Psycho-babble

One of the things that can put me in a really bad mood is too much psychological jargon. I find it tedious and pretentious. Yet it can be found in psychology in abundance.

Part of the reason is that psychology is a “soft science” (as opposed to “hard medical science”). Psychology as a field has long been uncomfortable by this fact and has longed to be taken seriously by the medical community and as a consequence has made various attempts to make psychology sound more scientific. One way has been to make our communication more convoluted, by using scientific-sounding terms, and employing long sentences that end with multiple quoted references. An unfortunately side-effect of this communication style is that it breaks up any fluid and coherent reading.

Most psychological journals are written in exactly such style and during my training I, of course, had to read a large number (and even to write a few) of such journal articles. They are rarely inspiring reading. I overdosed on these articles to such a degree that since I’ve graduated I’ve been hard pressed to read one. The librarian at the mental health library where I regularly pick up books these days, keeps asking me why I hardly ever ask for a journal article since I so clearly love reading psychology stuff. “I’ll read one when they figure out a way to write an article that’s fun to read,” I tell her.

What puzzles me about this phenomenon is that I don’t see the need for it. I think that psychology is fascinating and complicated enough without us trying to dress it up in fancy jargon. I’m often interested in what the journal articles are discussing but I have a busy life (who doesn’t these days?) and I don’t have time to read things that are written in an un-necessarily complicated way.

So you can imagine that I felt like cheering when I came across George Orwell’s five rules of effective writing: avoid cliché, never use long words when short ones will do, use as few words as possible, never use the passive where you can use the active, and avoid jargon.

Maybe someone should alert the schools of psychology…

Okay, rant over. 🙂 But I can assure you that all the books that I have listed in the Book section (because it doesn’t just happen to journal articles but also, unfortunately, to psychology books) are reader-friendly. That’s why I’ve recommended them.