Psychology is still a problematic science and the public knows it

Public skepticism of psychology: Why many people perceive the study of human behavior as unscientific.. E-mail:wtryon@fordham.edu DOI: 10.1037/a0030084 Psychology Is Still a Problematic

American Psychologist, 63, 146 –159. doi:

10.1037/0003-066X.63.3.146

Lilienfeld, S O (2012) Public skepticism of

psychology: Why many people perceive the

study of human behavior as unscientific

American Psychologist, 67, 111–129. doi:

10.1037/a0023963

Tryon, W W (2009) Missing mechanism

infor-mation American Psychologist, 64, 273–274.

doi:10.1037/a0015348

Tryon, W W (2012, June 11) A connectionist

network approach to psychological science:

Core and corollary principles Review of

Gen-eral Psychology Advance online publication.

doi:10.1037/a0027135

Correspondence concerning this comment

should be addressed to Warren W Tryon,

De-partment of Psychology, Fordham University,

441 E Fordham Road, Dealy Hall, Bronx, NY

10458-5198 E-mail:wtryon@fordham.edu

DOI: 10.1037/a0030084

Psychology Is Still a

Problematic Science and the

Public Knows It

Thomas Teo

York University

According to the philosophers of science

Hempel and Oppenheim (1948), who were

cited appropriately by Lilienfeld

(Febru-ary–March 2012) in his article, scientific

explanations serve to answer “why”

ques-tions Clarifying the logic of explanations

in the sciences, they developed famously

the notion that phenomena can be

ex-plained (using deduction) by means of

gen-eral laws and by means of certain

anteced-ent conditions According to Hempel and

Oppenheim, the question of why the part of

an oar that is under water appears bent

upward to an observer in a rowboat can be

explained by the law of refraction, by the

law that water is optically denser than air

and by reference to the fact that part of the

oar is indeed in the water

Here is not the space to discuss the

intricacies and complexities of scientific

ex-planations, because my point is more

ill-ustrative Lilienfeld’s (2012)subtitle (“Why

Many People Perceive the Study of Human

Behavior as Unscientific”) can easily be

translated into the question “Why Do Many

People Perceive the Study of Human

Behav-ior as Unscientific?” But whereas Hempel

and Oppenheim (1948) were able to

ex-plain a physical phenomenon by moving

from the explanans to the explanandum via

logical deduction, and whereas their

ex-planans contained general laws and specific

antecedent conditions, Lilienfeld (2012)

could not rely on general laws or even

statistical facts to provide a scientific ex-planation for this question What is evident

from all we know from the philosophy of

science is that Lilienfeld offered us an in-terpretation Although Lilienfeld provided

good arguments and good reasons for the explanandum (e.g., why the public is skep-tical toward psychology), citing studies and data, he clearly did not provide a deduc-tive-nomological explanation in the sense

of Hempel and Oppenheim or in the sense

of the natural sciences

Indeed, providing interpretations for

complex issues of mental life is character-istic in the discipline of psychology Look-ing at some of the most important studies in the history of psychology, one can easily see that psychologists provide scientific in-terpretations rather than scientific explana-tions It should be emphasized that inter-pretations are important: They make data understandable, they are conveyed to a readership or audience (scientific or pub-lic), and they are needed for grasping com-plex psychological problems, including the issue thatLilienfeld (2012)raised Thus, it would be unreasonable to assume that other psychologists would answer Lilienfeld’s question in similar ways (he listed eight sources) For example, as a historian and theoretician of psychology, I would sug-gest that some of the answers lie in the subject matter of psychology, within a lim-ited epistemology, and in the social func-tion of psychology This means that I would give primacy to the analysis of the discipline of psychology, which I label as still problematic (see also Woodward &

Ash, 1982)

(a)Lilienfeld (2012)articulated and de-scribed some surface phenomena very well, but ontological analyses demand an under-standing of the nature of the discipline of psychology History has demonstrated that

psychology is as much a human science as it

is a natural science Pioneers of psychology,

from Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and Abraham Maslow (1908 –1970) to contem-poraries such as Amedeo Giorgi or Ken-neth Gergen, to name a few, understood that very well Thus, it is unclear why Lilienfeld restricted his quest to the “Study

of Human Behavior” (as in his subtitle) when it is clear that psychology as a disci-pline has embraced in its history different definitions of its subject matter, including consciousness, mental life, experience, subjectivity, behavior, the mind, the brain, and so on All of these subject matters have

a natural-scientific but also a human-scien-tific dimension Memory can be studied through neuroscience but also through phe-nomenology or psychoanalysis Equally important, the public is interested in the

natural-scientific foundation of memory but particularly in the personal, subjective meaning of memory embedded in history and culture Academic psychology needs to address both needs (instead of leaving this

to pop psychology)

