Up to Speed

While addressing the 2008 National Symposium on Handgun Violence at Duquesne University, Tom Mauser displays the shoes of his son, Daniel, who was killed at Columbine High School. Mr. Mauser wears the shoes on special occasions. Photo via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

It seems like every time you turn around there’s another horrible violent story. The soldier in Iraq who killed five fellow patients at a mental health clinic. Men committing murder-suicides that wipe out their entire family. The teenage swimmers gunned down near Iron Mountain last summer. 

We turn to psychology to try to answer huge questions in the wake of these tragedies. Why do people commit these awful crimes? A bad upbringing?  Victimization at the hands of bullies? Traits they were born with?

The 10th anniversary of Columbine was this April 20, and journalist Dave Cullen published a new book profiling Harris and Klebold. Contrary to popular belief, Cullen found the killers were not unpopular misfits in the Trench Coat Mafia, harrassed by their peers. They were “two good students with lots of friends who were secretly stockpiling a basement cache of weapons, recording their raging hatred, and manipulating every adult who got in their way.” 

So then why did they do it? Read this Slate article Cullen wrote in 2005, “The Depressive and the Psychopath.” It details the conclusions of psychiatrists and psychologists closest to the case.

I’ve been taking Intro to Psych at the local community college as a prerequisite for my grad school program. The author of our textbook (Exploring Psychology in Modules, Myers) advises us to, “bear in mind psychology’s limits. Don’t expect it to answer the ultimate questions, such as those posed by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy: ‘Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?’  Instead, expect that psychology will help you understand why people think, feel, and act as they do. Then you should find the study of psychology fascinating and useful.” (page eight)

Okay, so maybe psychology can’t tell me the meaning of life. But psychology captures my attention, and my imagination, because it offers hints or answers to some vital questions about our humanity.

• What will REALLY make me happy?
• How do I raise my kid so he will be successful, happy, and not hate me?
• How can I have hard conversations with my husband without ending up unhappily married or headed for divorce court?
• What is it that makes some people superstars in their fields, achieving a level of performance far above the rest of us mere mortals?
• Why is it so hard for people to change, or to meet our goals? How do alcoholics get sober, or Biggest Loser contestants become marathon runners?
• What makes people from other countries, other cultures, act the way they do? Welcome strangers into their homes, or blow themselves up in a crowded restaurant?
• When I teach a lesson or write an ad how can I get people to pay attention and remember what I’m saying?
• What can I do and say in a job interview that will get me hired?

These are questions I find useful, that apply to things I care about. I’m not really interested in little questions. I want to talk about big ones. Psychology is an attractive field of study because it addresses so many of my big questions.

I’m not really into basic research - pure science that aims to increase the scientific knowledge base. You’d never catch me in a lab taking notes while people shock each other or rats chase cheese. But the applied research - using psychology to solve practical problems? That’s good stuff. 

And as a teacher, I love finding a good research study in psychology that applies to what I’m teaching. You gain two benefits, really. 1) It’s credible, because research in contemporary psychology is usually every bit as rigorous as that conducted in other scientific and medical fields. 2) People tend to be genuinely interested in hearing about what makes people tick.

I’ll read an article or book about psychology any day if I can see how it applies to me, to people I know, or to scary sensational stuff like psychopaths who go on killing sprees. I’m always on the lookout for more of the cool, crazy, use-it-tomorrow stuff that psychology has to offer.