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How to Think Straight About Psychology Source: by Keith Stanovich…
How to Think Straight About
Psychology
Source: by Keith Stanovich
Excerpt from Keith Stanovich’s Book “How to Think Straight about
Psychology” (2nd Edition)
PSYCHOLOGY IS ALIVE AND WELL
In the preceding chapter we suggested, but did not explicitly state, a fact of
fundamental importance: psychology is a data-based scientific discipline.
Understanding the implications of this fact is the single most important step that a
layperson can take in developing the ability to think straight about psychology.
People outside the discipline commonly deny that psychology is a science.
Some of these objections are put forth quite strongly and probably affect public
opinion. Attempts to convince the public that psychology cannot be a science
often stem from two sources. The first source includes many of the purveyors of
bogus psychology, who have a vested interest in maintaining the public’s attitude
that anything goes in psychology, that there are no rational criteria for evaluating
psychological claims. This is the perfect atmosphere in which to market such
offers as “Lose weight through hypnosis,” “Develop your hidden psychic powers,”
“Learn French while you sleep,” and the many other parts of the multimillion-
dollar self help industry that either are not based on scientific evidence or, in
many cases, are actually contradicted by much available evidence.
Most people who claim that psychology is not a science derive no material
benefit from their belief, however. The resistance from this second source simply
reflects an understandable tendency to oppose the expansion of science into areas
where unquestioned authorities and “common sense” have long reigned. History
provides many examples of initial public resistance to the use of science rather
than philosophical speculation, theological edict, or folk wisdom to explain the
natural world. Each science has gone through a phase of resistance to its
development. Hypatia of Alexandria, the last scholar to work in the great library
there, was murdered by members of the early Christian church because her
interest in science and leaming was associated with paganism. Learned
contemporaries of Galileo refused to look into his new telescope because the
existence of the moons of Jupiter would have violated their philosophical and
theological beliefs. For centuries, the understanding of human anatomy
progressed only haltingly because of lay and ecclesiastical prohibitions against the
dissection of human cadavers. Charles Darwin was repeatedly denounced. Paul
Broca’s Society of Anthropology was opposed in France because knowledge about
human beings was thought to be subversive to the state.
Each scientific step to greater knowledge about human beings has evoked
opposition. This opposition eventually dissipated, however, when people came to
realize that science does not defile humanity by its investigations but instead
contributes to human fulfillment by widening the sphere of knowledge. Who now
believes that astronomy’s mapping of the galaxies and intricate theories about the
composition of distant stars destroy our wonder at the universe? Who would
substitute the health care available in their community for that available before
human cadavers were routinely dissected? An empirical attitude toward the stars
or the human body has not diminished humanity. More recently, Darwin’s
evolutionary synthesis has laid the foundation for startling advances in genetics
and biology. Nevertheless, as we get closer to the nature of human beings and
their origins, vestiges of opposition remain. In the United States, religious
extremists continue to advocate the teaching of creationism in the public schools,
and surveys show that the scientific fact that humans evolved from lower
organisms is not accepted by a large portion (in some surveys, a majority) of the
public. If evolutionary biology, with its long and impressive record of scientific
achievements, can still engender public opposition, is it any wonder that
psychology, the most recent discipline to bring long-held beliefs about human
beings under scientific scrutiny, currently provokes people to deny its validity?
Before we can acknowledge that psychology is a science, we must understand
what science is. Indeed, many who deny psychology the status of a science are
themselves quite confused about the nature of science. Every undergraduate
psychology instructor has encountered the beginning student who is majoring in
psychology “because I don’t like science.” The instructor is, of course, prepared
for the student’s incredulity when informed that psychology is indeed a member of
the sciences (I can’t believe I have to take statistics!). When the instructor asks,
“Have you taken much biology or chemistry since coming to the university?” the
reply is very predictable: Oh no, I’ve always avoided science. The student knows
nothing about the sciences but is absolutely certain that psychology is not one of
them. Unfortunately, this attitude characterizes many of psychology’s critics.
WHAT, THEN, IS SCIENCE?
To answer the question, What is science? we can begin by dealing with what
science is not. In this way, we can rid ourselves of the vast majority of common
misconceptions. First, science is not defined by subject matter. Any aspect of the
universe is fair game for the development of a scientific discipline. This includes
all aspects of human beings, including their behavior and brain functions. We
cannot divide the universe into “scientific” and “nonscientific” topics. Although
strong forces throughout history have tried to place human beings outside of the
sphere of scientific investigation, they have been unsuccessful, as you shall see.
