Like all scientists, psychology researchers tend to be very specialized and conduct research on narrow phenomena, such as whether the most frequent words in the language are recognized more quickly (yes), or whether reading a paragraph about old age leads to walking more slowly (no, this result has not been replicated). If we are not aware of all the previous results which led us to formulate these hypotheses, we may wonder what is the point of carrying out such experiments and doubt the interest of research in psychology.
In fact, researchers themselves regularly ask this question. Certainly, one hundred and fifty years of scientific research in psychology have produced enough articles to fill an entire library, but what have we learned along the way that is truly important about human psychology? American psychologist Adam Mastroianni pointed out that some of the results from psychology had recently proven impossible to reproduce, and had therefore been removed from the list of established results. However, this had no significant impact on our understanding of human beings, as if the fact that these results were true or false did not in fact matter. Mastroianni concludes that unlike physics and biology, psychology has not produced any results that truly change our understanding of the world.
Encouraged by this challenge, the eminent professor of psychology Paul Bloom took on the task of listing ten major results of psychology which, if they have not changed the face of the world, are at the same time robust, surprising or interesting, and explain many common observations. Here they are:
1. Babies have a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the physical and social world even before their first birthday.
2. Our conscious experience of the world is severely limited; if our attention is elsewhere, we often fail to see what is right under our noses.
3. Memory is not an accurate record and our memories of the past are highly distorted. False memories are not difficult to implant: if you think you have a perfectly accurate memory of something that happened a year ago, you are most likely wrong.
4. Perception is a complex inferential process; what you see is influenced by your unconscious expectations about how the world works.
5. Many psychological traits are highly heritable, not only the obvious ones like intelligence, but also more surprising traits like degree of religiosity.
6. Many gender differences are culture-specific, but others, such as differences in sexual desire, are universal and occur all over the world.
7. We overestimate the likelihood of infrequent but striking events, such as plane crashes and shark attacks.
8. There is a universal list of things and experiences that scare people, regardless of where they were raised, such as snakes, spiders, the dark, and heights.
9. There are universal characteristics of physical attractiveness, such as facial symmetry. Even babies prefer to look at faces that have these characteristics.
10. Studies of people from dozens of different countries show that beyond midlife, we become more agreeable, more conscientious, and less neurotic.
Of course, each of these results deserves an explanation and justification. If you are interested, you can find them in the excellent book Psychology by Paul Bloom which has just been translated into French (ed. Markus Haller).
What strikes me most about this list is that at least eight of these results bear the mark of natural selection. When psychology, instead of listing all the observable differences between cultures, focuses on the universal characteristics, visible in all cultures, it draws the contours of human nature: not a straightjacket determining entirely what we are, but an envelope making certain behaviors more likely than others in most environments. She discovers psychological traits that are not perfect, but which allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce a little more than others. This is why they were selected and why we are here to talk about it.
In other words, this list supports evolutionary psychology, this sub-discipline which aims to understand to what extent certain aspects of human psychology have been selected during our evolution. Evolutionary psychology is often criticized for being poorly understoodand unloved because its results are sometimes considered politically incorrect. However, as in everything else in biology, only the Darwinian approach allows us to truly understand why the strange animals that humans are are the way they are, and to make sense of both our similarities and our differences. . Just as Darwin radically changed our view of the world, the application of his theory to human psychology is arguably what most disrupts our understanding of ourselves.
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