Psych 101: Thou shalt not be a sucker

So I study undergrad psychology on the side.

Barely! But you know, I have this ... uh, neurodevelopmental learning disability, so I pay the online college an obscene amount of money every month, so that I can hate myself and tell everyone I'm a psychology major. Am I going to acquire a degree? Once we return to our primordial soup, maybe, but that's not the point.

The popular belief is that psychology is the study of the human mind, but that's actually neuroscience; that it is the method of scientific inquiry into human behavior, but that's actually anthropology, it's uuuuhh... Isn't that how therapists are made? Well, yeah, but it's not like they forge them in undergraduate programs, pouring hot steaming empathy into their veins.

Psych 101, and I've been yelled at for saying that, teaches you to never trust an academic again. You learn that academic papers can't be evaluated without a serious understanding of what makes a good experiment, survey, or observation. And statistics. Like an ass-load of statistics.

Allow me to explain.

Let's say I want to prove that dogs cause cancer. Because I want to. Because I'm paid to push the agenda that dogs shouldn't be kept as pets, and should instead roam the countryside and poop there, so that the agricultural industry can take advantage of free fertilizer and farmers can fire at will. I'm also deeply against gun control for the sake of the argument, just so that you understand: I have an agenda.

Does that make me a scientist? Well, Hell no. The very notion of a hypothesis that didn't originate in empiric observation based on a theory that was formulated without bias is ridiculous! However, I have lots and lots of money and I'm very, very hot. So I can make hypothetic prophecies all day and no one will tell me to shut up.

So I'm paying to prove the causal relationship between owning a dog and having cancer. Now if I just survey all dog owners and find out that about five of them have or had a cancerous growth, and one had leukaemia, I haven't proven anything. How many people did I ask? Did I ask anyone who doesn't own a dog to compare (do I have a control group)? Did I just compare my findings with an arbitrary number that I think is realistic for general population? Worthless!

Additionally, did I survey them? Because the way the question was phrased is really important. Did they know about what I'm trying to prove? Were the answers standardized? Was it one of those scales, where 1 stands for absolutely zero cancer or alternatively, just a little bit of cancer, and 5 is all of the cancer, which most people think is kind of unattainable? Was the interviewer super hot? I don't know if that has any effect on dog owners with cancer, but it always matters.

Or did I go to a hospital, and the hospital gave me slightly modified anonymised data that has a bias because only people with cancer go to a hospital. In that case, did I prove that most people with cancer have a pet, or the other way around? Is the hospital disgusted with pet owners as a group? Is whoever I sent to the hospital disgusted with cancer patients? Why am I asking about disgust? Bias! IRONY!

So survey and observation are both very flawed methods. The one true way is experimentation, which is all about control and manipulation. That's what psychology is all about! But not abusively so, just by way of the independent variable!

What makes a variable dependent? It being measured. What does an experimenter manipulate? The multiple conditions that can lead to the codependency of the independent and dependent variable.

It's dumbing down time!

Our independent variable is that dogs increase your chances of getting cancer. That's simple, but it can't be measured like that, can it? So we need a dependent variable (people with dogs) which has some kind of a relationship (causal or incidental) with the variable of people having cancer. We have to vary conditions under which we study, because the environment plays a role in both, hereditary factors, bias, precedence, as well as validity etc, so the outcome has to be randomised and controlled (as mentioned above, checked with people who don't have a pet) OR we will find an alternative explanation to why the data is the way it is, like certain brands of dog food ... having toxic carcinogenic mould.

And after all of this work, if you're reading this absolutely cursed paper and perusing the data collected, you have to understand that even a statistical increase of 30% is absolutely meaningless.

Cancer.org says that an adult male has a 40.9% chance of developing cancer throughout his lifetime. That's a scary number. A female? 39.1%. Increase of 30%?! That's catastrophic, right? Not how math works. (40,9 / 100) * 130 = 53,17.

So your chances rose a bit, but since it's about a coin toss anyway, most people would take that risk because having a dog is like having children but better. And it makes you look hot.

What psychology does teach you in the end, is that whatever works. If it makes you happy? Do it. If you want to lead a healthy life, don't reach for studies, do what makes you happy and be kind to yourself.