A time-travelling debate on Psychological Literacy

It has been seven years since an article in The Psychologist boldly declared that "psychological literacy" is "overrated". I was wrong. 

In 2017, I wrote as an undergraduate student puzzled by the notion of a 'psychological literacy'. Now, seven years later, I am a lecturer whose academic work almost exclusively revolves around the study, development, and integration of psychological literacy in the psychology curriculum. It's funny how these things work out.

Back then, I had a lot of questions. Most of my writing was littered with "but what does this all mean?!", expressed in different forms and aimed at different pockets of psychology. When I first sat down to re-read my original article, I was poised to pen an addendum, offering a new perspective on this construct that has now become my life. However, I thought it would be a far more fun meta experiment to see how neatly I can answer the questions that second-year-undergraduate me posed to the world. So, here it is. Madeleine Pownall (2024) in conversation with Madeleine Pownall (2017; italics are quotes from the article). 

Psychological literacy is about outcomes

2017: I think psychological literacy can be harmful if over-applied. If every situation is greeted with psychology, much of the message is lost. I am literate – but have little idea of what to do with my new found literacy. I can't help but feel like I am left with a wider vocabulary and a full book shelf, but few actual tools that will benefit me in life.

This is an interesting way to start, because my view of what 'psychological literacy' is has now fundamentally shifted (or, rather, become a little more accurate). In this pondering over the harm of psychological literacy, I was misunderstanding what this approach is essentially trying to do. Psychological literacy is not simply 'knowledge about psychology' or, as I put it, "greeting every situation with psychology". This is an oversimplification, but an easy one to make. If you are able to read and write you are considered to be "literate". You know how to interpret the things and can broadly make sense of it. But psychological literacy, as a pedagogical construct, thinks about this very differently. I was tying myself into knots because I was being too literal about literacy.

I have spent the past four years in fun conceptual wrestles with Dr Richard Harris and Dr Pam Birtill, my fellow psychological literacy pedagogy pals. We have spent years figuring out and researching what psychological literacy is and, crucially, what it is not. Our current working definition (informed lots by Hulme, 2014) is that psychological literacy is about outcomes. It comprises a set of attributes, also known as competencies or graduate outcomes, in which students take their psychological knowledge – i.e., their understanding of theories, studies, psychological phenomena – and use this to navigate the world and contribute to solving problems.

Psychological literacy is also, importantly, a philosophical approach to education. We think that psychological literacy, when understood correctly, provides educators with a way to think carefully about what we are trying to do with our education. In this sense, it also encompasses constructs like justice, sustainability, and critical thinking. It speaks to the fundamental philosophical "what is the point of teaching psychology?" questions that can keep us up at night as educators. 

So, old me, no! Psychological literacy is not (just) about having a newfound language for being able to say what you see in a psychologically informed way. Rather, it is about the capacity to use this language to contribute to something beyond you and your immediate context. Application here is key. 

To cut me a bit of slack, it is important to recognise too that understanding about psychological literacy, both theoretically and empirically, has moved on quite a bit since 2017. In the past few years, researchers have grappled with how to measure psychological literacy (Newell et al., 2022), how it differentiates psychology students from other students (Pownall et al., 2022 [that's me]), and how it can be put on the agenda internationally (Cranney et al., 2022). The conversation is ongoing and the application aspect of psychological literacy has been more explicitly stressed in recent conceptualisations. 

Lenses

2017: This may be true, but in every definition of psychological literacy I have read, the researchers seldom mention how frequently this literacy should be applied. If everything is met with the sharpest critical eye, I wonder how much goes unnoticed, or how this impacts our general enjoyment of life. Questioning everything can be an exhausting way to live. 

There's another important point to be made here about terminology. Critical thinking is not the act of thinking with suspicion and criticism. It's also not something you can turn on or turn off. Psychological literacy, and indeed critical thinking more generally, is an approach to education that trains students to adopt a new, more refined, broader worldview. Today, in my teaching I talk a lot now about "lenses", which helps to make sense of this a bit. We all look at the world through certain lenses, and this impacts the sense that we make of it. For example, as my textbook explains, a feminist lens to psychology is particularly attentive to inequality, justice, voice, and power. This means that feminist psychologists have trained themselves to view the world through this perspective. It isn't something that is applied post-hoc, but rather a way of thinking generally about psychology and our place within it. 

