Consilience – The jumping together of psychology, technology, statistics, news and ?
Last weekend (April, 2010), I attended my favorite event in Los Angeles, the LA Times Festival of Books, and picked up the book Consilience, by E. O. Wilson. Consilience literally means the "jumping together" of knowledge and Wilson talks about how there is a potential orderliness or unity of knowledge that is possible across academic disciplines.
I was attracted to this book because it captures an overarching theme about how I have come to view the world. Everything I read these days jumps together into some grand puzzle, and social psychology, the field I study, is a natural glue (not the only possible glue, but a useful one for me). Almost anything can be studied by social psychologists...culture, health, gender, marketing, politics, morality, sports, poverty, love, justice, religion and death are all prominent topics that social psychologists study. I dare say that list includes most any big question that people care about.
Perhaps social psychology is just a set of methods and standards of analysis, but those do not seem unique either. The gold standard of generating new knowledge in social psychology is the experimental method using random assignment, a method shared with most every other scientific discipline. Social psychologists analyze the text of books, measure reaction times, examine images of the brain, do surveys of large nationally representative samples, and construct mathematical models.
In sum, social psychology can be the study of almost anything that people do by almost any method that can be quantified. Some people might take that as a knock on social psychology, but personally, I think the interdisciplinary or amorphous nature of the field is it's strength. The need to point to a unique contribution of one's field is part of the business of academia, not part of the quest to understand the world (see Louis Menand's Marketplace of Ideas for a discussion of this point). If you want to understand the world, this "jumping together"/consilience is perhaps the only way to get a true perspective.
A Booth at the Book Fair on "Happy Science"
Consider an age old question like 'what makes people happy?'. To be sure, it's a vague question that scientific/quantitative methods can make more precise. But the people at the booth from the book fair in this picture (left) probably have a reasonably well thought out perspective on what makes people happy as well. Philosophers probably think the answer lies in contemplation. English majors might think the answer is revealed by great literature. Neuroscientists and biologists seek answers in brain chemistry. Religious scholars in religious texts. Psychologists randomly assign people to do things and see if it makes them happier. Who has the answer? I would say nobody...and everybody...Just as any psychological finding is made more robust by the convergence of findings using multiple methods by multiple researchers in various settings on diverse individuals...so too is any greater theory about the human condition more easily believed through the convergence of knowledge across disciplines...or consilience.
For those who embrace this convergence, it's an exciting time. People are generating far more quantitative data as every facebook interaction, google search, credit card swipe, & GPS location can be mashed up into some application or graph that provides some evidence of the human condition. People are generating far more qualitative data as well, in the form of countless public blogs, forums, tweets, and facebook posts. Logic, statistics, & the scientific method can be used by people of any discipline to take this wealth of data and produce convergent knowledge.
I still plan to focus on posting graphs about quantitative findings that relate to psychological theories on this blog. But one of the main purposes of this blog is for me to store my own thoughts. My thought processes about the psychology of anything would be incomplete if I didn't have a place to store experiences that didn't explicitly have any data component to them...the random news article, observation, book review or quote that provides external validity to anything psychologists study. It is one thing to see something in a psychological experiment. But sometimes you only know it is real when you see the same thing exhibited in a character in a novel, in a quote from a politician, or in an essay by a philosopher.
Hence this section of the blog is born...the consilience section, where I jumble together news and assorted ideas from tangential areas that hopefully relate to moral and political psychology.
Posts in this category below:
- The Present Hedonism Time Perspective of Motley Crue Members, Liberals, and Libertarians
- On Hyperpartisanship, Hypermoralism, and the Supernormal Stimuli of Modern Politics
- Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation Leads to Greater Reward – 2 Theories
- Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation Leads to Greater Reward – 2 Theories
- Appreciating American Libertarians – Insight from Ted Conover’s Book, Rolling Nowhere
- Appreciating American Libertarians – Insight from Ted Conover’s Book, Rolling Nowhere
- Psychological Causes of Violence in Sports Riots
- Psychological Causes of Violence in Sports Riots
- What can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities cannot?
- Can open government data inform voters in the 2010 election?
- Consilience – The jumping together of psychology, technology, statistics, news and ?
- Consilience – The jumping together of psychology, technology, statistics, news and ?
- Methland by Nick Reding: Moral Maximizing and the Drug War
- What the positive psychology approach can learn from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided
- Gratitude Video from Conan O’Brien and Louis CK
- France to consider measures of gross national “bonheur” (happiness)
- Hyperpartisanship & Obama’s speech to kids in US schools
- Three polls which point to differing underlying fairness principles driven by differing goals
- Democracy Promotion vs. Dignity Promotion