Art of Persuasion

Paper 1 - Final Draft

The Dangers of the Division of Discourse

In my third year of undergraduate study, I was required to take a course titled “Research Methods in Psychology.” I had been waiting for about 4 years to take this class. I had notebooks full of personality tests on defense mechanisms, double blind experiments testing the effects of caffeine on academic performance, and several other research inquiries that I had designed. I was enthralled with the idea that I would get to test some of my ideas on freshman guinea pigs taking intro psychology who were required to participate in a few research studies as part of their grade. I had aced my AP Statistics exam in high school, and got an easy ‘A’ in the “Psychological Statistics and Design” course I took the year before. I love statistics as much as I love psychology; thus I was ready to finally channel all of this accumulated knowledge into some practical purpose.

Unfortunately for me, the psychology department changed the curriculum of the course the year I was required to take it. Instead of doing real research, I was required to do “observational studies” of people on reality television shows. I brought to the attention of my instructor the fact that watching scripted television was not real research; I described the ways that the statistics we were using could be manipulated to provide misleading conclusions; I mentioned that experimenters tend to find results that are favorable to whoever is funding the research; and I suggested that neglecting to look at explanations about human behavior from other disciplines is a disservice to the study of human nature. My professor never elaborated on any of these points with me. She was so engulfed in her own field that she never questioned anything that fell outside the realm of her particular discourse.

Discourses in modern academia are limited to each particular discipline. This is unfortunate for today’s students because scholarship in any discipline is greatly dependent on the discourses of other disciplines. In the case of my psychology course, we never discussed the discourse of statistics, which limited our understanding of what the “research” we were doing could actually tell us. Had my professor stepped outside the confines of her field, she might have mentioned that drug companies can manipulate sample sizes, alpha levels, or the demographics of the participants in ways that can “clinically prove” just about anything. This demonstrates how the most productive questions and counterpoints of a field often come from outside the particular field itself.

The inability to see the big picture is rampant in academia. This is particularly true with the social sciences, as many of the individual disciplines that comprise the social sciences are relatively new. Because they are so new, scholars in these fields are striving to be recognized as legitimate sciences that have some value to society. In trying to prove that their field is worth studying, scholars define their field as unique and separate from the other social sciences.

These divisions create barriers to a more holistic understanding of any particular topic. Take the study of what causes racism as an example. A psychologist will tell you that people are racist because of fundamental cognitive biases. The sociologist says that racism is caused by being exposed to racist ideology from social institutions and an individual’s social environment. Anthropologists study ethnographies on everything from Americans to indigenous people who live in the tropical rainforest of Peninsular Malaysia in order to describe how racism is present among different cultures. The way we are wired to think shapes the way we look at the world, the institutions we have been indoctrinated into effect the way we act, and how we understand other cultures helps us explain our own. Even after looking at the topic of racism through three separate academic lenses we cannot account for every facet of racism. Nonetheless, the academic can contribute much more to humanity’s understanding of our existence if he/she approaches every inquiry from multiple disciplinary viewpoints.

The composition classroom is sacred to education because it teaches students to think across the divisions of the academy. It is one place where scholars can learn to transcend the boundaries of academia, as the very study of language itself is interdisciplinary. Language comprises the building blocks of study in any field because it is the foundation of all human thought. Thus, those who teach language have the potential to create a generation of scholars that can piece the world of information back together. The study of language teaches these scholars that to understand a piece of writing is to understand the author and his/her historical, political, and social situation when he/she wrote the work, whether that work is a newspaper story or an article from a research journal. The scholar’s inquiry into this background information teaches him/her to always look for information that is missing to truly understand what he/she is reading.

Composition classes should teach students how to thinks, not simply to regurgitate information into a word processor following some arbitrary guidelines. Freshman-level composition classes do little more than the latter. The division of discourse harms students again, as English professors who teach freshman-level composition courses often forget that most of their students will be reading, writing, and analyzing in a completely different field. Instructors should teach their class from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, with an emphasis on building connections among the disciplines.

Unfortunately for humanity, narrow-minded, field-specific discourses effect more than the bickering of one academic with another over theories. The division of discourse yields severe consequences to all parts of society because of the decisions that people make based on research. Millions of Americans are on anti-depressant drugs, and the research that “proves” these drugs effective is funded by the drug companies. This has serious consequences for the people who are told that they are depressed and need to be on anti-depressant drugs. Anti-depressants often make the patient feel worse. Nobody really understands how anti-depressants work, or what kind of long term negative effects they could have on the brain but since there is money to be made, nobody really cares to find out as long as people keep taking them.

The study of racism has the same danger. Looking at racism through only one of the three academic disciplines mentioned—as people often do—leads people in racist environments think that there is one “catch-all” solution to the problem. If there was a catch-all solution to racism, than we wouldn’t have any. In fact, entering an environment where racial tensions are high armed with academic information on how to transcend the race barriers can just stir up more trouble. Telling someone that they are racist only because the social institutions they have been surrounded by have indoctrinated them with racism, will get stares as well as a possible fist to the face.

Specialized knowledge can only take human understanding so far. The ancient philosophers didn’t limit their inquisitions to any specific branch of knowledge, and instead questioned anything and everything without relation to what “field” the question belonged to. Somehow, the academy broke down knowledge into a million little pieces thinking that getting more specific can teach us more than understanding the whole picture. The division of discourse creates walls among all areas of human understanding, and creates walls between people themselves. The composition instructor is in a position to teach students to transcend these walls because of the nature of their field, as well as the fact that every college student is generally required to take a course on composition. They can educate the masses to transcend these barriers by presenting students with an interdisciplinary perspective of discourse analysis and teaching them to read and write from a holistic perspective. Teaching students how to truly think for themselves will not only help the students perform well academically, but will also help society to make well-informed policy and economic decisions that will benefit humanity as a whole.