"Science is supposed to stand against dogma. But in reality, scientific practice is often dictated by a dogmatic obsession with conventional methods. Young scientists are judged not by whether they win, but how they play the game. In other words, following the rules becomes more important than the verity of the results. Stupidity ensues." - TOM SIEGFRIED, The Dallas Morning News
Borrowing from Maslow and Kohlberg
I occasionally receive an e-mail from someone who wishes to impress upon me his or her idea of what constitutes optimum learning or intelligence for work in Psychology. Unfortunately, these conceptualizations express ideals seldom realized in our field. You remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Abraham Maslow believed persons are motivated by unsatisfied needs, and that there is a rank ordering to the needs, with the pursuit of some needs being conditional on the fulfillment of others (like a college curriculum's prerequisite system). Well, the Psych 101 of needs are the Body Needs (i.e. air, hunger, oxygen, sleep, etcetera), after which we can attend to Safety/Security, Social Needs (Love/Belongingness), Ego Needs (Esteem), and Self-Actualization Needs (in that order). You also remember Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development. Kohlberg believed persons varied in the extent to which they progressed through stages of moral reasoning beginning with reasoning conditioned by a concern with Obedience and Punishment (Stage 1) followed by stages driven by such concerns as Individualism, Instrumentalism, & Exchange (Stage 2), Approval Seeking (Stage 3), Obligations of Law & Order (Stage 4), Social Contract & Welfare of Others (Stage 5), and Universal Principle & Demands of One's Own Conscience (Stage 6).
Well, if I adapted these hierarchical models of human functioning to the matter of professional development in Psychology, in effect replacing moral reasoning with scientific reasoning and replacing motivation with scholarly motive, I would have to depict the population of psychology professors in much the same way Maslow and Kohlberg depict the general population. In other words, I'd have to conclude that a paltry percentage of psych profs reach that level where we can speak of them as "fulfilling the mission of science through a principled personal vocation." And why is this? Just who and what is responsible for getting psych profs stuck (fixated, if you will) in these earlier stages is a matter I take up at length in this report. Suffice it to say for the purposes of this paragraph that our training model, our branch structure, and our attitude toward science and nature makes of the earlier stages quite a comfy nest for some, and quite the Connecticut Valley thorn brush for others. Of course, there are the endogenous (or internal) factors. What we need as individual profs in part limits what we seek from our career life. Also, there are rather strident demands/conditions placed on our careers. What do we need to do to survive graduate school (~ Body Needs / ~ Obedience & Punishment)? To operate within a shared network of expectations designed to facilitate communication and integration (~ Social Needs / ~ Individualism & Exchange)? To earn the respect of our peers? To help our peers earn the respect of the public as a rank-and-file science/profession? Some of these demands are like hurdles, and once we've gotten over them, they're done. Take for example our doctoral candidacy exam and our dissertation. But within these same stages there are conditions that just don't go away. We never really do get that sense of secure attachment as 'professional infants' that we need to wander away from our native base of operations and explore other avenues. Even when we get tenure we seldom choose to cash in on those idiosyncrasy credits we need to go out and make a halfway decent go at science. Our colleagues and our community always need something from us, and we always need something in return from them. Sure, we disguise the social nature of this exchange by couching it in a more principled, Clinton-esque language, so that we think we are meeting the demands of Science itself. But by the time you finish reading this report, you will be quite clear on the fact that Science doesn't need all this from us. Psychology as a social institution (and its pork-barrelled brand of science) is the needful thing. So it's not a matter of maintaining minimum essential levels of these "other" (institutional) needs. We belong to a clingy, co-dependent community that needs us to maintain a certain identity so that it could continue to wear its mask and feel right about doing it. And so the arbitrary and superfluous (institutional) needs (the paradigmatic elements of our science) are elevated to the level of supreme principles. And if we need an additional reason for doing this, that is in addition to the way they plot our coordinates in the professional universe, look no further than the fact they makes our lives easier. We can produce research and read the research of others in our sleep. We can manualize everything from teaching to diagnosis and teach all this to the masses. But remaining fixated at these stages keeps our field from anything greater than occassional flashes of mediocrity.
There are people out there whose science is an intrinsic part of the life process. Their research tends to respect the fundamentals of science -- the conceptualization and fact collection -- and does not engage in the kind of gratuitous cosmetic science we so often see in a Psychology that is trying so desperately to appear as if it belongs among the rank-and-file sciences. For the research psychologist, rigor is glamour, especially when you grow accustomed to performing unremarkable, unproductive studies. When the science is not productive at affirming what is real, it gets hooked on using science to tell the world what isn't real, and it gets in the business of phenomena-debunking and performance-enhanced skepticism. Research psychologists, for example, love to debunk the meaning and functional significance of dreams whether they have performed any dream research or not -- whether they remember their dreams or not -- whether or not they are at all familiar with the research in this area. You bring up the subject of dreams and suddenly a psychology professor is transformed, right before your eyes, into the very person which they denounce, the person who speaks from a position of ignorance or faith. In their case, a person who needs to believe for their own comfort or self-esteem, that dreams are meaningless, and so they turn into these gossiping types who pass along to a student interested in dreams how they once read in an article of the Science [New York] Times about how some scientist found the "atoms in the brain" (yes, one psych prof used this phrase), binomial equation, sleep position, or genus of late evening sandwich meats that turns asunder all the interesting, intellectual, or imaginative theories/possibilities. In a February 24, 2005 ABC News special with Peter Jennings, research psychologists from Harvard were tapped for their views on claims of alien abduction. While I am not inclined to find reports of alien abduction plausible, I found the statements of the research psychologists rather distasteful. I choose to judge these research psychologists not by how well they explain what is not real, (i.e. it's easy to be convincing when we're debunking the implausible, improbable, unimaginable), but by how well they explain what is real. And I found their reduction of alien abduction to fragments of sensations experienced during a common sleep disorder and telescoped (amplified) by hypnosis itself a tad telescoping. They may be right on this score, but there isn't always a mundane anomaly that can be faulted for an interesting phenomenon or experience. Research psychologists grew too accustomed to performing unremarkable and unproductive research. And when you have so little to offer the world in the way of an affirmative product, you turn to the process for glory. You glorify the protocol. Suddenly, there are all these new and unnecessary conventions and practices that govern everything research and teaching psychologists do. Suddenly, rigor is glamour.
