About laws of psychology

2010-08-23

Most sciences have their own laws. Physics, chemistry and other natural sciences have plenty of them. Unfortunately this is not the case in the science of psychology; there is literally no law that adequately describes how we humans function.

The individualistic imperative

The absence of psychological laws is due to our unwillingness to be predictable. If psychology were to formulate a law, a number of people would immediately set out to ”violate” it, thus invalidating the law. Consequently, a psychological law would have to be kept secret in order to maintain validity. It should even be kept so secret that not even well-informed psychologists – the kind of people who really hate to be predictable – would be able to ”violate” it.

A few laws have, however, been formulated. One example is the pleasure principle, meaning that people seek pleasure and avoid pain. The unfortunate thing about this law is, however, that pleasure and pain can be understood differently. Masochists and those who are contemplating suicide, for instance, may have very personal ideas about this.

Festinger’s Theory of Cognitive Dissonance is as close to a psychological law as we can get. In short, this ”law” means that we humans strive towards consistency in our attitudes and if inconsistency arises, we try to resolve it in two different ways.

Just imagine that you have spent a fortune on an overseas vacation with your family but it has turned into a catastrophe. The hotel room is full of cockroaches; the bathroom is flooded and the shower has rusty water. The children are almost dying of disgust. You have invested a fortune and you’ve got a disaster.

According to Festinger we can resolve such a problem using two different strategies:
1. We can make the one unimportant or put more emphasis on the other.
”The hotel was not everything. The country was fantastic and the weather was perfect. It was really worth every penny.”

2. We can create a totally new condition which eliminates the inconsistency.
”In any case, we learned something.”

In the professional field, however, the Festinger tendency can become an ominous form of self-deception with possibilities to disrupt our capacity for realistic and sharp analysis:
”We failed to reach the sales target with our recent campaign. But we got good exposure.”

In either case we strive towards cognitive balance and towards eliminating pain and causes for remorse.