Many people seem to experience the temptation to say or believe that what is true of one person must be true of another. This is indeed the case if one refers to extremely specific things about human nature. All humans, for instance, are conscious minds in mammalian bodies, or else they would not be human. Yet that all humans have minds does not mean that their mental traits (personalities) are the same, just as the fact that all humans have bodies does not mean that they all have the same physical strength or skin color, or that they all choose to partake in the same activities with their bodies. There is an enormous spectrum of human desires, motivations, and behavioral traits that are not uniform across time or geography.
Sometimes I hear psychology get criticized for the extrapolations of some psychologists, so I want to make clear what truth these criticisms might possess. Psychology itself is the study of the human mind, personalities, and behaviors, a thing quite valuable in the pursuit of knowledge. Individual psychologists, however, might make rather drastic mistakes in reasoning, especially if they belong to faulty schools of psychology (deterministic forms of behaviorism, for example). I clarify that only some psychologists are guilty of these fallacies to emphasize that I am not committing the same error of generalization in pointing to it! They might assume that what is true of one person's motivations must likewise be true in the case of another person's motivations, or that some invisible and thus unverifiable part of human consciousness (the subconscious) controls human thought and behavior, or they might embrace some other stupidity. But idiotic beliefs or erroneous conclusions of some psychologists do not make the entirety of psychology illegitimate.
No fallacy has been committed in the careful observation of a particular individual or the classification of various personalities or mental disorders. If a psychologist extrapolates from one person to another regarding personality, this is where he or she has lapsed into error (i.e. "This woman is like this, therefore women have a tendency to . . .", "Joseph likes this, therefore this study shows that men like . . ."). This indicates nothing problematic with psychology itself as a discipline, only with the conclusions held by a particular psychologist. Because of bullshit fallacies and extrapolations one might see a "new study" get replaced by a newer study, and that study contested by a newer one, with the information from one conflicting with the other(s), until only rational people can see that it is not psychology itself that is the problem, but the absurd sub-ideologies that people might bring into psychology that are the problem.
Some people I know are quick to dismiss the majority of psychology as a discipline because of the stupidity of some historical and contemporary psychologists--yet we must be careful to not indict a discipline when it is only some of the participants who are wrong. Just as an unintelligent theologian does not render all of theology false, or an assumptive physicist does not mean the entire discipline of physics is useless, the irrationality of some psychologists does not discredit the whole of psychology.
I certainly detest it when a psychologist or study extrapolates from one person to another--or contrives asinine theories of mental metaphysics (like the subconscious in the Freudian sense) or views cultural conditioning as an inescapable force. Yet, reason distinguishes between the stupidity of a person and the usefulness or legitimacy of a discipline in itself. I simply want to make it clear that psychology itself, as a mixture of general philosophy, phenomenology, and science (in some cases), is not inherently built on fabrications or assumptions. Sometimes psychology must be protected from psychologists.
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