And as long as you observe and celebrate these things, you can call yourself a scientist. I have never met a community for whom science itself is such an entrenched political ideology (and vehicle for socializing new students into a professional sorority). And yet they have strayed so far from the transdisciplinary fundamentals of science (into a brand of science Kuhn calls a paradigm) as to be eminently ineffective and forgetful. And this is all largely because for research psychologists, science is something out there to be imitated. And if you imitate the most cosmetic features of science and if you earn yourself a credential so you could call yourself a scientist, then you can pretty much win people over to your view of things by claiming you have science on your side even when you don't. Conversely, I believe any work that emanates from within the psychology of the person will address and respect the psychology of the phenomenon. But it is clear to me that what we have here is many people for whom genuine science and the human condition is not in or of their natures. But they wish it were, or they simply like the amenities that come with the role of scientist. So they go looking for science out there in some educational/training program. They get their makeover and their cosmetic credential. It's my job to show you what these people look like without their makeup.
5A Psychology Hijacks a Science
My adversaries have been attempting to hang a label of anti-science on my argument for some time now and there was a point when I might have helped them by doubting whether Psychology is a science. "Maybe," as some of my supporters like to point out, "Psychology is an art." That was a mistake I will never make again. When science is conceptualized properly, which is to say, broadly, it becomes apparent that not only can Psychology be a science, but that it is I who is science's true servant, who embodies the spirit of exploration and discovery. By contrast, those who call themselves "psychology professors" (hereafter designated as "psych profs") have hijacked science for purposes only vaguely related to the pursuit of truth.
Understanding science requires disentangling its defining characteristics (or minimum essential elements) from the social and material context by which it is, to a certain extent, constructed and constituted. Science itself is neither very proscriptive or prescriptive, which is to say, it is not bound by many rules. By examining the trans-disciplinary scientific method, it is clear that science consists of formulating a problem/question, making observations, framing a hypotheses, collecting facts to evaluate the hypotheses, and drawing conclusions. The range of problems/questions is limited only by our experience and imagination (e.g., "why do we dream?") and various methodologies, from original methodologies to methodologies so routinely utilized as to be almost formulaic, may be applied to explore facts relevant to the question or evaluate a hypothesis derived from formal theory, hypothetical thinking, contemplation & reflection, or personal experience.
So science itself is made of the hearts and minds of scientists drawing constructively from their own wits to probe the facts surrounding a phenomena of interest. So with this in mind, let's revisit the distinction between 'art' and 'science.' Much misconception and mysticism surrounds the term 'art' especially with respect to its usage in the phrase "this is more an art than a science." Art refers to the scientist's discretionary application of his or her own wits allowed under science. Thus many self-professed or critically acclaimed researchers who claim to be 'artists' are in fact independent thinkers working within the open framework provided by 'essential science.' Unfortunately, I have to use the term 'essential science' to distinguish true science from the brand of paradigmatic science practiced within Psychology. You see, psych profs have imported or invented all these arbitrary and superfluous conventions, "rules" if you will. As long as the scientific merits of a person or their work continues to be assessed in terms of compliance with (or embodiment of) these "rules," psychological inquiry will continue to fail us as a science of nature and as a nature of science.
A Competitive, Stagnant Labor Market
When I use the term "rules" here (a comprehensive list will be provided later in this report), I am referring to a range of policies and procedures, quick-and-dirty algorithms really (e.g. "more is better" ; "less is better") whereby researchers show they are less interested in real science or in the requirements of the phenomenon under study than in furthering their careers and fitting into a professional community. This wouldn't read like quite a crude generalization if you understood the university labor market and what it takes to compete for a job in the university system, pressures that require professors and graduate students to stunt or sacrifice science, nature, and their own adult development so as to manage risks to their careers.
If you're pursuing a Ph.D. in any of the following areas (Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Social Psychology, Physiological Psychology, Human Factors Psychology), the only jobs for which you are uniquely qualified are tenure-track assistant professorships in departments of Psychology within colleges and universities. And we all know that any given year does not bear witness to many vacancies. Unless there is an enormous spike in college enrollment associated with population growth, this is an industry in which there is virtually no job creation. The number of professorships remains fairly steady, even as the bottleneck of unemployed doctorates begins to grow. Thus unlike most job functions in the labor market, a professor is likely to squat in one place from the time he accepts an assistant professorship at the age of 27-35, to the time he retires a full professor (even if that means knowing you will spend the rest of your life in Jonesboro, Arkansas). To make matters worse, many professors do not relinquish their job at the customary retirement age. And why would they? The job is neither physically demanding nor deadline-driven. The all-too-common psych profs stop publishing research once they've been granted tenure, which functions as an early lifetime achievement award (more like the Oscar for Best Actress, which has proven terminal for many actesses). This is not to say that tenured psych profs are strictly ornamental (that's the emeritus). They still have to, ugghh!, teach. And they teach 2-4 classes a week. But at this point in their career, after giving the same lectures for 30+ years, their work is no more thoughtful than riding a bicycle. The responsibility for teaching auditoriums of Intro Psych students (and smaller albeit constipating sections of Statistics and Experimental Design) are foisted on the young assistant professors or adjuncts (part of the "New Cruelty"), and the all-too-common psych profs outsource their office hours and grading to graduate assistants (and in some cases, even their teaching, a purely altruistic gesture to help a grad student build a vita, of course). And for many male professors too old to lug a tackle box down to the local fishing hole, the university even offers sanctuary from the wife. So you can see that the bulk of the professorial work is performed at the leisure (or should I say 'at the pleasure') of the full professor, who may occupy his or her position until the age of 75 or death (whichever comes first).
