Should I study sociology or psychology?

Are you crazy?

Or do you just want to drive yourself crazy trying to make sense of all the other nuts

out there?

What do you mean?

Psychology has few career options outside of counseling.

I could get a job as a criminal profiler.

You’d be more likely to get a job as a negotiator, MBA managerial track position or marketing.

Psychology has nothing to do with marketing.

That’s only what companies want you to think.

What do sociologists do?

They sometimes work in marketing, performing opinion surveys and studying demographic trends

of the customer base and its shifting preferences.

I thought they worked for non-profits studying people and determining public policy.

It’s rather hard to get a decent paying job at a non-profit these days.

You might make more money at a think tank.

Or a senior track position in sociology.

Fewer than one in four doctoral candidates in the liberal arts get a tenure track teaching

position today.

So much for teaching.

At least psychology is taught to nurses to better understand patients, police officers

to handle criminals, liberal arts majors who want an easy science class and business majors

who want to understand what sells other than sex.

I’ve heard that companies hire sociologists.

For marketing, sometimes.

But they hire psychologists for things like improving worker productivity by minimizing

distractions, reducing stress and finding out what is messing people up.

You’re making it sound like all the good paying positions are in business.

Marketing requires an understanding of human nature via psychology to improve the odds

of a sale.

They need an understanding of sociology to market that message to a whole lot of people

or manipulate opinion on a large scale.

Or I could study evolutionary biology.

That just makes you look stupid at parties to blame everything on evolution except your

own failure to find a way to make a living with a liberal arts degree.