The Objective and Subjective Aspects of Psychology

I think that some aspects of psychology are objective while others are subjective Because psychology covers such a wide range of topics, it’s difficult to call the whole science objective or subjective. For example, many psychologists research the brain and what happens when you poke and prod at the different parts of it. That’s pretty straight forward and objective. A brain is a brain is a brain and most people have very similar ones. Many psychologists also use mathematics and statistics to establish theories and hypotheses.

This is also straight forward and objective The number two will always be the number two no matter where it comes from or what its socio-economic background is, And almost all facets of psych use math and stats to better explain their conclusions, Therapy, however, is not objective. What works for one patient may not work for the same patient with the same problem. Why art therapy may work for one person with PTSD, group therapy might be more useful for another.

It varies so much from person to person and doctor to doctor that you can’t treat every patient the same way like you can with physical medical conditions. The flu is the flu is the flu (generally) but depression is not depression is not depression. Therapy does rely on the scientific method, though. A doctor meets with a patient, forms a hypothesis, performs research, performs experiments, and draws a conclusion. Why do they do this if therapy isn’t objective to begin with? The simple answer is: there’s no other way to do it If they just throw pills at people and hope for the best, no one will be Cured.

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They have to go patient by patient to ensure that each one of them is getting the treatment that they need. However, because every doctor interprets the data in his or her own way even more so than other medical fields, we can’t call it objective.

But we should still trust what therapists say. They can’t be objective, and that’s a good thing. If they were objective with each patient and gave them all the same treatment because they had the same disease, no one would get cured of anything. The whole point of a therapist is to be personal, to work with the patient, not against the patient. And because therapists spend their whole careers understanding a variety of patients and cases, we can trust their findings as true because they have so much experience with a wide variety of the same disease. We can’t say subjective equals bad or untrustworthy, because that’s not true. Therapy is about interpretation of the therapist as well as the patient. It’s personal. It’s subjective. And that’s okay.

And really, isn’t everything subjective? No matter what data you have, everyone will interpret that data differently based on their own personal experience. If data says that ninety percent of men hold higher positions than ninety-nine percent of women (I made that statistic up but it’s probably not far from the truth), then I’d probably interpret that as meaning that women are discriminated in the work-place because of my own experience and knowledge of gender discrimination. However, Joe Schmoe on the street might interpret that as meaning that women don’t work as hard as men do because he doesn’t have the same experiences as me. Whether these arguments are true doesn’t matter, The fact is that they’re both interpretations of the same data that would be presented in a variety of settings. And they are both very subjective.