So if you're a graduate student aspiring to a tenure-track assistant professorship, you know that you may have to compete with upwards of 200 applicants for any one vacancy. Vying for a professorship bares a striking resemblance to the time trials used to determine qualifying positions for the Indianapolis 500, with graduate students, well before they even see the light at the end of the doctoral tunnel, rushing to add to their vita the elements needed to qualify for the race. In fact, I would not hesitate to add that tenure-track jobs are won or lost in graduate school, in some cases years before the applications are submitted, which explains why so many grad students spend 8-10 years in graduate school when it only takes 4-5 years to fulfill all the curricular requirements for the doctorate (i.e. coursework, thesis, doctoral exam, dissertation). Since there is only room in the winner's circle for one winner, graduate students set their sites on winning pole position. But winning the points race for NASCAR champion demands a fierce professionalism. Students in effect compete to demonstrate they embody the policies and procedures of the field (i.e. the "rules") as well as, if not better than, their fellow students. In fact, not only do these students learn to become creatures of imprimatur -- mere vessels or models for "rules" they are expected to represent -- but the problem is compounded by the fact many of these students were admitted to the graduate program by professors seeking personality qualities and past achievements signifying a propensity to work within the rules structure and framework of expectations (i.e. compliance and trainability). They will learn to pack their methodologies with familiar and frequently used design elements and statistics. They will learn their way around the APA style guide, which by the way is not just about where to center the running header or how to format an intext citation with more than five authors anymore. (The APA style guide has over editions widened its influence over self-expression to favor choice of some words over others). And most importantly, students will learn exactly what corners to cut to get their names on at least one research study a year. They will learn to spend less time thinking about their decisions. They will learn to spend less time developing the theoretical background for the research, and then learn to pride themselves on having been 'parsimonious' in accordance with Occam's razor. And they will learn to streamline their methodology so as to harness responses from a large captive audience of research participants to standard questionnaires (all-too-often Psych 101 students in exchange for course credit). For a cosmetic and oft-gratuitous look of rigor, the questionnaire will have known psychometric properties that meet standards for various forms of reliability and validity, but the questionnaire would have been developed and published by another researcher. (Psychological researchers love questionnaires, in that the responses are wholly the work of the research participant and in that the responses, as numbers, do not have to be coded, quantified, or investigated. They need only be plugged into a spreadsheet and crunched by SPSS for Windows with no more effort or thought than that required to grade a multiple-choice exam). In brief, the risk-averse and time-efficient graduate student or assistant professor will avail him- or herself of every professionally-recommended short-cut ("heuristic") in producing a polished and controlled piece of research with minimal budgets for conceptualization and fact collection. Naturally, within this system, those less psychologistic or less natural research topics that do not obviously suffer from the short-cuts (e.g. the "how-to-build-a-better-spatula" research or "how-to-cut-up-a-frog" on a foundation grant) receive a lot of attention and are well represented within our organized body of knowledge (emphasis here on "of"), while complex psychologistic phenomena about which little is known (e.g. dreaming) is generally neglected by the psychological community.
It is my contention that some of the so-called "rules" were invented as a convenient means for faculty search committees, peer review committees, and tenure review committees, to separate the wheat from the chaffe and to offer a one-size-fits-all-research solution to the problem of managing an impression of science for the general public. To make matters worse, researchers succuumb to pressure to work these "rules" into their research, as these rules have become the measure of scientific merit in the research and researcher. Even beyond an era in which we have to ration space in print journals, we will still be rationing and regulating reputation, making it difficult for researchers whose research does not contain the required elements to acquire any professional development points. If this sounds at all like scoring the technical program for a pair of Olympic ice dancers, then you understand perfectly.
Like your average game show or reality TV program, psychological science is transformed into a zero sum game of legitimacy, where the least popular research, or the research that is least rigorous for its own sake, are eliminated from contention for those rare awards: the publication, the grant, and ultimately "the job" (tenure-track university position). In this game, there have to be winners and losers, and in what is a tragic necessity, psych profs are required to adopt as their moniker something entirely other than the "pursuit of truth": something called a "commitment to excellence" ("excellence" here referring to compliance with the rules of the game). Imagine a group of candidates for position of head chef is being evaluated through a baking competition. Now imagine that the competition is being judged by a 10-member panel, with each member of the panel having his or her own approach to the meal, his or her own favorite chef, and his or her own favorite spices. Imagining now that their widely varying preferences is a source of embarrassment for the panel of chefs (and the whole culinary industry), each of whom works to redress that imagined embarassment by treating the culinary arts as a science. The panel chef judges agree that first-prize (the only prize) is awarded for the recipe requiring the greatest number of measurements and the most precise measurements. Imagine that none of the judges on the panel cares about the quality or nature of the ingredients (unless of course its science has determined that paprika is always better for chicken than sage), about where the ingredients came from, nor about how the food tastes or whether it sits well in the stomach. Imagine that they care only about the numbers (amount and precision of measurements) and perhaps how nearly the meal is arranged on the plate. If you could imagine these things, then you can understand contemporary psychological research and how you can have excellent chefs who will never prepare your favorite meal.