2017 me, I hate to break this to you, but the "sharp critical eye" that you are grappling with here probably feels uncomfortable because it is a lens you're just getting used to. It's like you've emerged out of Specsavers with a new prescription and you're finding yourself blinking a lot while everything gets into focus. It will feel strange for a bit but ultimately will help you to see things you couldn't see before. 

Living with a built-in critical lens that you have trained to be laser-sharp is, granted, an exhausting way to live. But that isn't some kind of pedagogical flaw in the system, that is the system. Of course, it would probably feel a lot more comfortable and enjoyable to not be able to see, articulate, and want to solve problems. And "questioning everything is an exhausting way to live", yes! But that is also like saying "I've just had my eyes done and now I can see all of the awfulness in the world, I don't like it please blur my vision again". Part of the process of evolving as an informed, thoughtful, global citizen (to use my own words, Pownall et al., 2021) is getting used to this new lens. That is psychological literacy – it cannot be applied or switched off and it doesn't show up or stay at home, it just is. 

2017: Behind every scientific thinker and every psychologist is a human being. Too often, it feels like this is forgotten. When theories, evidence and data come before compassion, when students are well equipped to reference but find it harder to relate to another person, does this not mark a crisis in psychology education?

Kind of, but not really. Parts of this perspective have stood the test of time, but there are important distinctions to be made. It is interesting to me how I considered psychological literacy (albeit in its most literal sense) and compassion to be distinct from one another. Now, compassion, community, cultural responsiveness, and creative thinking are considered to be not only compatible with psychological literacy, but integral facet of it. 

Maybe I was ahead of my time or maybe I misunderstood. Regardless, the literature has since moved on somewhat from the initial conception and now the application of "theories, evidence, data" in a compassionate, informed way is a hallmark of the ability to show psychological literacy (see Cranney et al., 2022).  

What data are

2017: I understand the requirement for educators to instill a sense of viewing the world critically and objectively, but I fear that some fundamentals of psychology have been replaced. The world, as I see it from the comfort of undergraduate life, revolves around personal opinion. Surely that is the whole point. As one lecturer told me 'you learn more about a person in a five minute conversation than a validated questionnaire will ever teach you'. There is more to psychology than critique and analysis, and there is more to life than data.

I love this one. 2017 me, you are frustrated at the limits of data because you are a qualitative researcher! You will learn, after you've broken free of the "comfort of undergraduate life", that psychology does indeed welcome personal opinion, including in the context of how data are viewed. You were just looking in all the wrong epistemological places!

Qualitative approaches embrace and celebrate the messiness of psychology data and, crucially, allow for research positionality to be acknowledged in this process. The problem here is that I had only been taught a very narrow view of what "data" are. 

I still roll out the quote from my lecturer about the value of speaking to people over questionnaires, and even recently supervised a whole project about the limits of psychological scales (Mason et al., 2024). That is not to say that quantitative data is redundant, but rather that there is space in psychology for ways of thinking about the most valuable, informative, and compelling ways to ask research question that goes beyond the mainstream, experimental approaches that are taught. This speaks perhaps then to a bigger issue about how undergraduate psychology students are typically exposed to only a slither of the epistemological, methodological, and ontological buffet that is psychology.  

2017: How can I refrain from seeing everything through my newly-found lens of psychological theory? (I recall a good friend offering me relationship advice before I embarked on my degree. 'Don't psychologically analyse your partner,' she laughed, 'they don't like that'.) 

You can't refrain from seeing everything through your new lens. That's the fun of it. And that's education, baby! 

But also, don't psychologically analyse your friends. That bit remains true. 

2017: But what if there are some needs that cannot be met by psychology? The scenarios where only a person, rather than a theory or carefully selected nugget of psychological literature, will do? Is the academic study of psychology making us psychologically illiterate? At the very least – speaking as a current psychology student – I believe it is largely overrated.