The reactions against psychology as a scientific discipline probably represent the
modem remnants of this ancient struggle. A claim that human behavior cannot be
studied scientifically-which would rule psychology out of the sciences by
definition-should not be accepted as a given but should be viewed as a hypothesis
that can be evaluated. In fact, this hypothesis has been evaluated. It is false.
Science is also not defined by the use of particular experimental apparatus. It
is not the test tube, the computer, the electronic equipment, or the investigator’s
white coat that defines science. These are the trappings of science, but they are
not its defining features. (If this were the case, there would be no question about
psychology’s status because psychology departments in all major universities are
full of computers, chemicals, and electronic equipment Of all types.)
Finally, science is not defined by a specific method. Rather it is a way of
thinking about and observing the universe that leads to a deep understanding of
its workings. The principles governing science are general and broad in scope.
They are not sequences of rigid rules.
In this chapter we will discuss three important and interrelated features that
define science. They are (1) the use of systematic empiricism, (2) the production
of public knowledge, and (3) the examination of solvable problems. Although we
will examine each feature separately, remember that the three connect to form a
coherent general structure. (For a more detailed discussion of the general
characteristics of science, see the works of Bronowski, Popper, Cournaud, and
Medawar in the references section of this book.)
Systematic Empiricism
If you look up the word empiricism in any dictionary, you will find that it means
“the practice of relying on observation.” Although this seems clear enough, there
is an even simpler way of defining empiricism. The empirical attitude in science
can be summarized by the phrase “Let’s take a look.” Scientists find out about the
world by examining it. The fact that this may seem obvious to You is an indication
of the spread of the scientific attitude in the last couple of centuries. In the past,
it has not always seemed so obvious. Recall the refusal to look into Galileo’s
telescope. It was long thought that the way to know about the world was through
pure thought and argument or appeal to authority. Galileo claimed to have seen
moons around the planet Jupiter. Another astronomer, Francesco Sizi, attempted
to refute Galileo, not with observations, but with the following argument:
There are seven windows in the head, two nostrils, two ears, two eyes and a
mouth; so in the heavens there are two favorable stars, two unpropitious, two
luminaries, and Mercury alone undecided and indifferent. From which and many
other similar phenomena Of nature such as the seven metals, etc., which it were
tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily
seven…. Besides, the Jews and other ancient nations, as well as modern
Europeans, have adopted the division of the week into seven days, and have
named them from the seven planets: now if we increase the number of planets,
this whole system falls to the ground…. Moreover, the satellites are invisible to
the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the earth and therefore
would be useless and therefore do not exist. (Holton & Roller, 1958, p. 160)
The point is not that the argument is laughably idiotic, but that it was seen as a
suitable rebuttal to an actual observation. We laugh now because we have the
benefit of hindsight. Three centuries of the demonstrated power of the empirical
approach give us an edge on poor Sizi. Take away those years of empiricism and
many of us may have been there nodding our heads and urging him on. No, the
empirical approach is not necessarily obvious, which is why we often have to
teach it, even in a society that is dominated by science.
Empiricism pure and simple is not enough, however. Note that the heading for
this section is systematic empiricism. Observation is fine and necessary. But
pure, unstructured observation of the natural world will not lead to scientific
knowledge. Write down every observation you make from the time you get up
until the time you go to bed on a given day. When you finish, you will have a great
number of facts, but you will not have a greater understanding of the world.
Scientific observation is termed systematic because it is structured so that the
results of the observation reveal something about the underlying nature of the
world. Scientific observations are usually theory driven; they test different
explanations of the nature of the world. They are structured so that, depending on
the outcome of the observation, some theories are supported and others rejected..
We will see more specifically what systematic means in later chapters. Here,
we want to emphasize that psychology has only recently become empirically based
and that this has implications for public understanding of the discipline.
