Why a psychologist refuses to look at one problem through one lens

A return, a milestone, and the shape of the conversation

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Ali back to the show after almost a full year away, and noting two things in the same breath: this is the 200th episode of Thought Behind Things, and it is the last one of Season 2. Ali was on the show in the early days, when the operation was small. He is back now to a full team, a built-out office, and a sister channel — Pakistan Cars — that he tells Muzamil he has been watching and enjoying.

The framing is deliberate. Where their earlier conversations had stayed close to psychology as a subject, Muzamil tells Ali he wants to do something different this time: to explore Ali himself — the path, the decisions, the work — rather than the field in the abstract. The 200th episode is, in effect, an interview with someone who has watched the show grow from the inside.

How a pre-engineering student ended up in clinical psychology

Ali’s route into psychology is not a story of a calling identified in childhood. He had taken pre-engineering in matric. Engineering and medicine, as he puts it bluntly, were “not for me.” The turn happened on a bus in 2012, on the way back from Lahore, when a cousin handed him a copy of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. He had no reading habit at that point. He read it because he had nothing else to do. The theories of mind from the ancient Greeks held him in a way nothing in his syllabus had.

A television show — The Mentalist — pushed the interest further. He was less interested in the plot than in the protagonist’s reading of human behaviour. Some personal reasons sat behind the pull as well, which he does not name in detail. At the start of his second year, he stopped engineering.

The decision was not socially easy. “As a male, people look at you and they say, why are you going into psychology?” he tells Muzamil. The field is heavily gendered in Pakistan, and is not seen as a place where a man can make what he calls “a livable income.” Ali’s response, then and now, is the same. He did not care. He convinced his mother, started a bachelor’s in social sciences, majored in psychology, and went on to do an MS in clinical psychology at NUST, graduating in 2019.

A toddler discipline with no regulatory floor

Ali is direct about the state of the profession he has entered. “Psychology is definitely a very underdeveloped discipline in Pakistan,” he says. The few jobs that exist — in the police, the army, the air force, the navy, in government — pay very little. There is no licensing regime worth the name. “By law in Pakistan, unfortunately, nothing is regulated,” he says. A new graduate could, legally, start taking fifty patients a week the day after their viva. The only thing stopping them is their own ethics.

His own start was deliberately constrained. He took clients online at first, under the supervision of a senior clinical psychologist, then rented a room. He still does not practise more than a couple of days a week, because, in his own framing, the competencies are still being built and psychotherapy is emotionally taxing work that should not be done at volume from day one. The first clients came through his Instagram platform, Mental Health with Ali, where he had been writing posts not as marketing but because he thought they might be useful. A few of those posts got shared. The referrals followed.

Later in the discussion, Muzamil presses him on the money question — how comfortable, really, has it turned out to be? Ali is careful. He is happy with where he is. He had a number in his head, the kind of number any unmarried man in Pakistan carries around as a social benchmark, and he is past it. But he is also clear that he did not plan his way there. “I didn’t have a very good idea of how I would get there,” he says. “I worked hard from my side, and then I’ve been very pleasantly surprised in many ways as well.”

The two skills that compounded

Asked to look back and name what worked, Ali names two things. “One is, which I mention everywhere, reading. And the other is the ability to communicate verbally.”

The framing he gives the second one is worth pausing on. “This might be the first time in human history in which the spoken word has as much reach, or more reach, than the written word.” Podcasts, lectures, live sessions, training rooms — these are now the surfaces on which a psychologist becomes findable. He notes that the work he is doing for Icon Seven traces directly back to a podcast he did on this very show, on anchoring, which a friend showed to the company’s founder. That meeting, in turn, led to four months of consulting and counting.

Muzamil draws the chain out for him: the Icon Seven work would not have happened without the podcast; the podcast would not have happened without Muzamil’s own producer, Asad, who found Ali on Instagram, where he was running live videos. Reading and speaking were the inputs. Luck routed them.

Interdisciplinary work, and the one-pixel problem

Towards the end of his master’s, Ali began to find his way into something he did not have a name for at first. He started reading outside psychology — religious history, sociology, anthropology, biology, politics. Friends would tease him about always saying “the field is vast, the field is vast.” But the underlying intuition hardened into a position.

“If you’re looking at it just from psychology, you’re just getting one pixel of the whole image,” he says. “For another pixel to fit in, you have to understand the sociology of it. And then the biology of it. And then the politics of it.” Clinical psychology, he reminds Muzamil, is one of close to a hundred sub-disciplines inside psychology itself. There is marketing psychology, consumer psychology, forensic psychology, health psychology, psychophysics, ergonomics. The discipline is far wider than the one room — the therapist’s office — that most people associate with it.

The word he uses for the practice of holding several lenses at once is integrative complexity. He gave a TEDx talk at the University of Florida on the idea this past year. It is also the through-line that connects almost everything he is now doing outside his clinical practice.

Neuromarketing and the consumer who does not know

One of those things is the work at Icon Seven. The brief, as he describes it, is to use neuromarketing and consumer psychology research to inform branding, focus groups, and experimental method. Neuromarketing itself, he explains, is interdisciplinary by construction: psychology, neuroscience, marketing, and behavioural economics, brought together to understand consumer behaviour through more than one lens at a time.

