I wrote about how education can become a tool for gatekeeping, but there’s something even more insidious happening, and I used to think the worst part about bad research was that it existed. Then I realised the worst part is watching people with psychology degrees wave it around like a weapon, not to gatekeep knowledge, but to gatekeep basic human dignity.

Every few weeks, the same script plays out across social media platforms. Someone will make a bigoted statement—usually about LGBTQ+ people, mental health, or gender, and when challenged, they’ll deploy their credentials like a shield:

“As someone with a psychology degree…”  or “As someone who studies psychology…” then, what follows is invariably a cherry-picked study, a misrepresented finding, or a conclusion that bears no resemblance to what the research says.

This isn’t just mere intellectual laziness. It’s something far more calculated and harmful, and this needs to be talked about. I say this as someone who did psychology for my bachelor’s degree. I’m not just critiquing from the outside; I’m critiquing from within, having watched people turn what should be a tool for understanding into a weapon for harm. 

And honestly? It pisses me off that I need to explain why I decided to insert myself in this conversation, as if questioning harmful behavior requires some special justification. The whole point of education should be to make us more curious, more questioning, not to create people who demand credentials before they’ll listen to criticism.

The Performance of Authority

There’s a particular type of violence in watching someone use the language of science to justify prejudice. These individuals aren’t trying to educate or engage in meaningful discourse; they’re merely performing their credentials to end the conversation. Their psychology degrees become a conversational trump card, deployed not to illuminate but to dominate.

Too comfortable in their positions of privilege, they respond to calls for nuance or empathy with defensive retaliation. Rather than sitting with discomfort or examining their assumptions, they reach for their degrees like armour. This defensiveness often manifests as aggressively binary thinking, whether research is either completely right or completely wrong, people are either normal or deviant, or social issues are either scientifically proven or completely baseless. It’s thinking that refuses complexity because complexity threatens the neat categories that keep their worldview intact.

However, what makes this especially insidious is that psychology, as a field, is supposed to be about understanding people. It’s meant to help us comprehend human behaviour, reduce suffering, and build more empathetic societies. Watching people twist this knowledge into a weapon against the very communities psychology should serve feels like watching someone use a medical degree to justify withholding treatment.

The cherry-picking you see isn’t accidental—it’s systematic. These aren’t people who’ve engaged deeply with research and happen to disagree with mainstream interpretations. They’re people who’ve learned just enough about academic language to sound authoritative while remaining fundamentally incurious about what they’re citing. It’s the academic equivalent of someone who’s memorised a few phrases in a foreign language and thinks they can give a lecture.

What’s particularly telling is how they respond when challenged on their interpretations. Rather than engaging with the criticism or acknowledging the complexity of the research, they double down on their credentials. The degree becomes not just evidence of their authority, but evidence that questioning them is inherently invalid.

This phenomenon reveals something troubling about how we relate to expertise in the digital age. We’ve created a culture where having a degree in a field is treated as equivalent to mastering it, where undergraduate coursework is confused with genuine expertise, and where the ability to cite research is mistaken for the ability to understand it.

These students and graduates weaponising their credentials haven’t just failed to develop critical thinking skills, they’ve actively learned to suppress them. They’ve figured out that in online spaces, the appearance of authority often matters more than actual knowledge, and that most people won’t fact-check their claims or dig into the studies they’re citing.

The Importance of Critical Appraisal and Acknowledging the Construction of Knowledge 

Real engagement with research requires asking uncomfortable questions about knowledge construction. Which paper are you referencing? Who funded this study? What was the sample size and demographic? Who was this research truly for, and what were the researchers’ underlying assumptions? What are the limitations they acknowledged?

These aren’t just the bare minimum academic exercises; they’re essential steps in understanding what a study says versus what we want it to say. But critical appraisal takes time, humility, and the willingness to discover that your initial interpretation might be wrong. It’s much easier to skim an abstract, find a quote that supports your existing beliefs, and present it as definitive truth.

Here’s the thing: you don’t need to justify your bigotry with your educational background. You don’t need to make every discussion about social issues an opportunity to centre yourself and your credentials. If you’re genuinely interested in contributing to knowledge, then engage with the complexity, acknowledge the nuance, and stop treating research as a weapon in your personal vendetta against people you don’t understand or have never interacted with.

(TL;DR: If you’re not being asked to say anything that you clearly do NOT understand, just stay quiet. But that’s way easier said than done. People love to force their “truths” onto others that do not usually apply.)

This calls for critical pedagogy, not just within psychology, but in how knowledge is taught across all fields. We need to ask whether the institutions themselves are encouraging this harmful thinking. Are curricula designed to challenge students’ assumptions, or to reinforce existing power structures? Do the teaching staff model intellectual humility, or are they perpetuating the myth that having credentials equals having all the answers?

The individuals responsible for this weaponisation of knowledge are not merely people; they are products of a system that values certainty over curiosity, authority over questioning. When educational institutions focus on graduation rates and employability rather than fostering genuine critical thinking, we should expect graduates to emerge with degrees but lacking the intellectual tools to use them responsibly.

The Real Damage

But this isn’t just about academic integrity or intellectual honesty. When someone uses their psychology degree to justify homophobia, they’re not just spreading misinformation—they’re actively contributing to a culture that dehumanises queer people. They’re giving prejudice a scientific veneer, making it harder for people to recognise bigotry when it’s dressed up in academic language.

The real tragedy is that countless people have been doing meaningful work, conducting rigorous research, and using their knowledge to genuinely help people. But their efforts get overshadowed by the loud voices of those who’ve learned to weaponise their credentials.

The fundamental question becomes: is our education making us curious, or is it not doing that? 

You might decide to do psychology as your bachelor’s because you need to make yourself employable, and that’s completely fine, given the current system we’re trapped in. But would you like your future psychologists or counsellors, or any other people within this field, faced with people who have different backgrounds, to be incurious about their fields?

That’s what we’re observing–people who have spent years studying human behaviour yet lack real curiosity about the humans they examine. They are satisfied with simplified explanations, cease questioning once they find research confirming their biases, treat their degree as the endpoint of learning rather than its start, and justify their “truth,” which ends up harming others.

Beyond the Degree

The question isn’t whether you have a psychology degree. The question is whether you’re using that education to build understanding or to build walls, or whether you’re wielding your credentials as tools for learning or weapons for harm.

Because at the end of the day, the most important thing your psychology degree should have taught you is that people are complex, not that you get to decide who deserves what based on your selective reading of research papers.

True intellectual humility looks different. It means acknowledging the limits of your knowledge, engaging with research holistically rather than selectively, and recognising that having a degree doesn’t make you infallible. It means understanding that psychology, like any other field, is constantly evolving, and that yesterday’s conventional wisdom might be tomorrow’s discredited theory.

Most importantly, it means remembering that behind every study, every statistic, every research finding, there are real people whose lives are affected by how that knowledge is used and misused.