This is what has happened to dream research. Dreaming is one of those phenomena for which the best research is not necessarily the most rigorous research. In fact, if dream research were a film, it would demand a great deal of editing of the frames that we have grown as a field too accustomed to throwing to the cutting room floor. In the early, exploratory stages of research, dream research requires an acute attention to conceptualization and fact collection. This is why dreaming is neglected and disrespected by the all-too-common psych prof and why, where dreaming is addressed, it is force-fed into a rigorous recipe for research that ends up distorting the phenomenon by subjecting it to a form of managed neglect (as when dream lab researchers rely too heavily on the brain, the EEG, and the biological construct of REM sleep to draw conclusions about dreams even where they have not gotten their hands dirty in the actual dream experiences or in their relationship to waking experiences). While I will reserve details for later in this report, I will tell you that the scientific ambience fostered by the most controlled laboratory, with its white lab coats, its gleaming instrument panels, and its connection to grant money, can neither conceal, nor compensate for, a lack of fundamental conceptualization and fact collection. All the technicians slaving over lines of ink on an EEG printout cannot contribute if they pay insufficient or unimaginative attention to the content and characteristics of the dream itself and its relationship to the waking life or personality of the dreamer. Because of the deplorably comical hijinks that is their research, because the all-too-common psych prof lacks the temperament and the tendency to build interesting theories or innovative methods around dreaming, and because the all-too-common psych prof uses selection and reinforcement pressures to make Psychology unavailable to those who endorse home reporting phenomenological methodologies, dream research has been a massive failure. And because their dream research has been a massive failure, dreaming itself has been deemed an embarrassment and dismissed categorically as inherently unscientific, a stubborn phenomenon that eludes best efforts to solve its mysteries in a test tube called the cranium. Dreaming just does not lend itself neatly or readily to conventional research methods. It's not like we need all these white coats and instruments, but imitating the more cosmetic elements of advanced (non-human) sciences allows us to ingratiate ourselves upon aribiters of funding. And it's not like we need the funding to enhance our understanding of dreams, but everyone knows what a grant can do for our CV and ultimately our career.
Wrap It In the Symbols of Science
Given the competition for publication, we fell into some modes of preferring certain styles of research. Not unlike judging the merit of a steak by how it is sliced and where it is placed with respect to the parsley. If I presented pairs of research papers to an editorial committee, and I instructed that committee that it could choose only one paper from each pair, I could guess which paper in each pair would be selected, and I know it would not always be the best paper from the standpoint of advancing knowledge. If two papers on dreams were submitted, one involving the use of EEGs in a lab with diagrams of sleep spindles and references to instrument values/readings, and the other involving a NOT ENTIRELY qualitative phenomenology of dreams documented by the participants at home (e.g. my Experiography or my research with cancer patients), I bet that the committee would vote for the former every day of the week and twice on Sunday. They would vote for the former almost unanimously if deliberating and voting privately as individuals, unaminously if deliberating and voting in a group session. This would be the case EVEN IF the researchers in the preferred sleep lab study never addressed the content/characteristics of the dream experiences as reported by participants. This would be the case EVEN IF the researchers in the non-sleep lab study presented intriguing findings (e.g. showing an association between different coping styles and types of dream distortion). The lab study would always be selected. Why? It is wrapped in the SYMBOLS of science and professionalism. It looks more scientific. The home study conclusions would be deemed "preliminary," despite being intriguing, while the lab study conclusions would be deemed "strong" despite failing to lead us anywhere. Even if the sleep lab researchers drew sloppy conclusions or if their conclusions do not really follow from the data, such deficiencies in conceptualization will always be overlooked as long as we can embrace the research on technical merits. And that's just when I am hypothetically competing with one other study. Now imagine I am competing for one of five slots in a journal with between 80 and 400 other submissions, which is more realistic. Also bare in mind that there is an unwritten rule that I can submit my research to only one journal at a time, that it takes about 4-6 months for the committee to respond by letter, and that I am required to publish at least once a year to keep my career alive. What does that do to me? How will that affect my research decisions?
Well, for one, I am going to opt for highly circumscribed hypotheses and hypotheses that are safe (risk-averse, likely to reject null hypothesis) over exploratory research. This will likely be a mini-study that can be performed quickly. I am also likely to get involved with more than one study at a time. As a graduate student, I will have to join research teams in the hopes of becoming the sixth author on as many four-page publications as possible so I can compete for a tenure-track teaching position once my PhD is conferred.
Playing Small-Ball
Now consider what all this madness does to the organized body of knowledge. It junks it up with frivolous and low-quality research. You don't like SPAM, do you? Neither do I. But we are SPAMMING our organized body of knowledge with junk research. Psychology, considered both as a community of academics and as a body of work, consists of "the best of the passable." Psychology "is for people of basic intelligence," which is what an old high school friend said of the original Star Trek series. Once we've alienated and disenfranchised the brightest along with the bad, the most 'intelligent' of what remains, defined here as embodying best (i.e. most conventional) practices, is what survives to make its mark in this field. Actualization (a la Maslow), where both the individual scientist is concerned, where the principles of science are concerned, and where the nature of the phenomenon itself is concerned, would consitute a miracle in this system we call Psychology.
Consequently dreaming and other psychologistic phenomena close to the heart of the human condition (e.g., interpersonal attraction) are seldom explored and, in a field in which academics are defined by their primary area(s) of interest, these academics have abandoned the big questions and unfettered frontiers for highly circumscribed, utilitarian, materialistic, or socially conscientious research topics (the four dwarfs of Psychology and horsemen of its apocalypse), in turn abandoning the 'psych-' for the '-ology.' Risk-averse psych profs have perfected the art of publishing, on a career timetable, statistically significant research addressing remarkably frivolous questions with increasingly less relevance for the human condition. But hey, they don't look foolish when they cut up frogs or re-design cockpits on grants from the FAA. From an evolutionary perspective, the psychology department has drastically changed shape over the decades and particularly in the 90s. With all the sound and fury surrounding such burgeoning specialties as I/O psychology, Health Psychology, Human Factors, and even Engineering Psychology, no one has noticed the nearly total disapprearance of Personality programs nationwide and would not recognize it if they spied it on the side of a milk carton. Even the substance of Social Psychology (small group dynamics, organizational culture, systems theory) has been exported to I/O Psychology, leaving Social Psychology with a topical rubble of feel-good interests for the braindead (like self-esteem, racial prejudice, and gender identity).
Ultimately, the human condition becomes the 800 pound gorilla in the psych department, not only because psych profs lack the mind and moxsy to probe it, but also because they are in the business of suppressing, concealing, and compensating for indigenous sources of their own diversity. With so many pet theories, formal schools of thought, research interests and clinical populations, and let's not forget their own personalities, psych profs need a strong common denominator to bind them to one another and anchor them to science. So they invent these rules, the framework of arbitrary and superfluous conventions, to embrace as the "glue that holds them together" (in the words of one psych prof who celebrated them). Collectively the system created by these rules may be designated as "epistemology" or "paradigm," but it would be less appropriate to refer to it as "science." This pork-riddled paradigm is not entirely without its uses, but its sphere of efficacy is limited to those issues and utilities that can benefit from highly circumscribed and automated research (i.e., from the bureaucratization of knowledge production).
