Hard and Soft

I have been thinking a lot about subjective experience lately.  One of the main complaints about psychology (especially from the so-called hard sciences) is that you can't really study subjective experience in an objective way.  For example, a microbiologist can look at cells under  microscope; there is something tangible they can see and 'feel'.  A psychologist can't hold someone's attachment style in their hands; it's a totally theoretical construct.

Psychologists are also humans with their own biases and perceptions and implicit assumptions that they make, and they study other humans with biases, perceptions, and implicit assumptions.  (There is a quote I really love that says, "You can't do clear observation if you aren't in the field.  You can't be a pure observer if you're now in the field."  All psychologists have no choice but to be in the field.)  We work really hard, as a discipline, to make all these subjective things as objective as possible by carefully formulating theories, carefully constructing measures (interviews, experimental tasks, tests, questionnaires...), carefully controlling as many variables as we can, and carefully analyzing our data with carefully designed statistics.

In the end, though, being a human with biases, perceptions, and assumptions is complicated.  There is so much that influences how we are, and frankly, subjective experience matters.  To me, part of the value of psychology is that it is subjective to some degree.  That subjectivity also gives us flexibility - the task is to find the theory and accompanying constructs that best explain the phenomena we observe in real people.  I'm not saying we should abandon our attempts to be scientific in our approach to studying psychology at all (that's what philosophy is);  I am saying we should acknowledge the subjective, 'soft,' elements of the discipline, and use them to our advantage.

All the flack that psychology takes is symptomatic of a larger trend in our culture to undervalue 'softness,' by which I mean things that are less than concrete, things that are ephemeral, things that are not tangible, in short, things that are subjective.  Someone told me recently that I need to stop starting sentences with, 'I feel' and use, 'I think' instead (this was in a non-academic context - had it been at school, I would have been more ok with it).  Why should what I feel be less legitimate than what I think?  Why is intuition a less valid way of knowing than reasoning?  Again, I'm not saying that we should all be going off our gut reaction all the time.  I just feel that both ways of functioning are valid and appropriate in different contexts and for different people.

Some people at SRCD were talking about how we need to avoid the 'people are stupid' approach to research.  I think feel that if we don't pay attention to all facets of the human experience, especially the subjective ones, we are over simplifying, and subscribing to the 'people are stupid' approach to interacting with the world.  People are so varied, complex, and layered...enjoy that richness.