• Human beings have some degree of free will which confounds reproducible results. Some will dispute this, and maybe humans are more constrained than we might think, but that is a far cry from believing that human behavior is fully determined.  In contrast, a computer is actually incapable of producing a random number that is not fully predictable, though it can measure an ostensibly random event outside of itself and report that as a random number. If psychology or neuroscience ever produces a machine that can predict which number a person will pick from 1-100 with 100% accuracy in the same way that you can predict a machine's decisions (if you know the inputs), I will retract this paragraph, but I doubt that will ever happen.  As long as you allow for some degree of free will of the subject matter, the scientific paradigm of reproducibility breaks down.  Imagine if the gas in our car could decide not to combust or the electricity in our refrigerator could decide not to flow in the direction intended.  How reliable would our cars and appliances then be?  Physicists should be quite thankful that atoms are not so willful.
• We care about individual human beings, not the "average" human being. When we do studies on electricity and figure out a method to conduct electricity with 10% less loss of energy, without any side effects, we have undoubtedly made a worthy discovery.  It doesn't matter if the same intervention causes some energy that would otherwise be captured to be wasted, as long as the net effect is positive.  Energy is fungible.  In contrast, human beings are not.  If we conceive of some intervention that makes 10% of people more happy, undoubtedly it will make x% of people less happy.  All psychology studies are full of people who react in the opposite direction to the published results.  For example, people generally conform to social norms...but we all know that there are people who do the complete opposite and rebel.  This can be mitigated by measuring individual differences, but the problem is that human beings are both the consumers and the subjects of our research.  People care about what makes them themselves happier, not the "average" person.  Since psychologists cannot say with certainty what will happen to any individual person, the consumer of psychological knowledge has to filter anything said to them through the filter of their own individuality, in order to derive utility.  While our results may often be reproducible on groups (despite free will), they never encompass 100% of people and so there will always be some degree of subjectivity to a result.  For this reason, a memoir where a person can be more certain of the applicability of a phenomenon, due to the deep description of a situation, really can lead to more useful insight than a study that describes what scientifically happens to an "average" person, from the perspective of a knowledge consumer.
• Human beings are highly evolved social animals that can intuit complex things about other human beings. The observer article highlights the findings of this probability sample survey where it was found that people believe that psychology is a science, but also that everyday life provides training in psychology (see below chart).  In both the original study and the APS article, these statements were presented as somewhat contradictory pieces of evidence, but I don't think this is necessarily true.  I believe both are true.  People intuitively know a lot about how people work.  Their perceptions may be biased by experience, but then again psychologists are biased by sampling in the same way.  I firmly believe that anyone who believes that you can't learn something profound about the human condition from a good book hasn't read a good book (or is blinded by their own biases).  I cannot see how psychologists can be truly useful to the world as long as we believe that our methods are the only ones that speak to questions about human psychology and ignore outside wisdom, much of which is more advanced than what we study.

Personally, I agree with the survey respondents in the above study.  Psychology is a science and psychologists are among the best scientists in the world, if only because we have to deal with a subject that is willful, variable, cares about itself, and where the bar is so much higher for producing marginal knowledge above that of the average person.  Psychologists should be applauded for that.  Yet, I believe that trying to tell people that our image as a discipline rests upon the belief that what we do is very similar to what physicists and chemists do will always fail because the above three reasons are self-evident to most consumers of psychology.

Psychology is what it is.  Trying to sell it as more may lead psychologists be less trusted, as we seem more out for our own gain than for doing something useful.  It may also lead psychologists to adopt unhelpful procedures, designed to prove our scientific-hood, as opposed to being of use to others, and/or to ignore those methodologies seen as less "scientific" (e.g. qualitative studies or narratives), in order to be associated with methodologies seen as more scientific (e.g. neuroscience, as in the article), even when we could learn something from both.  There is truth in any view of the world, and the best truths are arrived at from a variety of angles, in the same way that the use of many measurement techniques reduce overall error.  According to the above graph, under 50% of people (in 1986) believed that psychology has an impact on their daily lives.  I absolutely believe that psychologists should continue to use the scientific method as best we can.  However, I also believe that psychologists may actually make more of a real impact if we realize the inherent limitations of our subject matter and stop worrying so much about whether we are grouped with the physicists or the sociologists.

- Ravi Iyer

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.

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.

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.

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

A long time ago, 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, always incomplete, but not unsolvable, and social psychology, the field I am trained in, 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.

That being said, "if all you have is a hammer, everything seems to be a nail", and psychologists often fall prey to this saying in thinking that the use of statistical methods is the only valid way of examining the world.  A well designed experiment can tell us that something can happen (under often artificial circumstances), which is important knowledge, but a good book about someone's life can tell us unequivocably what actually has happened, at least to one person.  And a lot of times, we care as much about what happens to individual people as we care what happens to the "average" person, as we happen to be one of those individual people.

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.  So I will often write book reviews on this blog linking what I've learned from the book with what I have learned in particular psychology studies.

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.

Book Reviews:

• Tony Hsieh, liberals, and libertarians prefer buying experiences to materialism – A Review of Delivering Happiness
• The Definition of Moral Hazard and A Review of The Big Short
• Why is Warren Buffett liberal on the estate tax? A Review of The Snowball.
• The Present Hedonism Time Perspective of Motley Crue Members, Liberals, and Libertarians
• On Hyperpartisanship, Hypermoralism, and the Supernormal Stimuli of Modern Politics
• Appreciating American Libertarians – Insight from Ted Conover’s Book, Rolling Nowhere
• Psychological Causes of Violence in Sports Riots

Other Consilience posts:

• Tony Hsieh, liberals, and libertarians prefer buying experiences to materialism – A Review of Delivering Happiness
• The Definition of Moral Hazard and A Review of The Big Short
• Why is Warren Buffett liberal on the estate tax? A Review of The Snowball.
• 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?
• Book Reviews – Consilience between psychology and books I read.
• Book Reviews – Consilience between psychology and books I read.
• 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