Top10 - Theories in Psychology That Aren't Nonsense? - Part 2
Snapshot of a living brain (not pictured: the mind).
This second section for theories in psychology that aren’t just unverifiable hogwash are more focused on finding happiness and meaning within life. Because really, isn’t that generally the point?
Let’s see what Psychology has for us this time around.
5. People very often seek to avoid the responsibility of coming up with meaning for their lives, or meeting the expectations and hopes of others.
Existentialism is all about taking responsibility for the fact that you’re alive. That means accepting the inherent responsibilities you have not only as a human, but for whatever you're born with or into. Among many other morals, the primary existentialist creed is to face the unchangeable challenges of life as though one were a metaphorical Sisyphus – forever walking up an incline with ethereal and abstract weights upon our shoulders. The point of living, they say, is to face your responsibilities and deal with how well – or how ineffectively – you’re coping with challenge.
Why is there an entire school of philosophical thought dedicated to owning up to your challenges and facing them legitimately? Because people often want to escape life’s challenges any way they can.
Eric Hoeffer is one psychologist who has written at length about the curious human response of dodging responsibilities about large life challenges and cozying into a very busying task or lifestyle. One example he provides is individuals who join an all-encompassing cause to escape responsibility for creating meaning within the present. People allow themselves to be swept up in larger causes in order to be freed of responsibility for their lives and to escape the banality of the present, which offers no inherent meaning. Facing up to the possibility that the present is devoid of all but subjective meaning is often very hard, because of the implications that thought creates about the larger human experience.
Or how about the people – you may know at least one – who don’t mind being sick because it allows them to dodge the responsibility of having to be motivated and competent? Embracing the sick role is by no means a really widespread occurrence, but of course the drive to escape responsibility via lifestyle choices is also something of a continuum.
“A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.”
--Eric Hoeffer
Owning up to the responsibilities of the present, many writers of the psychological canon believe, is a continual effort to embrace life – difficult or not.
4. If you know someone’s personality “type”, their behavior makes much more sense.
Knowing a personality type goes a long way towards understanding why that personality behaves as it does – and predicting how it will behave next. This goes for influencing people, winning over friends, avoiding enemies, helping someone overcome problems, empathizing – and of course, living with the opposite sex. The fact is that mostly everyone falls somewhere within several broad categories of personality. These may range from the extraverted-introverted scale to continuums based on one’s ability to try new things or meet new people.
Now, this is not to say that once you’ve memorized personality typology that you can instantly start predicting behavior and reading thoughts. If you want to predict behavior, you have to think of the human response in terms of a continuum of possibility. For example, theoretical physicist Erwin Schrodinger once theorized that every state of being cannot be fully predicted without being sensed – that until you view something, it exists in a “potential state” of probabilities. The closer you get to viewing something, the closer the wave function, as Schrodinger called it, approached a definitive state where you finally reach the highest level of probability and view an object as the state it’s in. So too is the prediction of behavior – a continuum of probability that gets closer to being very predictable the closer you get to a display of action or emotion.
Carl Jung is the psychologist most often credited with popularizing personality tests and dichotomies with his famous psychological typology. His theory of psychological “types” became the one of the more famous cases within psychology to pigeon-hole everyone into easily classifiable categories. Of course, Isabel Myers was also famous for developing many apt personality tests to determine one’s placement along those continuums, like the famous Briggs Myers test.
The Briggs-Myers Personality Typology
When you understand where a person is coming from via understanding their personality type, their behavior makes a lot more sense. And when someone’s behavior makes a lot more sense, it becomes that much more forgivable. When my wife finds me playing videogames online at half past four in the morning, she understands that I have needs for overcoming challenges related to reflexes and dominance that can easily be sublimated by an Xbox. Therefore, even though something like the need to challenge and fight against people that may be halfway across the world sounds incredibly stupid and pointless to her, she knows that it fits my personality type to enjoy that sort of thing. Likewise, I know that she prefers things that’re softer, snugger and completely unnecessary in the comfort department. Knowing that items like these coincide with her personality, I don’t (entirely) view them as pointless purchases that aren’t necessary.