Unfortunately, my adversaries are unable or unwilling to disentangle the true scientific requirements from the institutional ones that have less standing in science or nature than in social necessity and, beyond that, in social expediency, social control, public relations, and self-therapy/terror management (the practice of using science to negatively reinforce pre-existing rational worldviews). The psych prof is perfectly content to confuse the public by fusing the scientific, para-scientific, and pseudo-scientific requirements into one giant mandate and measure of the scientist.
While every scientific discipline is at least partly constituted or constructed by the social and material context in which it finds itself, psych profs turn tragic necessities into unnecessary tragedies by celebrating logistical constraints and limited sources and reifying them into some training course and true test of scientist. Take our methods of evaluating student performance as an example. Where possible, essay exams are preferable because students learn while reading the materials in a course in which they expect to be tested by this free recall format. The students learn while they study for the exam, while they complete the exam itself, and when they receive feedback on their performance. But instead of rueing the necessity, given the sheer number of students in some of our classes, of multiple choice questions and optically scanned answer sheets, we embrace the mathematical superiority and so-called objectivity of multiple choice exams, archiving banks of test items with the highest item discrimination coefficients and criticizing essay exams as "psychometrically unsound." We find this same vicious cycle of erosion in publishing. Not only do future-psych-profs research only what is likely to help them survive -- in a way that will help them survive -- they have to publish earlier in their career to survive. Not only do graduate students have to build a record of publications to compete for post-doctoral tenure-track positions (neglecting their dissertation to join as many research teams as possible in the hopes of becoming the sixth author on a four-page publication), but undergraduate students are now expected to publish to compete for application to graduate school. This has seriously strafed our body of knowledge, as it is routinely SPAMMED with trade papers analogous to junk e-mail (and thinly veiled advertisements at that). But rather than feel badly about the way we've polluted our pool of collective wisdom, cognitive dissonance kicks in like so much endorphins and we adjust our scientific standards to reflect the way we've been forced to do business. Suddenly we speak of meeting meaningless but competitive and demanding publication deadlines as if it reflected a "commitment to excellence." Similarly, rather than feel badly about the way we assassinate the character of our graduate students under the guise of evaluating their academic performance and progress evaluation, we invoke such tasteful words as "mental hygiene and competency," "rites of passage," and "vetting in the public interest." (I have even been treated on one occassion to the metaphor "getting your union card").
What Does ADHD Look Like as a Philosophy of Science?
I intend to make the case that the brand of science (or 'paradigm') currently practiced and consumed within psychology is analogous to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, psychology's ADHD science is designed to mass produce insignificant but polished articles that have the appearance of formality, finality, and perfection while neglecting the phenomena under study. I am reminded here of a long-term care facility I routinely passed in walking to grade school. It was always the most vibrantly painted structure on the block. The Chem-Lawn truck was there every week attending to the flowers beneath the windows of residents who, according to news reports, died from starvation or from injuries stemming from scalding hot water in the shower. Similarly, psych profs manage a scientific and professional persona, impeccably deploying design principles, utilizing sophisticated statistics, and polishing their instrument panels, all while deindividuating and dehumanizing everyone connected to this field. If you are an individual research participants are treated as anonymous bricks in the wall when psych profs 'back-end' a genuine process of fact collection in favor of an 'event harvesting of data.' Psych profs use instant-pudding type methods of constraining the range of participant responses to produce generic numbers for immediate insertion into that sausage grinder of a statistical formula, all to generate that test statistic that adjudicates a binary null hypothesis. The hypothesis itself is usually ill-informed by formal theory, contemplation & reflection, or personal experience, instead serving to fill a hole in the research literature, replicating or varying some prior research in fulfillment of a hidden contract to exchange credit through citation. (This is another reason why original works are discouraged). It's all part of the scientific gloss.
This also means that if you are an individual researcher, you are treated like interchangeable workers. As an individual, any individual to whom the findings of our research will be generalized, you will also be treated as a collective being of sorts. The generalizations we distill through our statistics are like rules for which most individuals are exceptions. While I have never argued against quantitative methods, I have always contended that we should rethink the role of quantitative methods in psychology. Only after establishing meaningful and adequate conclusions based on a case-by-case analysis of variance WITHIN individuals is it appropriate to abstract the commonalities ACROSS individuals necessary for the universal generalizations we crave. By treating individual resaearch participants as a series of n = 1 experiments, and by preserving the integrity and richness of the individual, can a science of the human condition be achieved. The current paradigm would have us first draw conclusions based on an analysis of variance BETWEEN individuals in each of a million research projects and then analyze the variance of the conclusions across projects through review studies or meta-analysis. This is the antithesis of what is needed: if we draw conclusions WITHIN individuals we can within the very same research project analyze the variance of the conclusions across these same individuals. This reduces our dependence on comparing and contrasting studies conducting by different researchers, studies that vary in a number of ways that influence our ability to meaningfully relate the studies (i.e., sample size, sample composition, methodology).
ADHD science may deploy design principles impeccably, according to the manual, and in a way that makes no official mistakes, and/or utilize a sophisticated (i.e., complicated) statistical technique. But psychology, while it cannot be faulted for what it does wrong, can be faulted for what it fails to do right.
Psychological research certified as worthy of publication (i.e., the only research undertaken in Psychology) enjoys the following characteristics:
"Please wait as we pause for station identification". In a designated introduction section, an expectation as to the results of the research, complete with an empirically grounded rationale, is presented as an hypothesis. The hypothesis is expressed as a function of previous work (i.e., a link in a chain of studies), with an emphasis on identifying its 'place' within the organized body of knowledge (i.e., as an extension or variation of authoritative sources for which its authors receive recognition in the form of an 'in-text citation').
