The Isolated Psychologist


She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces through the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

         She looked down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror cracked from side to side;

“The curse is upon me,” cried

         The Lady of Shalot

 

Alfred Tennyson’s (1809-1892) poem THE LADY OF SHALOT is often interpreted as symbolic of the isolated life of the artist. The Lady of Shalot sees the world through a mirror, and is destroyed when she looks at the world directly. Academic psychologists seem to imagine they suffer a similar curse, because they are more and more determined to see the world only through a mirror, which gives them images constructed on the basis of the lives of undergraduate students. 

The vast majority of psychological research is still being conducted using undergradaute students as subjects. This is despite the fact that undergraduate students are not a good representative of the seven billion people who now inhabit the earth. 

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