Take it from a criminal justice major who ended up going into student loan debt because I felt like I just downright “needed” to get it from a university. NOTE, I’m not saying don’t go to college, I’m saying unless you are majoring in one of the fields I named, you’d be better off enrolling at a JUCO or Community College. Now if you have a scholarship then that’s a different story. I was originally in a community college but ended up transferring because that school only offered associate degrees (my other excuse for leaving lol). College as a whole is way too fucking expensive to begin with but I feel as though it would be more worth it if you were in the majors I mentioned. I do realize that there are many graduates who have majored in other fields and feel content and that’s great.
Soft sciences in general need to be covered more in the fields OP mentioned! Psych and philosophy should be taught in high school, too. The amount of arrogant asshole STEM majors I’ve met that think experts in sociology and psychology are just making shit up is too damn high. Ironically I did a deep dive on delusions recently and it’s wild realizing that’s what some of these folks are suffering from.
To be clear - delusions are not a character flaw. We all probably have had a few in our lifetime. The fucks I’m thinking of just push their delusions onto others and become emotionally abusive by weaponizing the term against people for shit like preferring neutral pronouns. They don’t bother to ask why someone (like me) might have the preference.
/tangent
To be fair to the soc/psych skeptics, there has been quite a number of scandals where famous TED talk researchers had their big theories discredited due to failure to replicate. “Power posing” was the big meme one but there are many others including ego depletion, social priming, and the facial feedback hypothesis.
The replication crisis is extremely embarrassing for the field.
The replication is actually evidence to me of moral reasoning. There are limits to the types of experiments we can or should be willing to perform. Power posing was never considered an entire scientific model like the sex/gender distinction.
You mean the lack of replication? Yes, it’s evidence that humans are sophisticated reasoners and that simplistic “life hacks” like smiling at yourself in a mirror are not effective. But then these are among the most widely known “findings” of psychology, so the field’s reputation suffers.
Where are you getting the idea that’s one of the most widely known findings? I’m genuinely asking, I hadn’t heard about it in years.
These are all the findings that make the TED talk circuits.
And you use Ted talks to see what’s most popular??
We’re talking about widely known psychology results. TED talks, articles in the New York Times, interviews on daytime TV. We’re not talking about whose textbook is most well known in psychology departments.
Ok. I guess you think I’m being an elitist, so I just asked an LLM “What are the most popular concepts in psychology understood by the overall population, and what metrics do you use to determine that?” Chopping down the responses, I got: Cognitive Dissonance, Confirmation Bias, Personality Types (like Myers Briggs), Freud’s Psychoanalysis, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Behaviorism, IQ and Intelligence Testing, Positive Reinforcement, Depression and Anxiety, and Mindfulness and Meditation.
That’s based on search engines trends, social media mentions, media representation, surveys and polls, academic citations and book sales.
A few of those are outdated concepts, but it takes time for the general public to catch up. So, I’m not sure this supports how people in general might be skeptical of the field. It’s healthy to have some skepticism, but I was referring to people that will take one example and act like it discredits the whole field. That is some poor critical thinking that I doubt many actually believe. The same people I’ve argued with on sex/gender will also gladly talk about the benefits of some of the stuff the LLM brought up, too. There’s just a lot of societal indoctrination and sexist reasoning to try to discredit that specific theory.
Sorry I’m going a bit into AuDHD mode here. I like talking about this stuff but if it’s too much I’ll stop