"Ground Control to Major Tom". A mistake-free deployment of data-phobic design principles to insure the research is formally unassailable to criticism and resistant to alternative explanations. Overly structured, this stilted research constrains the responses of the research participants (or else establishes conditions that isolate a specific range of behavior), such as when participants provide pre-quantified data in the form of completed questionnaires. Here it is important to distinguish between a 'genuine process of fact collection' and an 'event harvesting of data.' The insensitivity to breadth, depth, and fidelity in real fact collection is flanked by a hypersensitivity to factors that open the door to alternative explanations (i.e., which reduces the publish-ability of the study). At the end of the day, the researcher is regarded as more the scientist for not violating any prohibitions and for sanitizing his or her study of infectious reality.
"Scientific Orgasm". The execution of controlled and structured design elements culminates efficiently in a parsimonious 'test statistic', measuring the implication of the 'observed' or 'actual' data for the status of the hypothesis. Professional development is defined as a series of statistically significant test statistics published in reputable journals on a career timetable. And you thought all that score-keeping surrounding the sex lives of your peers stopped in high school. Too bad the academics don't spend enough time in foreplay to bring any real intimacy between researcher and phenomenon, question and answer.
In contradistinction to the reigning paradigm in Psychology, I propose this Bill of Rights to provide equal rights to psychologistic, mysterious, or Big Picture questions and certain privileges to those who wish, or would wish, to stake a career on their research.
Despite the appearance of formal process and productivity, most psychological research amounts to 'idle thrashing.'
Certain psychological phenomena require exploratory research process to insure attention, authenticity, accuracy, and adequacy.
Exploratory research process unfolds according to a unique development cycle that manages contingencies distributed across a phenomenal landscape of progressively narrowing scope and depth (i.e., (proceeding from large grain to small grain within a single study).
Exploratory researchers should enjoy an exemption from institutional requirements governing typical (e.g., confirmatory, circumscribed, utilitarian) research
Affirmative action is required to insure proportional if not equal representation for exploratory research and to redress adverse impact in the areas of faculty selection, publishing, and funding
A genuine process represents an early investment in an early exploratory stage consisting of phased and fluid studies by flexible and divergent thinkers, unconstrained by institutional norms masquerading as scientific requirements (see frontier research) that confer favoritism toward research that is gratuitously, precipitously, or excessively formal as conditioned by the framework of expectations or career incentives. (Hereafter, such research will be referred to as ADHD science, autistic empiricism, methodolatry, or thrashing. Currently, the inflexibility of the psychological research culture coupled with its penchant for treating all exploratory research, which lacks some of the gloss from its scientific sheen, as pilot studies, represents a substantial resistance to investing in genuine process.
ADHD science however can be faulted not for what it does wrong, but for what it fails to do right, namely to explore the phenomena or question under study in a way that is adequate. Perfectionistic execution of methodology and complicated statistics can not compensate for, but is often used to conceal, deficiencies in fundamental conceptualization, observation, and fact collection.
While psychological researchers can often be heard hailing study designs that are parsimonious, essential science aims for research that is adequate. Adequate research addresses the phenomena with considerable breadth and depth in a way that is consistent with logical principles of detectivework (which is proactive in its collection of facts) in a way that flows from the impassioned curiosity of the investigator.
5C Separating the Scientific from the Institutional Requirements
The vast majority of research practices to which professors refer as standards are, in actuality, merely conventions, opinions endorsed or implemented by a critical mass of people because they are expedient, convenient, or conducive to amenities. For example, such practices allow the group of academics and professionals to...
...manage a public perception of Psychology as legitimate and authoritative
...maintain group harmony (solidarity) and morale among colleagues
...manage a framework of expectations that facilitates communication and integration of findings, minimizing the expenditure of energy required to express and comprehend ideas.
While institutional norms with these social benefits are, in small doses, a tragic necessity, in large doses they have actually proven counterproductive to science itself, which makes them an unnecessary tragedy...
...requiring persons to internalize norms that homogenize research by constraining intellectual freedom and independent thinking
...requiring persons to suppress personal sources of diversity (i.e., diverse ideas and experiences)
...manufacturing assignments and gratuitously multiplying responsibilities that reduce resources (i.e. time/energy) for contemplation and reflection
...automating the process of scientific inquiry into a ballistic tool insensitive to the potential benefits of detective-like on-the-fly adjustments
...discouraging research into phenomena (e.g., dreaming) that do not lend themselves as neatly to the institutional requirements and discourage the hiring of candidates who express an interest in such phenomena
...in the name of facilitating communication and integration, promoting mindless, ballistic, and formulaic methods and punishing persons whose original, fluid, or adjustible methods do not lend themselves as readily to tabular presentation, 4-page publications, or PowerPoint
Unfortunately, the admixture of scientific and institutional requirements makes them indistinguishable to the laity and the novices. In fact, admixture may be too sanguine a term. To borrow a metaphor from chemistry, I would have to characterize psychological research practices as less a mixture of scientific and institutional requirements than a compound. The current state of affairs reflect less a married couple than its offspring.
As long as I am presenting material in easy-to-digest bullets, I might as well provide an abridged list of the arbitrary institutional requirements that have little or no real standing in science and nature.
null hypothesis testing system (NHTS)
APA style
bias toward confirmatory research at the expense of exploratory analysis techniques
bias toward inferential statistics at the expense of descriptive statistics
bias toward quantitative data at the expense of qualitative methodologies that may, in many cases, provide the necessary basis for broad and solid quantification
bias toward nomothetic over idiographic units of analysis
review of applications and submissions by peer committee
emphasis on achieving and projecting professional status at the expense of true professional development and its necessary concomitants, personal growth, intellectual freedom, and career potential.
the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, primarily for its organization of research, its orientation of students in training to psychopathology, and its spawning of manualized disorder-based therapies
textbooks, not as a reference guide for instructors, but as required reading for students and the primary delivery device for course material.
the concept of learning styles, not as an open-ended invitation to consider illimitable sources of diversity in students, but as a motivation for administrative savants who think they can elevate racial and ethnic minorities to serviceable standard-bearers by requiring multimedia in the classroom and requiring professors to mix modes of student-teacher and student-student interaction.
the notion of hypotheses and methodologies as contractually binding and insoluble (creating a contest of sorts where we may be compelled into the blanket claim of no support for a hypothesis rather than into a discussion affirming what the data is likelu support for. While we occasionally traipse into such a discussion, it is often weak and awkward and organized around the headline of 'no support for hypothesis 1b,' which places the research at the back of the line in the competitive search for a home in a journal).