Psychologist Donald Broadbent (1961) has discussed why the development of
psychology means that we must make the transition from armchair speculation
about behavior to an empirical orientation in the following:
There are therefore great dangers in any attempt to short-cut the study of
behaviour. From all the labours of the past fifty years, three main lessons can
perhaps be learned for everyday life: and the first of these is that an objective
attitude to behavior is possible and essential if we are not to accept glib
generalizations. When, for example, we are told that income-tax discourages the
working of overtime in industry, our response should not be to ask ourselves if
this is intuitively reasonable, but to see whether the records of an actual factory
support the statement. When we put the knobs on a gas-stove we should not put
them in the place which seems natural to us, but try out a number of
arrangements on a large sample of people who might use the stove. In many of
the cases in which we blandly make assumptions about human nature, it is
possible to get evidence. (p. 202)
Publicly Verifiable Knowledge
Scientific knowledge is public in a special sense. By public, we do not mean
that the results of scientific observations are posted on community center bulletin
boards. Instead, we refer to the fact that scientific knowledge does not exist
solely in the mind of a particular individual. In an important sense, scientific
knowledge does not exist at all until it has been publicly submitted to the scientific
community for criticism and empirical testing. Knowledge that is considered
“special”-the province of the thought processes of a particular individual, immune
from scrutiny and criticism by others-can never have the status of scientific
knowledge.
Here is where the technical criterion of replication becomes important. In
order to be considered in the realm of science, a finding must be presented to the
scientific community in a way that enables other scientists to attempt the same
experiment and obtain the same results. Scientists use replication to define the
idea of public knowledge. It ensures that a particular finding is not due simply to
the errors or biases of a particular investigator. In short, for a finding to be
accepted by the scientific community, it must be possible for someone other than
the original investigator to duplicate it. When a finding is presented in this way, it
becomes public. It is no longer the sole possession of the original researcher but
is instead available for other investigators to extend, criticize, or apply in their
own ways.
John Donne, in his most famous sermon, told us that “no man is an island.” In
science, no researcher is an island. Each investigator is connected to the scientific
community and its knowledge base because the knowledge can be communicated
from scientist to scientist. It is this interconnection that enables science to grow
cumulatively. Researchers constantly build on previous knowledge in order to go
beyond what is currently known., This is possible only if previous knowledge is
stated in such a way that any investigator can use it to build on.
By publicly verifiable knowledge, then, we mean findings presented to the
scientific community in such a way that they can be replicated, criticized, or
extended by anyone in the community. This is a most important criterion not only
for scientists, but also for the layperson who, as a consumer, must evaluate
scientific information presented in the media. As we will see in chapter 10, one
important way to distinguish charlatans and practitioners of pseudoscience from
legitimate scientists is that the former often bypass the normal channels of
scientific publication and criticism and instead go straight to the media with their
“findings.” One ironclad criterion that will always work for the public when
presented with scientific claims of uncertain validity is the question: Have the
findings been published in a recognized scientific journal that employs some type
of peer review procedure? The answer to this question will almost always
separate pseudoscientific claims from the real thing.
Not all information in scientific journals is necessarily correct, but it has met a
minimal criterion of peer criticism and scrutiny. Most scientific disciplines publish
many different journals (although these journals often vary greatly in quality), so
that most scientific ideas can get published somewhere in the legitimate literature
if they meet some minimal standards. The idea that only a narrow range of data
and theory can get published in science is false. This is particularly true in
psychology where journals publish papers on an enormous variety of topics and
from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives.
Table 2 lists the names of only a fraction of the journals from which articles are
summarized in the publication Psychological Abstracts. Most of the journals listed
in the table are peer reviewed. Peer review is a procedure in which each paper
submitted to a journal is critiqued by several scientists who then submit their
criticisms to an editor (usually a scientist with an extensive history of work in the
specialty area covered by the journal) who decides whether the weight of opinion
warrants publication of the paper, publication after further experimentation and
statistical analysis, or rejection because the research is flawed or trivial. Most
journals carry a statement of editorial policy in each issue, so it is easy to check
whether a journal is peer reviewed.
The mechanisms of peer review vary somewhat from discipline to discipline,
but the underlying rationale is the same. Peer review is one way (replication is
another) that science institutionalizes the attitudes of objectivity and public
criticism. Ideas and experimentation undergo a honing process in which they are
submitted to other critical minds for evaluation. Ideas that survive this critical
process have begun to meet the criterion of public verifiability. Not all ideas
published in the journals summarized in Psychological Abstracts are necessarily
good or correct, but failure to appear in an established scientific source is a good
sign that a claim is unfalsifiable (a topic we will consider in chapter 3), not
replicable, or simply wrong. Thus, the consumer of psychological research can
rely on the general rule: if empirical support for a psychological claim has not
appeared in the established, peer-reviewed journals of psychology, it is highly
likely that the claim is bogus.