(b) In terms of epistemology, primacy should be given to the subject matter of psychology, or to the problems or topics for which psychologists develop methodol-ogies and methods that do justice to psy-chological problems Rather than privileg-ing one set of methodologies or methods (e.g., the experiment), psychologists need

to open their studies to the plurality of methods, quantitative or qualitative, and to the limitations of all of them Instead of a celebratory selling of goods to the public, I recommend knowledge about the limita-tions of psychological methods, modesty when making generalizations, and most of all, honesty about the contingencies of knowledge produced in psychological re-search Psychologists often provide inter-pretations that may be dependent on the-ory, histthe-ory, and culture When research does not have immediate relevance to the public, we should address that rather than make promises about applications that we cannot keep Sometimes it will be neces-sary to admit that a study, working with isolated variables, may not have any real-life applications at all When admitting that interpretations are part of psychologists’ scientific life, we should discuss how we ensure that psychologists provide good in-terpretations of empirical evidence This requires academic training in interpretative competencies (Teo, 2008)

(c) We cannot deny that many psycho-logical issues have political-ethical mean-ings Suggesting that we can be completely neutral when it comes to hot-button issues in our historically and culturally contingent so-ciety, such as gay marriage, racism, parenting practices, gender differences, torture, mental illness, and so on, would be misleading The public has developed good intuitions about the nexus of human sciences and politics and understands that academics come from

“somewhere.” The public also understands, although I do not disagree with the misun-derstandings thatLilienfeld (2012) enumer-ated, that psychology is not like physics, en-gineering, or medicine Here, I suggest an extension of honesty about the historical, cul-tural, and personal limitations of psycholog-ical knowledge and interpretations: Aca-demic and public self-reflexivity would be an antidote to the myth of value-neutrality, and I

do not think it would weaken the discipline (seeMorawski, 2005) Instead of presenting psychological research as final and as tran-scendent of culture and history, we need to

807

present psychological knowledge as

contin-gent given the evolving and sometimes

ideo-logically laden nature of the subject matter

(d) Psychology has been an

impres-sively successful discipline in North

Amer-ica, Europe, and many other parts of the

world The process of psychologization, the

fact that more and more areas of human

existence—from education, industry, the

military, the economy, legal and health

sys-tems, to society and politics—are

under-stood in terms of psychological categories

and theories can be identified as our

suc-cess But with regard to the

psychologiza-tion of public life—from discussions on

national intelligence at the beginning of the

20th century, to the psychological

contri-butions in Brown v Board of Education in

the middle of the 20th century, to the

no-tion of empathy deficits that President

Obama evokes—the public also has a right

to know about critical assessments of

psy-chology from within the discipline (Slife,

Reber, & Richardson, 2005;Teo, 2005)

The psychologization of everyday life

also demonstrates that the categories of

psy-chology are not the same as those in the

natural sciences (Danziger, 1997) One

im-portant feature that makes psychological

con-cepts different is the evaluative looping

ef-fects (Hacking, 1994) that psychological

categories evoke Psychology is applied in

the public sphere through concepts or ideas

developed in academia (e.g., IQ, emotional

intelligence, extraversion, pathological grief,

attribution style, the notion that brains are not

wired correctly) But the application of these

terms in the public sphere changes the

pub-lic in that a different type of reflection

occurs when the public uses these concepts

in their self-understanding and in the

for-mation of their identities—and when

psy-chologists rediscover these entities in their

research There exist ongoing looping

ef-fects between academic psychology and

the public, and psychologists need to study

and understand this dialectical

interconnec-tion

REFERENCES

Danziger, K (1997) Naming the mind: How

psychology found its language London,

Eng-land: Sage

Hacking, I (1994) The looping effects of

hu-man kinds In D Sperber, D Premack, & A J

Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition: A

multi-disciplinary approach (pp 351–382) Oxford,

England: Clarendon Press

Hempel, C G., & Oppenheim, P (1948) Studies

in the logic of explanation Philosophy of

Sci-ence, 15, 135–175.doi:10.1086/286983

Lilienfeld, S O (2012) Public skepticism of

psychology: Why many people perceive the

study of human behavior as unscientific

American Psychologist, 67(2), 111–129.doi:

