#psychologist — Public Fediverse posts

TL;DR: "Psychologist" is a problematic term

Psychology has had a #terminology problem for 100+ years, repurposing natural-language terms which then feed back into popular usage and are now ambiguous or poorly defined. In my opinion one of the worst problems here is #Psychology and #Psychologist.

What do you think of when you hear "A psychologist said..."? A researcher? A clinician? Something else?

Imagine if M.D.s were called "biologists", structural engineers were called "physicists," or attorneys were called "philosophers."

Okay the last one is a stretch.

My point is that, in other fields, there are distinct terms for the people generating domain-specific knowledge and those applying that knowledge. In psychology we don't have that; both a researcher studying cognition and a therapist doing CBT are called "psychologist," despite having radically different jobs and different relationships to knowledge about human behavior & brains.

This won't change anything, because I'm just some tiny-college prof, and I am aware that there have been multiple attempts to fix psychology's terminology problems in the past. Nevertheless, here is my proposal, to the Gods of Language:

Psychology researcher: Psychologist
Psychology practitioner: Psychologer

Although I claim no restrictive copyright on the second term or this system, any gratitude-based donations can be sent to my personal PayPal.

#research #language #labels #ambiguity #academic #professor #therapist #counselor