The impressions that I get from my readings of popular psychology this past year or so is that psychology is at a pre-paradigm stage, with no particularly dominant over-arching structure that guides its research programs(in the Lakatos sense). There are psychological theories that aim to diagnose and treat people with mental illnesses, theories that aim to encourage certain desired behaviour, theories that were used as political instruments in the struggle for equal rights, and theories that aim to help organisations harness human potential more effectively. It is hard to consider psychology as a single subject, because the only thing that is common to all these theories is that the subject matter is the mind, and that they use the scientific method. Reading about all these theories seems like 瞎子摸象.

Perhaps, it's just that psychology is a HUGE subject, but popular psychology books don't emphasise this point. I would suppose that if all that one knew about science came from popular science books and magazines, science would seem like a really messy subject too. I guess I'm like a guy reading Scientific American and going, "Woah, black holes, cool! But what's that got to do with the health benefits of dark chocolate?"