Epilogue

The New York Times is among media outlets that now feature announcements of psychological findings, and discuss the psychology of events in the news.

Coming to know more about the mind may help us improve our understanding of others and ourselves, and help to build societies in which people of different abilities, and from different backgrounds, find it worthwhile to live.

A Glimpse of the Future

Only recently has psychology entered everyday conversation and understanding. Newspapers now carry reports of psychological research. For instance, the New York Times, pictured at the head of this epilogue, has a Sunday Review section in which there is a column called “Grey Matter,” that is devoted to psychology. Developments like these mean that psychology is becoming more open. This provides us with means that enable all of us to think about ourselves and those we know.

On May 27, 2016, the Grey Matter column was about why, when researchers try to replicate them, some psychological studies fail to reproduce the same results as those reported by the original researchers. One reason is that psychologists have not always been scrupulous. Some have published only findings that agreed with their own theory.1 This may have overcome the scientific obligation to look for evidence that might refute one’s theory. Another answer suggested by the writer of this article, Jay van Bavel, is that many findings depend on culture. Some processes, such as basic operations of perception, are shared by all humankind. For other processes, including some of the most critical, such as how we feel about each other, and how we treat each other, findings in one society may not replicate in another. Therapeutic properties of psychoanalysis have been found in Sweden. Perhaps they are similar in the United States. But what about in Nigeria, or Japan? A new movement is taking place in psychology, to see how far research findings can be replicated, and to show which findings are reliable.²

As much as any other field of research, in conjunction with research in history, in sociology, in anthropology, in computer science, in medicine, psychology is making itself available to us, to offer us knowledge, some directions for education, psychiatry, town planning, and even perhaps in government. We still live in times where much of life is peaceful and cooperative, but life can also be dangerous. There are still enough nuclear weapons to end the human species. Not enough notice is devoted to human rights either of our contemporaries, or of those who will be our descendants.

Psychology has tended to be the psychology of the individual—one-person psychology—but a shift is taking place toward the psychology of what goes on between us and among us—two-person and many-person psychology. There is also a growing movement in psychology of how to live well, not in terms of individual rewards, but well in terms of our contributions to others and society. Joar Vittersø has taken from Aristotle the term “eudaimonia”—the psychology of how to live well—and published a handbook on it. Printing was a technology that enabled us, by means of reading, to understand each other better, and to enable empathy to grow for people in circumstances different from our own. Perhaps newer technologies will enable us to make group decisions better, and to live better with each other. One start on this has been by John Richardson, with his program Ethelo, in which people on their computers or phones join together to discuss a social issue that concerns them. People can offer considerations for discussion, and others join in by making inputs. At the same time, they rate their degree of agreement with different proposals. In this way, not only is a range of concerns and options generated, but the amount of agreement on various choices goes forward, is registered, and is enabled to change. Though the Greeks invented democracy, it may need something of this kind to implement it in the modern world.

Plato was exaggerating when he said that our ordinary perception was like being shackled in a cave, able to see only shadows. The interpretations that the mind makes of the world around us are not direct, but they are good enough for human purposes. We don’t need to struggle out from a cave of illusion. The shadow idea, however, is useful, because there is something between us and the world. That something is a set of constructed models within our minds. The model-based perceptual world is generally used not so much for recognizing eternal truths like those of mathematics, but for purposes that are, for the most part, dependable enough for interacting with each other, and for providing the wherewithal for our lives.

At the beginning of the 1300s, Dante wrote about a world in which everything had been arranged by God except for human free will. In the Inferno, Dante meets the father of his best friend, Cavalcanti. Ignoring the flames of Hell, this man rises from his tomb to ask Dante whether his son is alright. Here, perhaps, Dante is asking whether this life on Earth, this life of families and friends, may not have more meaning than the seemingly unattainable world of the ideal about which Plato wrote, and which Christianity adopted.

Since the time of Hermann Helmholtz, psychology has established itself as exploration of the mind. Psychology is different from the physical and biological sciences in that what we discover can affect the objects of study: ourselves. In this book, I suggest, too, that psychology is better not kept as a separate science, but rather that it needs to be integrated with other disciplines: not just neuroscience and biology but also philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, psychiatry, linguistics, computer science, and literary studies. Psychology has the capacity to make a difference to us in our relationships with each other and within ourselves. It is not likely to be effective in sudden and sweeping ways, as occurred with the discovery that electricity could light our houses. But as members of society we can take it in, perhaps a little at a time, and reflect on its meanings.