When we subtract these and countless other institutional requirements from psychological research, what remains is essential science. Ever hear the phrase, 'we need to get back to the fundamentals.' Well, the managed neglect of the fundamentals of psychological research needs to come to an end. The fundamentals include...
logic: the predisposition and willingness to reason in a disciplined manner
reflection: the predisposition and willingness to think and play with ideas
observation: the process of monitoring and remaining attuned to the factual material surrounding the phenomena under study, which may include structural, dynamic, and developmental features within the context of psychology's sacred unit of analysis, the whole person
conceptualization: the process of integrating logic, reflections, and observations in determining the requirements for:
a meaningful question,
relevant scope and depth of facts for conversion into data,
a plan for fluid and phased fact collection and data analysis that treats hypothetical data as contingencies and includes provisions for alternative courses of action
fact collection: the process of insuring that the scope and detail of the factual material is represented and reflected in the data. Here a distinction is made between facts and data. Facts refer to the raw material associated with the experience of the phenomena, while data refers to the quantitative or categorical representation of this factual material in preparation for manipulation by statistical techniques.
The institution's paradigm fosters a culture of mindless and ballistic research that prevents researchers from making detective-like on-the-fly adjustments to data. Fluid and phased research driven by flexible and divergent thinking is all but outlawed by a culture that rewards and requires convergence with certain conventions and expectations falsely branded as 'standards.' I am reminded of an e-mail I received the other day by someone who has grown quite fond of stalking me on the Internet, someone citing a description of science in a textbook in an effort to dispel my characterization of the scientific method as an 'open framework.' I had to laugh, because you won't see these issues addressed in textbooks. Textbooks 'work for' the status quo, for the day-to-day operations of psychology departments. Because the purpose of the textbook is to to serve as a canon (i.e, to reflect the consensual components or common denominator of our field) and to socialize students into Psychology's academic and professional cultures, the textbook is indifferent to the thorny intellectual questions or unresolved issues that truly pervade our
science. From reading a textbook, you almost get the impression our designs and statistics were carried down on stone tablets from Mt. Sinai or dug up from the earth. It is this air of self-contentment that makes a paradigm so dangerous. Science becomes a tool of skepticism rather than a tool of exploration, and a tool of disqualifying candidates from membership in a scientific community rather than a tool of affirming a candidate's commitment to real science. With respect to both subject matter and vocations, science becomes the Great Disqualifier.
5E Abandoning the 'psych-' for the '-ology'
So how does psychological research fail to emulate the principles of detectivework? Given that psychological researchers are interested in topics that range from rat saliva to racial prejudice, an insecurity arose among psychology professors that Psychology would not be taken seriously unless it projected a unified front. The scientific method was embraced as a source of unity, a common denominator capable of providing a common language and identity to professors studying a wide range of psychological issues. Because psychology professors were seeking to compensate for or conceal such a tremendous variability, they demanded a proportionately narrow conception of science. Science became synonymous with rigor and parsimony -- with the rules -- rules that stingily alienate individual researchers from their wits and from the scope and depth of the phenomena under study. Psychology professors rallied around what amounts to a subset of possible scientific practices and philosophies, exercised to a high standard, and tauted as the 'glue that holds psychology together.' To contribute to this thin veneer of legitimacy and solidarity, psychological researchers began to resemble technicians more than scientists, skilled in the execution of a standard battery of statistical analyses and experimental designs. They became scientists first and students of the human psyche second and they adopted norms for research that emphasized those elements of scientific research that created an appearance of science. While they perfected the mask of science, the true soul of science is not in their hearts. This is evident in the decision rules that ultimately determine who is published and who is hired. Only those writings that can claim to be a polished end-product, confirming some hypothesis through rigorous, quantitative, and controlled research, can be printed for distribution to colleagues and libraries and placed on the resume (i.e. CV).
5F So What's the Problem?
Problem 1: Lazy Research
Knowing what it takes to build a competitive resume, psychology students and professors gloss over most aspects of the scientific process, doing only what is necessary to write a paper. Allow me to present a rather extreme example of this. If I need to publish on a career timetable, I may pick a rather uninteresting or unchallenging topic for study. In fact, we are rewarded in Psychology for building on the work of others. So I may decide to re-create someone else's research with a slight difference. I may vary a variable, up the dosage, add another control group, or select a different sample (e.g., Hispanic females). I then inform my Psych 101 students that course credit is available for participating in this research. Concerned about their grades but totally uninterested in the research, these students, primarily ages 18-22, fill out my questionnaire or submit to my standardized interview protocol, either way the instruments selected probably have known psychometric properties so as to spare time and criticism. The range of factual material, the rich phenomenal tapesty, associated with the phenomena under study is not delved, nor is the historical context or individual system in which the phenomena is embedded. The only data collected is that required to yield an inferential test statistic like t, F, or r. Each research participant is reduced to a string of numbers. Not only is the data a superficial and denuded representation of the factual material, but once collected, it is not even adequately explored. The numbers are keyed into the Excel or SPSS spreadsheet (usually by the professor's research assistant), and with a few clicks to the appropriate menu items, a matrix of correlation coefficients or t values are obtained and scanned for all instances of "p < .05" to answer in an instant the binary question "was my hypothesis rejected or not?" that determines whether one has a publishable paper.
