Essay, Research Paper: What Is Pyschology

What is Psychology?
Before entering the History of Psychology class, I thought that psychology was the science of human and animal behavior, experience and mental processes. I still believe that this statement is true, but now I know that psychology is more than that. I also felt that psychology is used to help people through analyzing their behavior, this is true but it is also used to classify people. Now I can see that psychology is a social construct used to organized people, manipulate people, and to maintain the status quo.
Knowledge, power and interest, all three must be explored when discussing the virtues of psychology. In our Genes, Lewontin, Rose and Kamin, discuss the legitimacy of inequality. In this chapter they discuss how the bourgeois revolution destroyed random chance of social class and allowed the ideology of natural differences to be brought forth, natural differences, referring to our genetic make-up. In other words we are all on the same playing field, and any differences that come about is because of our genes, which are inherited. Inheritance in this context has two meanings –“social and the biological--legitimizes the passage of social power from generation to generation. It can still be asserted that we have an equal opportunity society with each individual rising or falling in the social scale according to merit, provided we understand that merit is carried in the genes”(Lewontin, Rose & Kamin p.72). It is of the interest of the bourgeois class to perpetuate the myth of reification, so that they can maintain their power and keep the knowledge. Jacobi said that this social illusion serves to maintain the status quo, reification helps us to forget that we can be an active part of society.
Also while in this class I learned that intelligence testing was at first used by Alfred Binet to identify children whose intelligence level was not at the proper point and increase the intelligence of that child. “The intelligence test was to be used as a diagnostic instrument” (Lewontin, Rose, Kamin p.84), Binet did not suggest that IQ test served to label the child, or to say that intelligence is innate or has fixed characteristics that could not be changed. The validity of IQ test in past research has been colored, social and cultural consideration and the interest of the researchers were not been taken into account when writing these test. This is the case with Sir Cyril Burt who administered test to two small groups of schoolchildren. One group of children was the son of Oxford dons while the other group was from the townspeople. Burt said that the children of the higher-class did better on the test because, intelligence was inherited. Today intelligence test are still used to classify people of race, class, and gender, and it is asserted that intelligence is and unchangeable fixed quantity, of genetic origin, a common ideology shared by the United States and most western countries. Although past research has contradicted this view.
Ideology is a term that I thought that I was familiar with, but an ideology represents itself as having a commitment to objective truths, based on facts which are arrived at independently from interest. When in fact an ideology is colored by ones social views and can be a way on maintaining the status quo. Ideology can be seen as a justification or rationalization, which claims to be neutral and objective but has tinted structural values. Ideology are created for reification, so the past can be objectified and no longer have human meaning. Ideologies can con be used in interpreting worldviews past or present. A dialectical view is appropriate because it incorporates the understanding of the present, past, objective, subjective, scientistic and cultural.
What I found to be most important is taking this class is my place in history. I see that my presence in psychological community is important to produce a balance view of the world through Black women eyes. Though out the history of psychology, white male upper class views have dominated the interpretation of the world. Others of diverse backgrounds are needed to disrupt the status quo, so they to can utilize the trinity of knowledge, power, and interest.



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