Han van der Maas | Major breakthroughs in science are extremely rare, even in the natural sciences
Reflecting on the upcoming budget cuts, columnist Han van der Maas attempts to rightfully reprimand the right-wing cabinet and the Minister of Education, Culture and Science Eppo Bruijns. “When Eppo thinks about psychology, he sees a couch in front of him.”
Eppo Bruijns said some years ago in Scienceguide, “How many more sociologists and psychologists do we want to train? What kind of country do we want to be? I think we would benefit much more from people who can make smart products, instead of just putting people on the couch with the psychologist.” He also said that you do need to invest in the humanities because that is what makes us a civilized country. Another MP, Michel Rog (CDA) said in the Dutch daily FD: “The most frequently asked question among psychology graduate students is, ‘Do you want fries with it?’ They end up in the snack bar, that’s just the way it is.”
Psychoanalysis
That does not promise well for my faculty. Still, I make a futile attempt to vindicate our right-wing politicians. The bench no longer exists: endless sessions of psychoanalysis have been replaced by forms of therapy that are constantly being scientifically tested. These have proven reasonably effective for many psychological conditions. More research on this is essential. The waiting lists in the GGZ institutions are enormous (more than 100,000 people), millions of Dutch people use psychopharmaceuticals such as Prozac with all its side effects, and about one in five employees in the Netherlands suffers from burnout complaints. This suffering cannot be solved with products, shopping is not a successful form of therapy.
Hundreds of years waiting
I share the frustration that in psychological research on addiction, depression, aggression, learning disabilities, autism, conflict and bullying behavior, to name just a few socially relevant examples, major breakthroughs have been lacking. In our defense, major breakthroughs in science are extremely rare, and even in the natural sciences they have sometimes taken decades, or even hundreds of years.
But, such a breakthrough is now here, it’s called Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI has its origins in psychological research into human thought. Notably, my predecessor Adriaan de Groot, with his dissertation Thought in Chess, was a major inspiration for the development of AI. The two pillars of today’s AI - neural networks and reinforcement learning - were put on the map by psychological researchers. Not for nothing did Geoffrey Hinton, cognitive psychologist, receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work on artificial intelligence. Talk about smart products!
As with the Nobel Prize for Kahneman (Economics), it is often overlooked that these contributions come from psychology. The persistent prejudice that psychology cannot be a “hard” science continues to prevail. When Eppo thinks of psychology, he envisions a divan. But chemists are no longer alchemists and psychologists are no longer Freudians.
Michel Rog’s comment about the job market for psychologists is another misunderstanding. Job security for psychology students has always been in the mid-range. The number of psychology students at UvA has also been constant for decades. Internationalization has not changed that. We explicitly take into account the labor market. For example, our bachelor’s program is in English, but the clinical master’s programs are in Dutch – precisely because of the demands of the labor market. Graduates of my own master’s, Behavioral data science, find jobs very easily. This applies to almost all academic programs, by the way. The Netherlands is desperate for personnel, highly and poorly educated!
Finally, about Eppo’s investments (=at best less severe cuts) in the humanities. This administration puts people with severe mental disorders in prisons, lets refugees sleep on the streets in winter, lets the benefits affair continue, delays climate measures, hands out harsh welfare fines, makes dubious migration deals, and systematically phases out development cooperation. But Eppo is perhaps cutting back a little on humanities, so thankfully we are still a civilized country!
