phenomenology vs. psychology?1
“Phenomenology: A philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness.”
Wikipedia
“Psychology: The science that deals with mental processes and behavior.”
Wikipedia
Both of the studies have to do with the mind and our cognitive/perceptive systems. What differentiates the two, and where do we see differences in their approach to producing knowledge about human experience? The best bet I have in answering this is looking at design and when designers use either of them to inform “good design”
It is only pulling from phenomenology that a design house can generate a pretty absurd and infamous 27-page design doc of the “Pepsi logo.” The design considerations go from consumer cognition of colors to the gravitational pull of the logo in a grocery aisle, and get even weirder as you scroll downwards.
Point being, phenomenology is far from data-driven at all. Phenomenology as an inquiry method simply relies on the ability of the speaker to say something lucidly and confidently, so that we recognize the truth of what they are saying. It is also the mode that most designers operate in, I think.
From a design perspective, we make choices that have theorized effects on how a user interacts and perceives the product. It’s usually either “gut feeling” or some long paragraph in plain English about why doing something will be effective for the product and how it aligns with the user goals.
In contrast, then, psychology still makes similar claims, but comes at it from a heavily “data’d” approach. It’s a very common approach to give out surveys that generate numerical data or to operationalize fuzzy virtues into measurable behaviour. “Reliability” and “Validity” are just terms that say how well one has reified abstract things like “intelligence”, “sadness”, or “learning” into a single number. The whole sort of let’s define “love” in 10 variables and call it that.
The main place where you’d see this show up for designers is in “A/B testing”. Instead of theorizing about how a certain choice would affect user enjoyment, simply run an experiment using an agreed-upon metric. There is actually nothing wrong with the approach, especially if there is an understanding of what “good user behaviour” looks like, i.e., do they spend more money?
But ultimately, designing for “joy” is always second place to that. I guess it’s also harder to get data for that as well. I mean, do you really fill out the review survey after purchasing something or eating at a specific restaurant?
Going back to the “love” example, my understanding is that phenomenology will ask the question of what it feels like to be “in love” whilst psychology will give you a “love” score based on common pre-set behaviours. They both go at the same question, but from different angles. My only problem with psychology is that “operationalization” often fails and is often misused/abused. Also, “Goodhart’s Law” is a thing.
“Ainsworth (1954), defends the Rorschach technique by arguing that it rests upon a phenomenological rationale that has been only inadequately tested in validity studies to date.”
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I have quote from a book I checked out to see if the literature thought the same. It highlights the challenges of the definitional and operational aspect of psychology and say’s at “base level” it is phenomenological. The “rationale” part is again pointing out how both disciplines can use their theories deterministically. ↩