Solvable Problems
Science deals with solvable, or specifiable, problems. This means that the type
of questions that scientists address are potentially answerable with currently
available empirical techniques. If a problem is not solvable with the empirical
techniques that scientists have at hand, then scientists will not attack it. For
example, the question, “Will three-year-old children given structured language
stimulation during day care be ready for reading instruction at an earlier age than
children not given such extra stimulation?” represents a scientific problem. It is
answerable by currently available empirical methods. The question, Are human
beings inherently good or inherently evil? is not an empirical question and, thus, is
simply not in the realm of science.
You should be aware of two important misunderstandings regarding this third
characteristic of science. We have said that science deals only with a certain class
of problem-the kind that is empirically solvable. This most definitely does not
mean that scientists believe that questions in the realm of science are the only
important questions. Unfortunately, nonscientists often make such an inference,
though scientists rarely voice such opinions.
Scientists do focus on a certain class of problem, but there is no implied
denigration of nonscientific problems in this natural division of labor. Scientists
are not concerned that the expert on Thomas Hardy does not set aside a day once
in a while to study messenger RNA. On the other hand, it is similarly wrong to
infer that the solid-state physicist who does not devote time to the study of Alfred
Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is denying the importance of literature and
poetry. In short, just because scientists do not address nonscientific questions in
their professional work, it does not follow that they are unconcerned about such
questions. Informed artists are often concerned about current developments in
science; so, too, scientists recognize the importance of philosophical debates and
the artistic and literary developments that affect our culture.
By saying that scientists tackle solvable problems, we do not mean to imply
that different classes of problems are inherently solvable or unsolvable and that
this is fixed forever. Quite the contrary: Some problems that are unsolvable, given
currently available empirical techniques, may become solvable as theory and
empirical techniques become more sophisticated. This is how science in general
has developed and how new sciences have come into existence. There is always
ample room for disagreement about what is currently solvable. Scientists
themselves often disagree on this point as it relates to current problems of
ambiguous status. Thus, while all scientists agree on the solvability criterion, they
may disagree on its specific applications. Peter Medawar (1967) titled one of his
books The Art of the Soluble to illustrate that part of the creativity involved in
science is finding the problem on the furthest edge of the frontier of human
knowledge that will yield to empirical techniques.
Psychology itself provides many good examples of the development from the
nonsolvable to the solvable. There are many questions (for instance, How does a
child learn to speak the language of his or her parents? Why do we forget things
we once knew? How does being in a group change a person’s behavior and
thinking?) that had been the subjects of speculation for centuries before anyone
recognized that they could be addressed by empirical means. As this recognition
slowly developed, psychology coalesced as a collection of problems concerning
human behavior. Psychological issues gradually became separated from
philosophy, and a separate empirical discipline developed.
Thus, the key step in understanding modern psychology is appreciating its
implications as the empirical science of human behavior. Beginning students of
psychology are often quite confused about just what distinguishes psychology as a
discipline. It is not, for example, the focus on human behavior per se, because
many other disciplines and professional groups are concerned in some way with
human behavior: novelists, anthropologists, and so on. It is the fact that
psychology studies human behavior scientifically that makes it unique as a
discipline.
Many students major in the field of psychology because they want to “help
people,” but this again is not a defining feature of the field. “Helping people”-
although a laudable goal-is really only one of many different applications of
psychological knowledge, and many of these applications are outside of the
helping professions entirely (for example, applications of psychological knowledge
in advertising, in technology design, and in the military). Many other professionals
engage in activities designed to “help people” (social workers, nurses, teachers,
occupational therapists, pastoral counselors, and the like). Clinical and counseling
psychology, however, base their therapeutic techniques on scientifically derived
knowledge and evaluate the effectiveness of their techniques by scientific
methods. This scientific approach is the only factor that differentiates the
application of psychology in the human services domain. Nothing else
distinguishes either the study or the practice of psychology. Thus, if psychology
were not a science, it would simply have no reason to exist as a discipline
questions:
1) The beginning of the article describes two sources of resistance to psychology as a science. Please describe one.
2) What three interrelated features define science?
3) Why is it important that scientific knowledge is publically verifiable?
4) What is your overall reaction to Stanovich’s argument?
5) Has this article changed any of your views about psychology as a field?