He walks Muzamil through the toolkit. EEGs that measure brain activity. Pupilometry that measures pupil dilation. He cites a 2011 Hyundai study in which fifteen participants were placed in EEG machines and their brain responses to different parts of a car’s exterior were measured, with the resulting data feeding back into the design itself. Pakistan, he is clear, does not yet have most of this equipment. A pupilometer is on the wishlist because it is cheaper. The work he is doing is closer to “psychologically aware marketing” than to lab-grade neuroscience.

A second example — and one that lands cleanly — concerns scent. Scent, he tells Muzamil, can lift a single customer’s spending in a restaurant by roughly thirteen percent. In 2008, Starbucks stopped selling sandwiches for about six months because the aroma was interfering with the aroma of the coffee; the move, if he remembers the numbers correctly, lifted coffee sales by 300 percent. He also explains menu re-engineering — the “golden triangle” of where the eye lands first, the bias toward the first two items in a section, the way the last item in a section pulls attention back.

The framing he uses to distinguish the field from conventional marketing is the cleanest sentence he says all hour. “Neuromarketing does not assume that the customer knows why they want what they want.” Conventional marketing asks the consumer to explain themselves. Neuromarketing assumes the explanation is unavailable, and tries to read the behaviour directly.

Forensic psychology, and a field that does not yet exist

The other direction Ali has moved into is forensic psychology — psychology in relation to the courts, the police, the prisons, the judiciary. He is careful to clarify that he is not himself a forensic psychologist; his master’s research was in the area, but the specialty itself does not yet exist in Pakistan as a trained field. He and Dr Fawad Kaiser, a forensic psychiatrist, have established an organisation — Kaiser Psyched International — to begin the slow work of building it: mental health training inside prisons, the police, the judiciary, and university psych departments. He estimates it will take at least ten to fifteen years before the field is recognisable.

Muzamil presses him on the legal side. Where does an insanity plea sit in Pakistani law? Ali walks through it carefully. Anyone can make the plea. A board of psychiatrists is then convened to assess whether the person was, in the legal sense, out of touch with reality at the time of the crime. The problem is that Pakistan does not have forensic specialists to sit on those boards; the people who do is typically generalists, or psychiatrists who happen to work in large government institutions. A psychiatrist in an outpatient clinic, he notes, is a very different professional from one trained to assess violence inside a prison. The specialty matters, and the specialty does not yet exist.

Black-and-white thinking and the case against one truth

The conversation’s most pointed turn comes when Ali links integrative complexity to the work being done globally on violent extremism. People who move towards extremist views, he says, tend to show a documented pattern of black-and-white thinking — all-or-nothing reasoning, this is the right person and that is the wrong one, this is the truth and that is the lie. “My truth is the truth, and your truth is just —” Muzamil completes the thought, and Ali agrees.

Black-and-white thinking is not the only driver of violent extremism — Ali is careful to flag the structural factors, the economics, the politics — but at the individual level it is one of the strongest indicators. The intervention, the research suggests, is to build integrative complexity in the person doing the thinking. A useful side effect of doing that, he notes, is that you become much more willing to be wrong. “And I think that that is at the bottom of all learning.”

Muzamil takes the point and pushes it outwards. He has been watching the rise in polarisation inside Pakistan — religious, political, gendered — and is struck by how little of the analysis of it is being done by psychologists, sociologists, or anthropologists. Journalists do it. Economists do it. Computer-science majors do it. The discipline best equipped to understand why people think the way they do is barely in the room. Ali’s response is that the analysis is happening, but in small pockets, often unreported, and often hampered by the fact that the relevant research requires cooperation from state institutions that have very little incentive to engage.

The weirdest people in the world

Ali walks Muzamil through one of his favourite citations. In 2010 the psychologist Joseph Henrich published a paper titled The Weirdest People in the World. WEIRD is an acronym — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. The paper’s finding was that roughly eighty percent of psychology’s research base, at the time, came from populations that fit that description. “After that, it was like a slap across the face of social sciences and psychology in particular,” Ali says.

The implication for Pakistan is straightforward. Borrowed studies do not describe a society whose structures, economics, politics, and sociology are different. Indigenous research is not a nice-to-have; it is the only way the discipline becomes useful here. And until researchers have more incentive to do it, and government has more openness to using it, the field will keep guessing. Ali is hopeful but unsentimental about the timeline. Worldwide, psychology is a teenager. In Pakistan, he says, “we’re a toddler right now.”

What he hopes Pakistan looks like in 2050

Muzamil asks the question he now asks every guest. Thirty years from now, late fifties, peak of career — what does Ali hope Pakistan looks like? The answer is small and exact. He hopes policy will be informed by research. Not by public opinion. Not by the views of whoever happens to be drafting the policy. Not by political agenda. He is thinking specifically about public health, where he has seen pockets of innovative, data-driven work — the smart-lockdown response to COVID is the example he gives — and where he believes the country can plausibly improve in the next three decades.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil thanks Ali, thanks the audience, and signs off the season. The team is taking the show on the road — Lahore, Karachi, Sialkot, Faisalabad — while the Season 3 studio is built. “Build in silence,” in a sense, before the season returns loud. Two hundred episodes in, the show is still doing what it set out to do: pulling careful thinkers into long conversations and giving them the time to follow the argument all the way through.