10.1037/a0023963 Morawski, J G (2005) Reflexivity and the

psychol-ogist History of the Human Sciences, 18(4),

77–105.doi:10.1177/0952695105058472 Slife, B D., Reber, J S., & Richardson, F C

(2005) Critical thinking about psychology:

Hidden assumptions and plausible alterna-tives Washington, DC: American

Psycholog-ical Association

Teo, T (2005) The critique of psychology:

From Kant to postcolonial theory New York,

NY: Springer

Teo, T (2008) From speculation to epistemological violence in psychology: A critical-hermeneutic

re-construction Theory & Psychology, 18(1), 47–

67.doi:10.1177/0959354307086922 Woodward, W., & Ash, M G (Eds.) (1982)

The problematic science: Psychology in nine-teenth-century thought New York, NY:

Praeger

Correspondence concerning this comment should

be addressed to Thomas Teo, Department of Psy-chology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, To-ronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada E-mail:

tteo@yorku.ca

DOI: 10.1037/a0031015

Further Sources of Our Field’s Embattled Public Reputation

Scott O Lilienfeld

Emory University

In my article on public skepticism toward psychology (Lilienfeld, February–March

2012), I delineated eight reasons why many laypersons are dubious of our field’s scien-tific status I argued that although some of these sources (e.g., hindsight bias, the illusion

of understanding) reflect public misunder-standings regarding the application of science

to psychological questions, others (e.g., our field’s reluctant embrace of evidence-based clinical practices) reflect professional psy-chology’s failure to uphold rigorous scientific standards I was gratified to read these three stimulating commentaries, if only because they suggest that my article accomplished its principal aim: to engender thoughtful debate concerning the sources of, and remedies for, psychology’s problematic scientific status in the public eye The authors all noted signifi-cant points of consensus with my analysis but also identified areas in which they found my coverage to be incomplete or inaccurate I welcome these constructive criticisms and address each in turn

I thank Newman, Bakina, and Tang (2012, this issue) for directing me to a source of public skepticism toward psy-chology that I had neglected: the funda-mental attribution error (FAE) They

con-jectured that because of the FAE, many laypersons are suspicious of standard social psychological explanations of behavior in the media, which emphasize situational in-fluences These attributions, Newman et al contended, are readily perceived by the public as excusing unethical actions New-man et al drew on data (e.g.,Newman & Bakina, 2009) demonstrating that after un-dergraduate participants read descriptions

of studies that highlight situational rather than dispositional influences on immoral behavior (e.g., cheating, domestic abuse),

they view the researchers who penned the

descriptions as attempting to absolve indi-viduals of responsibility for their actions If these results generalize to real-world set-tings, they could imply that many layper-sons perceive psychologists, especially so-cial psychologists, as “bleeding hearts” (Newman & Bakina, 2009, p 269) who are reluctant to hold bad actors to account for their misdeeds.Newman et al (2012) ad-ditionally reported evidence that respon-dents are less likely to attribute what we might term “exculpatory intent” to investi-gators when the written accounts of the study accord roughly equal weight to situ-ational and dispositional factors

I findNewman et al.’s (2012) hypoth-esis to be worthwhile and intriguing, and I offer two friendly amendments to their friendly commentary First, I wonder whether participants in these studies were

in essence behaving as “implicit Bayes-ians” when drawing inferences regarding researchers’ motives and views In every-day life, individuals who frequently invoke situational influences when explaining oth-ers’ unethical behavior (e.g., “The soldier followed the general’s orders because he felt he had no choice”) may indeed be more likely than other individuals to be attempt-ing to condone it If so, these participants may be at least partly justified in their conclusions regarding the researchers’ in-tentions Second, although the FAE is un-deniably an erroneous conclusion in certain instances, it probably reflects the overgen-eralization of a broadly accurate propensity

to perceive traitlike consistencies in indi-viduals across situations (Funder, 1987) Indeed, at times social psychologists have gone too far in neglecting dispositional in-fluences on behavior, as witnessed by ef-forts to minimize the role of individual differences in accounting for the deplorable behavior of approximately 10 U.S soldiers during the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal (Donnellan, Fraley, & Krueger, 2007) A meta-analysis of over 25,000 studies com-prising more than 8 million participants revealed that the mean effect size of

dispo-sitional influences on behavior (r⫽ 19) is

View publication stats