Psychology

Psychology is the study of the human and animal mental functions and their behaviors. Recent studies show that there have been so many misunderstandings and criticisms of psychology and it is crystal clear that the discipline of psychology has been having a lot of controversies. Some of the grounds that the criticisms have been made is the ethical and philosophical grounds. Some have often argued that they can objectify persons by subjecting the human mind to experimentation and statistical studies (Solomon, 2001). They have argued that psychology is more of dehumanizing, as it treats human beings as things and further uses them in performing experiments. They have further suggested that the quantitative researches of psychology ignore the humanity in a human being.

Another criticism is the fact that it is a times taken as a science. Psychology relies on scientific methods for instance statistical analysis and use of questionnaires. Some have argued out that psychology is not really a science as it claims this is due to the fact that many have the belief that the mind is not open to quantitative scientific researches (Munger, 2003). They further support this criticism by arguing that psychology agrees on very little about how the mind works.

The above criticisms can be applied in the various sub-disciplines of psychology. Some of the particular disciplines include abnormal psychology, social psychology, and the organizational psychology. To begin with, abnormal psychology is a branch of personality psychology. This is due to the fact that it involves the diagnosis of mental malfunction and sometimes of bizarre behavior. Abnormal psychology is usually strongly clinical and its popular with the mass media (Michael  Tracy, 2000). The psychological criticisms are applied with the sub discipline of abnormal psychology in that they paint an inaccurate portrait of human nature while lending implicit support to the prevailing social order. The criticism that psychology is not a science and that psychologist agree little about how the mind works gives them incapacity to determine that a particular individual is mentally malfunctioned.

Secondly, there is the social psychology. This is the psychological study of how people relate to other people so that roles and norms are especially important. It includes how interactions affect behavior and how behavior affects interactions. The psychological criticisms are applied in social psychology in that as the criticism states that psychology treats human beings as things, they are thus incapable of interacting with one another and thus their behavior will not be formulated (Munger, 2003).

Lastly, the organizational psychology is the application of psychological facts and principles to the problems concerning the human beings operating within the context of business and industry. Organizational psychologists examine the role of the work environment in performance and other outcomes including job satisfactions and health. The psychological misunderstanding is applied in organizational psychology in that the human mind cannot mult-task naturally. This is to mean that the human mind is controlled by one brain and that some of the work employees cannot be working and building good interpersonal relations among themselves in the working environment. There will be lots of differences in the working area as one critic based this argument on ethical and philosophical back grounds (Michael  Tracy, 2000).

The connectivity principal stresses that new theories and ideas must not only present new information but also account for old information, this is necessary in determination of occurrence of events. The connectivity principle can be utilized when evaluating research in order to know how to design future study. For instance, one can analyze the flaws of related studies and discard the negative design aspects. On the other hand, the aspects of the breakthrough model of scientific process stress that the gradual synthesis model is a better approach to understanding how we reach conclusions in the field of psychology. The two are helpful in explaining events and outcomes.

Some of the concepts of the single cause effects is that an event occurs when it is assumed that there is a single or rather simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes (Solomon, 2001). A need for simplification is often perceived in order to make the explanation operational. For instance, after a school strike, questions are raised whether the strike was caused by the students, their parents, or the teachers themselves.

On the other hand, multiple causation are concept where various possible causes may be seen for a given event, any one of which may be sufficient but not necessary condition for the occurrence of the effect, or necessary but not sufficient condition. Here, the given effect may occur in the absence of all but one of the possible but not sufficient causes and, conversely, the given effect would not follow the occurrence of some but not all of the various necessary but not sufficient causes (Munger, 2003).

Multiple causation explains that an event that precedes another in the occurrence of another event. Whenever the first event occurs, which is the cause, the second event, the effect, necessarily follows. More over, in simple causation, the second event does not occur unless the first event has occurred. For instance, pornography clearly doesnt cause rape as it seems safe to assume that some pornography consumers do not rape women, and that many rapes are unrelated to pornography.