Abstract
Smedslund (Psychol Inq 2(4):325–338, 1991) has demonstrated that much of the experimental research in psychology is pseudo-empirical—empirically testing what can be determined a priori based on the meanings of everyday psychological terminology. The present article shows how Smedslund’s general perspective is consistent with certain aspects of a theoretical model of the narrative form, and how the latter provides a useful lens for making sense of pseudo-empiricism. This raises a paradox: While something along the lines of the narrative element of ‘trouble’ is required as a premise for research, trouble is not possible in the context of questions of the general relation between everyday psychological concepts. This paradox is resolved by showing how certain methodological and discursive characteristics of research—specifically, the reification and abstraction of psychological terminology, quantification, and the statistical analysis of group-level results function to obscure the absence (and impossibility) of trouble and/or to create the illusion of its presence.
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Notes
For the sake of illustration, we are accepting the theoretically dubious notion that beliefs (or attitudes or desires) are things that a person literally ‘has’, in an objective, discourse-independent sense.
This does not apply to applied research, which is rightfully concerned with ephemeral patterns and ‘momentary stabilities’. Nor does it apply to research bridging psychology and other fields, e.g., neurology, since this work entails matters that go outside the domain of everyday psychological terminology.
This is illustrated by the ongoing replication crisis where evidence that research has been improperly reported or cannot be replicated is taken as automatic grounds for calls that it be rejected. For example, in the context of the recent calls for the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) to be “discarded” in light of evidence that the received account from Philip Zimbardo (Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973) misreported the original events (Haslam, Reicher & Van Bavel, 2019; La Texier, 2019), the fact that the experiment has provided an engaging and convincing account for students in introductory psychology classes for decades would not be an acceptable rebuttal.
Gibson’s warning that the field is “ill-founded [and] at any time the whole psychological applecart might be upset” (1967, p. 21), has been borne out in reports that experimental research conducted with the goal of corroborating provisional theories inevitably undermines and complicates them, rapidly rendering them untenable. Examples can be found in social psychology (Klein, 2014; Thorngate, 1976), personality (Lamiell, 1987), cognitive science (Newell, 1973, pp. 288–289), and cognitive psychology (Kloos & Van Orden, 2009), among other places.
This question pertains specifically to basic research because the goals of applied research render the issue of pseudo-empiricism irrelevant. Although the focus of an applied research study—e.g., the relation between different attitudes—may be considered pseudo-empirical, insofar as the research is being conducted with the sole goal of informing/guiding some later decision making, rather than discovering lawlike relations between attitudes, the charge of pseudo-empiricism is irrelevant.
This is reflected by the fact that the researchers were able to design the experiment in the first place. If the typical psychological significance and consequences of the various parts of the experiment were not matters of common sense identification, the design and use of the experiment itself would have no justification. (Along these lines, it should be noted that the fact that the experiment shows empirical results that are suggested to conflict with common-sense expectations begs the question of why the latter expectations should be open to dispute when the study presumes the validity of others).
Note The current analysis is agnostic with respect to whether the changes in average task enjoyment at the group level reported by Festinger and Carlsmith are valid and generalizable.
Festinger and Carlsmith characterize the focus of their study in objectified terms, which effectively demotes the authority of commonsense expectations about attitudes and desires. For example, they ask “what happens to a person’s private opinion if he is forced to do or say something contrary to that opinion?” (p. 203), implying that opinions are not private or public affective/discursive events, but static, persistent cognitive objects that a person “privately holds” (p. 203) and which may be modified. Similarly, the participant is not actively thinking but instead “has two cognitions which, psychologically, do not fit together” (p. 203). Finally, participants’ expression of attitudes about how enjoyable they found the task are not spontaneous utterances, but rather, answers collected via likert scale survey.
Lamiell (2018, p. 474) provides an excellent example.
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Byers, P. Where is the Trouble in Pseudo-empirical Research?. Integr. psych. behav. 56, 96–113 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-021-09631-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-021-09631-x