We have enough disciplinarily humility to know that there are, of course, problems that can't be met with psychology alone. I think the big take-home here is that there are parts of psychology that recognise and celebrate how who we are as people, researchers, and psychologists fundamentally changes the research we do. Throughout the original 2017 piece, I was writing as if being a "psychologist" and being a "human" were two different hats, and you had to decide which one to wear in different contexts. So, of course, psychological literacy will feel overrated, if you interpret this to mean the ability to be literally literate in psychology stuff. Of course, this will feel like your education is forcing you to leave you "human" hat at the door and become an expert in theory.

Since then, research in our team has considered whether students even know what psychological literacy is in the first place (Harris et al., 2021). Our work suggests that only around 18% of undergraduate students had heard of "psychological literacy" explicitly. So, in a way, it is useful that I was beginning to ponder what it means to be literate in psychology. This does raise some important questions – if students interpret the ability to be "literate" in psychology as the need to bring a well-trained suspicious, critical, over-analytical eye to everything they do, this is problematic for it as a pedagogical framework. Work has moved on since 2017, but there remains an important effort in ensuring that this philosophical approach is not lost in translation. 

Global challenges

If I have come to just one conclusion over the past seven years, it's that psychological literacy is perhaps one of the most important and influential ways of setting the agenda for psychology education. It isn't simply the capacity to know psychological insights and read books and recite studies. It is, fundamentally, the ability for students to take lessons from their discipline apply them thoughtfully and sensitively to their own life, and to use this lens to contributing to the world's most pressing problems. 

The notion that education can (or, perhaps, should) do more than simply churn out graduates with lots of subject-specific knowledge isn't new. In the first approximation of psychological literacy back in 1990, Boneau wrote about how students should apply their psychological knowledge to address global challenges and to use psychology to meet personal, professional, and societal needs. However, in the past few decades, psychology education has been slowing becoming more explicit in the extent to which social justice issues and other global problems are on the educational agenda.  

Arguably, this shift in agenda is a much-needed response to two trends. Firstly, global problems are becoming too big and too pressing to ignore anymore. Psychologists are well-placed to contribute to tackling climate change, gender inequality, poverty. This is the crux of our discipline. So, it is both a moral obligation, and indeed a privilege, to use psychological insights to contribute to these problems. Secondly, as the "value" and purpose of psychology education becomes more explicitly under threat, especially when value is used synonymously with graduate earnings, psychological literacy provides a rebuttal to this. 

In this sense, psychological literacy provides a language that allows students and educators to articulate the global contributions of psychology as a discipline. So, if anything, psychological literacy isn't overrated, it is misunderstood. 

References

Boneau, C. A. (1990). Psychological literacy: A first approximation. American Psychologist, 45(7), 891.

Cranney, J., Dunn, D. S., Hulme, J. A., Nolan, S. A., Morris, S., & Norris, K. (2022, May). Psychological literacy and undergraduate psychology education: An international provocation. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 7, p. 790600). Frontiers Media SA.

Harris R., Pownall M., Thompson C., Newell S., Blundell-Birtill P. (2021). Students' understanding of psychological literacy in the UK undergraduate curriculum. Psychology Teaching Review, 27(1), 56-68.

Hulme J. A. (2014). Psychological literacy: From classroom to real world. The Psychologist, 27, 932-935. https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-27/december-2014/psychological-literacy-classroom-real-world

Mason, J., Pownall, M., Palmer, A., & Azevedo, F. (2023). Investigating lay perceptions of psychological measures: A registered report. Social Psychological Bulletin, 18, 1-32

Newell, S. J., Chur‐Hansen, A., & Strelan, P. (2020). A systematic narrative review of psychological literacy measurement. Australian Journal of Psychology, 72(2), 123-132.

Pownall, M., Harris, R., & Blundell-Birtill, P. (2022). Embedding global citizenship in the undergraduate curriculum: A case study from psychology. In A research agenda for global higher education (pp. 211-226). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Pownall, M., Thompson, C., Blundell-Birtill, P., Newell, S. J., & Harris, R. (2022). Does "psychological literacy" feature in non-psychology degrees? A cross-discipline study of student perceptions. Teaching of Psychology, 00986283221130298.