Introduction

Society suffers from a dilemma where hard sciences technology progresses while soft sciences application has stagnated.  This speaks to everything from societal problems to individual psychopathology.

To understand the state of applying scientific findings about people to the real world, one has to understand the paradigm progressions in those fields and the same in the public.

Currently, anthropology and sociology are the drivers of social change, likely because they are favored in political science though they are not the most relevant disciplines.  Yet they have no interest in other more relevant sciences and they fight to dominate the stage.

But is it really the fault of those fields?  Probably not.  Circumstances brought us here.

Psychology has its origins in what I call philosophical mysticism.  Most notable were when theorists developed elaborate systemic theories about the inner workings of the minds from merely their observation of people.  That died off as psychology became a more scientific discipline and migrated to only accepting what was purely observable.  This process lead to behavioral-based theories of psychotherapy that later adopted more cognitive aspects as the cognitive specialty started to develop.  From this history come all theories of psychotherapy - even contemporary theories are born in this paradigm built from the past.

Regarding the research side of the house, behaviorists ruled for a long time.  The gist of it is focusing solely on what responses to certain stimuli can be invoked.  But it is not easy to do so without harming people.  Some of the most profoundly influential research came from generalizing to humans from research of non-human animal behavior.  This stirred aversion and broad motivation to move beyond pure behaviorism. 

The unfortunate thing is they had the right idea (human animal behavior based on purely empirical findings), but they needed to research human subjects and not animals and make connections to the social world.  Believe it or not, I say this even though I’m a humanist.

Such research had little efficacy until the age of fMRI and new tools and findings in neuroscience that developed throughout the last several years.  What is interesting is social psychology has for nearly a century been producing empirical findings at fundamental levels and only in the last decade has it been getting noticed. 

Why this is interesting is today we have a suite of empirical findings in social psychology where some of them have been confirmed with findings in neuroscience.  Scientifically, it doesn't get much better than this with understanding people.  Why this is significant is all this is entirely relevant to just about everything and anything to do with human cognition and behavior, which is the root of all social issues.  In short, it makes the dominate paradigms in anthropology and sociology - as well as psychology, obsolete.  In this regard, cross-disciplinary research involving anthropology and sociology, and social psychology and neuroscience has great promise. 

Unfortunately, the paradigm of those fields and the attention they get is far too much to give up.  I suspect this will remain a major force well beyond my life.  But this is not the only issue; the dominant paradigm in psychology and the memory of the behaviorist takeover is still all too prevalent and may act as a resistance.  These findings can be viewed as getting back to viewing people as mere animals while ignoring the most interesting aspect of humanity. 

But such is not what I am proposing.  

Understanding how the brain works from a systemic and sub-systemic perspective and then connecting them to real-world contexts and situations promises far more than anything else psychology, anthropology and sociology has ever had to offer.  With regards to understanding and engendering solutions, these three fields together should be like "peas and carrots" - they go together.

The field of psychology alone probably needs to be flat-lined and be reborn.  But so does what the public accepts as the experts on people. 

With this said, there is another resistance.  Just look at society and the resistance to anything with science that theists view a threat to their beliefs (at one time I was at this stage).  Both the evolution debate and the mind vs. brain debate has been a turbulent and long one - and it is still very fresh and influential.  So there is a resistance to viewing human beings in a way that posits that people behave mainly from the social constructs they've spun in response to the impulses of the creature within them.

So there you have it.  A view of how the paradigm of relevant disciplines and of society can prevent solving society's social problems - and even individual problems. 

Hopefully, we will evolve to overcome this someday.