[meow1032]

As someone who studied Psychology and CS, and is somewhat good at math, it's not necessarily a bad thing that psychology students don't take a lot of math.

I'd say maybe 10% of students who take psychology actually go on to do anything with research. Most of my friends in psychology are now counsellors, social workers, occupational therapists etc., and are good at their jobs, and this would not change if they had to take multivariate calculus.

At the same time, I do think psychological research would benefit if the people performing that research were better trained in math (actually when I say math, I specifically mean statistics and linear algebra).

I think the problem is that psychology is so broad that it can't possibly do a good job at catering to all these different concerns. Even at the graduate level, in order to become a clinical psychologist, you have to do a lot of research. The scientist-clinician model sounds good, but in practice I found that a lot of people who just didn't care about research were doing research. I found the same thing with medical students who were doing research to pad their resumes.

I also think that you can't just take a physicist or mathematician and plop them in psychology and start fixing everything. The problems often require a ton of theory, are really expensive to test, and the data quality is often terrible (because of human error, measurement error etc). Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1831/