The Psychology Trap

Evolutionary psychology is one of the most controversial schools of thought of the past several decades. Those who firmly believe in this theory hold that every aspect of human behavior can ultimately be explained by the selective advantages our ancestors retained in their struggle for survival. This claim looks, on the surface, like it puts rationalization first, but if you go around recklessly applying it to explain human behavior, you’ll end up with some pretty big jokes. Look at the examples the book uses — just wearing a baseball cap backward is enough to spin out a whole pile of theory. (See A Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, p.92 — that’s really all there is to it.)

This kind of thing really does come up often in psychology. In positive psychology, for instance, researchers often try to examine how subjectively happy a person feels, but just like with those random human behaviors, how could someone else possibly detect or observe another person’s subjective views and feelings? Of course, psychology naturally tends to use scales to measure such things, but these scales are all built on top of certain theoretical assumptions — for instance, the assumption that subjective well-being is made up of a certain set of factors. Any proper quantitative analysis is, without exception, built on a foundation of various assumptions!

Talking about this, I wonder if you’ve noticed — certain subjective psychological and behavioral matters, under the scale of certain kinds of research, can seem to be analyzed, can seem to be compared… just like what one philosopher once said: man is a machine with a soul. We are governed and manipulated by a kind of vulgar consensus, a kind of prejudice that runs through psychology, and under this bias, faith reduces a person to nothing more than a simulated machine. Communism can, in this sense, dictate what counts as happiness and what counts as correct; so too can capitalism; so too can Taoism, Buddhism, and Islam.

To put a fresher spin on something I often say: our behavior and psychology may well just be a bunch of clichéd viewpoints — when it comes to things that can be reduced to symbolic operations, like the conduct of the masses or social etiquette, analysis genuinely works. But what about human beings themselves? It’s entirely possible that human beings really are complex machines, too difficult to fully grasp, because we are, always and forever, irreducibly ourselves.