/ˈfoustēən ˈbärɡ(ə)n/ — a pact made to gain power or knowledge at the expense of losing one’s soul.

Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, famously quipped that university politics are especially vicious because the stakes are so low. As a one-time director of Harvard’s Defense Studies Program, Kissinger understood academia, where almost every disagreement is someone’s hill to die on.

This makes it difficult for young faculty to distinguish between what’s truly important and what’s wisely ignored. Soon after getting my first academic job, I watched rival groups of colleagues argue for months about a single, seemingly simple question: Should we or shouldn’t we change our name from a department of psychology to a department of psychological science?

From the outside, this may seem like a trivial issue of the sort Kissinger implied. It certainly seemed that way to me. Why take sides in a pointless debate and risk alienating people I hardly knew? Had modern Facebook or TikTok existed, I might have sat against the back wall at our faculty meetings, scrolling through silent AI reels of grizzly bears nursing abandoned kittens in the snow.

Years later, while I was a senior professor at a different university, I had the opposite reaction when the same question arose. With two decades of experience behind me, I’d come to understand how deeply important the argument was, and how it cuts at the core of psychology’s fragile identity among the sciences.

For decades, many academic psychologists have sought to align themselves with the “hard” sciences like physics, biology, and biomedicine. These disciplines enjoy higher status than the social sciences, which translates into more grant funding and greater prestige. Put bluntly, the more we align ourselves with the hard sciences, the more we can draw from their deeper well of tangible resources and good favor.

From this perspective, renaming a department of psychology to a department of psychological science is a no-brainer. Pragmatic as the strategy is, however, not all........

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