Can Psychology Become a Science?
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Personality and Individual Differences 49 (2010) 281–288 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Personality and Individual Differences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid Can psychology become a science? Scott O. Lilienfeld Department of Psychology, Emory University, Room 473, 36 Eagle Row, Atlanta 30322, Georgia article info abstract Article history: I am profoundly grateful to Tom Bouchard for helping me learn to think scientifically. Scientific thinking, Received 3 December 2009 which is characterized by a set of safeguards against confirmation bias, does not come naturally to the Received in revised form 16 January 2010 human species, as the relatively recent appearance of science in history attests. Even today, scientific Accepted 25 January 2010 thinking is in woefully short supply in many domains of psychology, including clinical psychology and Available online 23 February 2010 cognate disciplines. I survey five key threats to scientific psychology – (a) political correctness, (b) radical environmentalism, (c) the resurrection of ‘‘common sense” and intuition as arbiters of scientific truth, Keywords: (d) postmodernism, and (e) pseudoscience – and conclude that these threats must be confronted directly Psychology by psychological science. I propose a set of educational and institutional reforms that should place Science Pseudoscience psychology on firmer scientific footing. Postmodernism Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Psychotherapy 1. Can psychology become a science? groups, they would need to possess above zero validity for at least one subgroup. When I entered graduate school in psychology at the University Of course, a naïve graduate student can perhaps be forgiven for of Minnesota in the Fall of 1982, I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed such logical errors, especially one embarking on his training nearly 21 year-old eager to learn about the mysteries of the mind. I was three decades ago. Yet as Faulkner (1951) noted, ‘‘The past is never brimming with energy, intellectually curious, and deeply in love dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” Even today, in the pages of our with psychology. Yet despite my undergraduate education at a su- journals and newsletters, we can find similar misunderstandings perb institution, Cornell University, something important was con- of individual differences psychology. Witness, for example, two re- spicuously absent from my intellectual repertoire, although I did cent passages from the pages of the APS Observer, the newsletter of not realize it at the time. I had not learned how to think. the Association for Psychological Science: As one symptom of my dysrationalia, to use Stanovich’s (2009) ‘‘...partitioning the determinants of behavioral characteristics term, I confidently held a host of profoundly misguided beliefs into separate genetic versus environmental causes is no more about individual differences. Among other things, I was certain sensible than asking which areas of a rectangle are mostly that: due to length and which to width” (Mischel, 2005, p. 3). ‘‘...this approach [traditional behavior genetics] does not Genetic influences on most psychological traits are trivial. escape the nature–nurture dichotomy, and it perpetuates the Genes and environments always interact. idea that genetic and environmental factors can be accurately Genes and environments cannot be separated. quantified and their relative influence on human development IQ tests are invalid for predicting cognitive performance. measured...genes and environment are always interacting, IQ tests are strongly biased against minorities. and it would be impossible to consider one without the other” (Champaigne, 2009, p. 2). At the time, it never occurred to me that some of these beliefs were not only poorly supported, but contradictory. For example, Both quotations confuse the transaction between genes and it never crossed my mind that if one cannot separate the influences environment within individuals with the separate influences of of genes and environments, there is no way of ascertaining genes and environment across individuals (Rowe, 1987). Mischel’s whether genes and environments interact statistically. Nor did it assertion, like many others in the literature (e.g., Ferris, 1996; cross my mind that for IQ tests to be biased against certain sub- LeDoux, 1998), implies erroneously that one cannot examine the question of whether good quarterbacks are more important to a football team’s success than are good receivers, because quarter- E-mail address: [email protected] backs ‘‘depend on” receivers to function, and vice versa. Yet it is 0191-8869/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.024 282 S.O. Lilienfeld / Personality and Individual Differences 49 (2010) 281–288 entirely possible to partition sources of variance across individuals granted today, did not emerge in psychology until the early 20th even when these sources ‘‘depend on” each other within individu- century (Dehue, 2000). The necessity of control groups is decidedly als (Waldman, 2007). Chaimpaigne’s claim exemplifies the same unintuitive, as these groups are designed to eliminate alternative error, and compounds it by asserting simultaneously that (a) genes explanations that lie outside of our immediate sensory awareness. and environments always interact, but that (b) one cannot separate Our commonsense realism or ‘‘naïve realism” – the seductive but or quantify the relative influences of genes and environments, de- erroneous belief that the world is exactly as we see it (Ross & spite the fact that one cannot ascertain whether genes and envi- Ward, 1996) – tells us that if a group of depressed clients improves ronments interact statistically without separating them as following therapy, we can conclude that the therapy worked. Our sources of variance. Incidentally, I strongly suspect that as a begin- naïve realism assures us that ‘‘we have seen the change with our ning graduate student, I would have found both of the aforemen- own eyes” and that ‘‘seeing is believing.” Yet these conclusions tioned quotations persuasive, in part because they dovetailed are erroneous, because they do not control for a host of rival expla- with my own biases against genetic influences, or at least genetic nations that lurk in the causal background, such as regression to main effects, on behavior. the mean, placebo effects, spontaneous remission, effort justifica- It was not until my second year of graduate school at Minne- tion, and the like (Lilienfeld, Lohr, & Olatunji, 2008). sota, when I enrolled in Tom Bouchard’s course on individual dif- ferences, that I first began to learn to think scientifically – that is, to try to put aside my biases in an effort to align my beliefs more 3. What is science, anyway? closely with reality (in this respect, I am an unabashed adherent of the correspondence theory of truth; O’Connor, 1975). Tom Up to this point, I have said little or nothing about what science taught me that political correctness has no place in science: The is. Some scholars insist that any attempt to define science is desire to discover the truth must trump the desire to feel comfort- doomed to fail, as the specific methodological procedures used in able (see also Sagan, 1995). Tom also taught me that we must be one domain (e.g., astronomy) often bear little or no superficial courageous in facing up to evidence, regardless of where it leads resemblance to the procedures used in others (e.g., psychology; us, and that as scientists we must prepare to have our preconcep- Bauer, 1992). Yet this argument overlooks the possibility that cer- tions challenged, even shattered. More than anything, Tom incul- tain higher-order epistemic commonalities cut across most or all cated in me a profound appreciation for intellectual honesty, scientific domains. which B.F. Skinner (1953) regarded as the ‘‘opposite of wishful I side with several authors who maintain that science is a set thinking” (p. 12). For this wisdom, which I have always tried to of systematic safeguards against confirmation bias, that is, the take to heart as a researcher and teacher, I will forever be grateful. tendency to seek out evidence consistent with our hypotheses and to deny, dismiss, or distort evidence that runs counter to them (Hart et al., 2009; Nickerson, 1998; see also Lilienfeld, 2. The unnatural nature of scientific thinking Ammirati, & Landfield, 2009). Nobel-prize winning physicist Feynman’s (1985) aphorism that the essence of science is ‘‘bend- Why did I begin this article by presenting misguided statements ing over backwards to prove ourselves wrong” succinctly embod- by myself and other psychologists? To make a straightforward ies this view, as does Skinner’s (1953) conclusion that science point: Scientific thinking does not come naturally to any of us. In mandates a ‘‘willingness to accept facts even when they are op- many respects, science is ‘‘uncommon sense,” because it requires posed to wishes” (p. 12). This emphasis on disconfirmation rather us to set aside our gut hunches and intuitions in lieu of convincing than confirmation accords with Popperian and neo-Popperian data (Cromer, 1993; McCauley, 2000; Wolpert, 1993). Even many views of the philosophy of science (Meehl, 1978), which under- great thinkers have failed to grasp this profound truth. Huxley score the need to subject our most cherished hypotheses to the (1902), Darwin’s ‘‘bulldog,” wrote that ‘‘science is nothing but risk of falsification. More broadly, this emphasis dovetails with trained and organized common sense” and mathematician-philos- the point that science is a prescription for humility (McFall, opher Whitehead (1916) wrote that ‘‘science is rooted in the whole 1996) and a method of ‘‘arrogance control” (Tavris & Aronson, apparatus of commonsense thought.” 2007). The adoption of scientific procedures, such as control In contrast, other scholars, including eminent psychologists, groups, is an explicit acknowledgement that our beliefs could have offered a diametrically opposed perspective, one more conso- be wrong (Sagan, 1995), as these procedures are designed to pro- nant with that I present here. Titchener (1929) maintained that tect us from fooling ourselves.