that the signal to noise ratio may be suspect.

Psych majors with just a BS degree - totally agree with you.

PhDs, though - some more rigor is involved. Definitely not C-grade level folks (or if they were, they've rectified that problem). But still, we do have a replication crisis...