PoliPsych.com Exploring Political Attitudes Through Moral Psychology

15Jun/101

What can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities cannot?

Some colleagues of mine were fortunate enough to gather in Herzilaya, Israel for a conference on morality, the product of which is publicly available online. As I reach the end of my graduate school career, I find myself wondering about the greater purpose of some of the research psychologists do and I found particular resonance in this chapter from the conference, Paradigm Assumptions About Moral Behavior: An Empirical Battle Royal by Lawrence J. Walker, Jeremy A. Frimer, & William L. Dunlop of the University of British Columbia.

What interested me was not the data, but the critique of how psychologists attempt to illuminate the human condition.  A few quotes from the chapter summarize the points I'd like to emphasize.

Psychologists often study phenomena in isolated, artificial environments, which allows researchers to necessarily isolate variables of interest, but....

Aiming to isolate phenomena, scholars in this research enterprise are prone to devise somewhat peculiar and overly constrained assessments of moral functioning that are remote from everyday moral experience.
Psychologists then generalize these findings to natural settings that are 'messy' with extraneous factors.
A gold nugget in Gilligan’s (1982) critique of moral psychology was her skepticism concerning such constrained dilemmas and her advocacy for assessing moral judgment more naturalistically, tapping moral problems from individuals’ own experience.
If 60% of participants in a study do X in situation Y, psychologists are prone to saying that "people" tend to do X in situation Y, not addressing the 40% who did not do that.  Or in experiments, it may be said that Y causes X, rather than saying that Y can sometimes cause X.
Another paradigmatic assumption to which we draw attention asserts that people are psychologically “cut from the same cloth,” uniformly operating by the same moral psychological
processes. This assumption is manifest in the frequent reliance on a single type of research participant (e.g., undergraduate students garnering course credit), a lack of consideration for
individual differences, and a homogenizing “people” label.
Sometimes psychologists point out such methodological flaws with the conclusion that psychologists need to do more rigorous research. I would say that instead, perhaps there are inherent limits on how convincing any single piece of research can be. Published research can be seen as evidence to be shared, rather than conclusive final words on a subject, which they rarely are when dealing with something as complex as human behavior. Similarly, the author's conclusion is not to throw out psychological research, but rather to use "multiple lenses" on the same phenomena before concluding anything.
Our proposal contends that lab experimentation should be balanced with real-world observation of socially significant affairs and that morally relevant aspects of personality should
be tapped across all levels of personality description. Different methodologies should be mutually informative. Multiple lenses on the same phenomena contribute to a more comprehensive understanding, whereas divergent findings across methodologies hearken our attention.

So what can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities, or simply reading the newspaper thoughtfully, cannot?  I would say not much, but rather that psychology can help buttress what can be learned by other methods and vice versa. They both get at the same questions. A colleague of mine once shared that he thinks of psychology studies as statistical parables, in the same way that stories of the real or fictional world provide us with different kinds of parables. Anyone who has read a really good novel might believe Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote that "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."

The authors I quote above want us to use multiple lenses to understand the human condition, referring to the lenses that psychologists might use (different samples, different methods). I would further extend that analogy to all fields that attempt to understand the human condition, such as literature and the humanities, but also just reading the news. This is not to say that there is not something powerful about quantitative analysis and methodologically rigorous psychological research. But as I step back from the research, I find that I'm only convinced by findings where there is a web of evidence, of the type that one researcher, paper, study, method, or discipline, could never produce...where the statistical parable has been replicated in other ways by other people and is echoed in situations I've faced and news stories I've read about. Fortunately, the internet and semantic web technologies promise to make it easier to discover such webs of evidence...but that's a subject for another post.

If you have the patience, it's worth reading the results of the conference in Herzilaya, but if not, perhaps I'll make a practice of summarizing some of the other chapters as I read them. Social psychology can be unfortunately unintelligible, in ways that literature is not.

- Ravi Iyer

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30Apr/102

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.

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