Keith Stanovich - How to Think Straight About Psychology

Psychology, of course, does not have a monopoly on studying behavior. Many other allied disciplines, using a variety of different techniques and theoretical perspectives, also contribute to our knowledge. Many problems concerning behavior call for an interdisciplinary approach. However, a frustrating fact that most psychologists must live with is that when work on an interdisciplinary problem is publicized, the contributions of psychologists are often usurped by other fields.

There are many examples of scientific contributions by psychologists that have been ignored, minimized, or partially attributed to other disciplines. For instance, the first major survey of the evidence on television’s effects on children’s behavior was conducted under the aegis of the U.S. Surgeon General, so it is not surprising that the American Medical Association (AMA) passed a resolution to reaffirm the survey’s findings of a suggested causal link and to bring the conclusions more publicity. Again, there is nothing wrong here, but an unintended consequence of the repeated association of the findings on televised violence with the AMA is that it has undoubtedly created the impression that the medical profession conducted the scientific research that established the results. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the research studies on the effects of television violence on children’s behavior were conducted by psychologists.

One of the reasons that the work of psychologists is often ascribed to other disciplines is that the word psychologist has, over the years, become ambiguous. Many research psychologists commonly append their research specialty to the word psychologist when labeling themselves, calling themselves, for example, physiological psychologists, cognitive psychologists, industrial psychologists, evolutionary psychologists, or neuropsychologists. Some use a label that does not contain a derivative of the word “psychology” at all, for example, neuroscientist, cognitive scientist, artificial intelligence specialist, and ethologist. Both of these practices—in conjunction with the media’s bias that “psychology isn’t a science”—lead to the misattribution of the accomplishments of psychologists: The work of physiological psychologists is attributed to biology, the work of cognitive psychologists is attributed to computer science and neuroscience, the work of industrial psychologists is attributed to engineering and business, and so on. Psychology won’t be helped by the fact that one of its most brilliant contemporary researchers, Daniel Kahneman, received the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics! Of course, no Nobel Prize is given in psychology (Benjamin, 2004; MacCoun, 2002).

In fact, here is how ridiculous the tendency to overlook psychology can get. In its April 17, 2008, issue, the New York Review of Books published the following correction on page 86: “In Sue Halperin’s review of books about happiness [NYR, April 3], the field in which economist Daniel Kahneman has done pioneering research should have been referred to as hedonic psychology, not hedonistic psychology.” At first we might give the magazine some points for accuracy—they corrected the mistaken use of the word hedonistic with the word hedonic. However, the editors did not notice, before printing this correction, that they had introduced another error—Daniel Kahneman is a cognitive psychologist, not an economist!

Psychologist Frederick King (1993), the director of the Yerkes Primate Research Center at Emory University, told of taking time to explain to a reporter the importance of animal models in the study of human neurological disorders. After listening to the long explanation by King, who had contributed for years to the research literature on the neurological and behavioral problems of epilepsy, the reporter asked, “How do you know anything about epilepsy? You’re just a psychologist.”

Finally, consider what happened at the trial of former White House aide Lewis (Scooter) Libby in 2007. Expert testimony from a renowned research psychologist was disallowed because the judge ruled that it was well known that memory was fallible and that juries can safely rely on their common sense to ascertain how memory works. In fact, studies show that almost 30 percent of the population believe that human memory “operates like a tape recorder” (Lilienfeld, 2012). Contrary to what the judge thought, 30 percent of his jury badly needed to hear from the expert!

Lest it appear that we are blaming everyone else for psychology’s image problems, it is about time that we acknowledge the contribution of psychologists themselves to confusion about their field. Most research psychologists do very little public communication. This is because there are very few rewards for the legitimate psychologist who tries to communicate actual psychology to the public.

Nevertheless, the APA and the APS are making more efforts to facilitate public communication (West, 2007). The APS has started a new journal for this purpose: Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The APS also sponsors a blog called “We’re Only Human” for this purpose ( http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/). Psychology needs to make much more of an effort in this area. Otherwise, we will have only ourselves to blame for the misunderstanding of our discipline.

Past APA president Ronald Fox (1996) spoke of psychology’s communication problems in a presidential address and how we have brought some of these communication problems on ourselves:

Some practitioners who are appearing in the mass media are behaving in ways that are unprofessional, marginally ethical at best, and downright embarrassing to a majority of their peers. . . . Our discipline lacks effective measures for responding to irresponsible and outrageous public claims. . . . Too often in today’s world, the public is treated to the views and opinions of charlatans (as observed on a recent TV talk show in which a psychologist claimed to have helped dozens of patients remember traumas suffered in past lives), rather than rational practitioners. (pp. 779–780)

And, finally, there is the phenomenon of antiscientific attitudes within parts of psychology itself. For example, some groups of psychotherapists have traditionally resisted scientific evaluations of their treatments. Columnist and psychotherapist Charles Krauthammer (1985) wrote of how this attitude presents a serious threat to the integrity of psychotherapy. First, there is the proliferation of therapies that has occurred because of a reluctance to winnow out those that do not work. Such a proliferation not only removes a critical consumer protection but also promotes confusion in the field. Krauthammer was correctly seeing that the failure to use the falsification strategy prevents scientific progress.

Finally, Krauthammer pointed to the inconsistency of a therapeutic community that, on the one hand, argues against scientific evaluation because it is “more art than science,” in the common phrase, but is still greatly concerned about what he called the 800-pound gorilla: reimbursement for services by government and private health insurers. Krauthammer exposed the inconsistency of these attitudes within the psychotherapy community, pointing out that if psychotherapy is an art rather than a science, then it should be supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, rather than by Medicare.

Some readers of the first few editions of this book commented that they thought I had “let psychologists get off too easily” by not emphasizing more strongly that unprofessional behavior and antiscientific attitudes among psychologists themselves contribute greatly to the discipline’s image problem. In trying to provide more balance here, I have relied heavily upon the work of Robyn Dawes (1994) and Scott Lilienfeld (2012). If anyone doubts that psychologists themselves have contributed greatly to the field’s dilemmas, they need only read the work of these two scholars. Dawes does not hesitate to air psychology’s dirty linen and, at the same time, to argue that the scientific attitude toward human problems that is at the heart of the true discipline of psychology is of great utility to society (although its potential is still largely untapped). For example, Dawes argued that “there really is a science of psychology that has been developed with much work by many people over many years, but it is being increasingly ignored, derogated, and contradicted by the behavior of professionals—who, of course, give lip service to its existence” (1994, p. vii). Likewise, Lilienfeld (2012) argues that “psychologists should curb the facile temptation to place all of the blame for their field’s tarnished image on widespread public misunderstanding. At least some of psychology’s negative reputation appears to be deserved, as large pockets of the field, especially those pertaining to psychotherapy, remain mired in unscientific practices” (pp. 122–123).