Problem 2: Cosmetic Research
Much of the sophisticated research in our field that wins awards or that finds its way into the premiere job-winning journals like JPSP is actually just a variation on the lazy research. The deceptively sophisticated research omits the same critical elements of essential science but simply exhibits a greater mastery of the discourse and a mistake-free execution of the analyses. They do not understand statistical theory. They 'borrow' from the field of Statistics a Chinese menu of tools they consult like someone who has never used a kitchen consults recipes in a cookbook or like a grade school student selects a salisbury steak from the Wednesday cafeteria line. And this ignorance makes it possible for them to mistakenly equate statistical analysis with quantitative thinking. A quantitatively-minded researcher can develop original or
outside-the-box ways of representing the phenomenological facts as numbers depending on the nature of the questions and the nature of the facts collected. As we seem to have these rather lazy and common fact collection techniques, it is no wonder that we can refer to it as 'data collection' (i.e., as if facts and data were synonymous here). In fact, as poor as our fact collection actually is, we skip a step and harvest data directly. By that I mean we collect numbers and then plug them into a formula, usually to settle some highly circumscribed question. For example, a sophisticated researcher might deploy a "hierarchical regression analysis" rather than an ANOVA. While the sophisticated technique represents a more complex statistical formula and provides somewhat more information, it does not require any more than one or two additional clicks of the mouse. It does not imply that the user can speak intelligently about the operations performed on the data by selection of this technique. And the technique is often thought to make up for extraordinary deficiencies in the conceptualization and fact collection stages.
Unfortunately, regardless of the statistical analysis selected, no researcher can cheat the fundamental principle: "garbage in, garbage out." A sophisticated researcher, however, can be far more destructive than the lazy researcher in that the illusion created is an even more powerful one. Take for example dream research that takes place in the laboratory by technicians wearing white coats. The scientific ambience and ingrained instrumentation (e.g., EEG) fosters an aura of impenetrable legitimacy. Any conclusions, and perhaps even pre-experimental preconceptions, offered by the EEG-toting researcher is likely to be considered the first and last word on the subject of dreams. Certainly the public would side with this researcher in any debate with a phenomenologist or psychodynamic theorist. Would it really even matter if I were to tell you that the lab researcher, aside from measuring some beta waves and sleep spindles, never gathered more than a single piece of data about the actual dreams? This is quite common. In some cases, it is not entirely inappropriate, because the interest of these researchers in dreams is often limited to some small question like, 'when do we dream?' or 'do dreams have meaning?' But this latter question is dangerous, because most lab researchers are motivated to deny the function and significance of dreams. Moreover, given the limited information to which they have access (some gross estimates of brain functioning and no dream content) their conclusions are either stilted and stretched beyond the facts, or they allow for an information-processing function of dreams that could and should be swallowed whole (i.e. subsumed) by a broader theory informed by wider knowledge and attuned to a greater range of factual material. (The conclusion would look much different, possibly no longer warranting the adjective 'info-processing' when re-evaluated by adequate research). But what lab researchers often possess in the way of knowledge of lab instruments and, in some cases, the human brain, they lack in the way of personal dream experience, knowledge of dream theory, and a general predisposition and ability to think. I have read about a study that was supposed to provide the definitive statement on the question of compensation or reflection. (This question relates to whether dream material reflects waking experience or compensates for it). The study was flawed from the start. If any of the researchers had been familiar with Jung, who explored these issues indepth, they would not have operated with such a rigid and poor idea of what it means for a dream to 'compensate' for waking experience. Secondly, they would have understood that it was short-sighted of them to think they can use physical objects as the units of analysis (e.g., if a person played Tetris during the day and played Tetris in the dream, then this is evidence of reflection. What does this kind of research teach us about anything?). In an adequate theory of compensation, the researchers would have realized that dreams may not care for specific objects, but for broad motivations or feeling-states, both of which, unlike physical objects, speaks to the foundation of the human condition and both of which can be fulfilled in a dream with reference to a variety of different objects. And they would have realized that no single answer to the compensation or reflection question can be applied universally. Perhaps dreams reflect one type of motivation, compensate for another, and exhibit an indifference to some motivations we may consider important from a waking standpoint. Perhaps dreams compensate for deficiencies in certain motivations but not excesses. Perhaps compensation may occur not only through references to images but through affects, as when a person who has not felt secure in some time experiences a dream in which there is a feeling of great security (one that would have been difficult to diagnose using only the imagery). And perhaps we can speak of different kinds of imagistic references. The research I have read examined none of these issues and thus, in my opinion, shows inadequate methodology, poor data, and rather disgusting conclusions. But why should we doubt them? They have a key to the lab, a white coat, and they can weave statements that incorporate exotic terminology pertaining to the brain and to the technology. In short, the sophistication of the statistics and the perfection of the design principles, while meaning that the researchers are NOT DOING ANYTHING WRONG, cannot compensate for what they are NOT DOING RIGHT. There are shortcuts built into the scientific paradigm that allow psychology researchers to conduct mindless research, to import data that represents the facts with inadequate scope and depth, and to employ only those analyses that rule on the null hypothesis in a single bound (rather than probing the data, as poor as the data is).
When we demand for publication or job placement certain stnadards from our research (e.g., parsimony and rigor) that are not essential to science itself and that are consistent with a narrow definition of science or excess baggage in the way of superfluous norms, we are shorting our students and our subject for the sake of our own personal gain and possibly for the glory of our profession. This tradition within psychology must come to an end.
5G Multivariate Techniques Is Not the Answer
Multivariate techniques provides no solution to, only a distraction from, the lack of an emic tradition in this field. Whether we are adjudicating null hypothesis vis-a-vis inferential statistics or engaging in a heavy manipulation and manufacturing of data through multivariate techniques, we are neglecting to treat the individual as the unit of analysis. Both classes of methodologies are means of fracturing the individual, extracting superficial characteristics for export into a variance-partitioning sausage grinder more appropriate to studying the space between individuals, as revealed by Georgetown professor James T. Lamiell (The Psychology of Personality, 1987; Beyond Individual and Group Differences : Human Individuality, Scientific Psychology, and William Stern's Critical Personalism, 2003). Multivariate techniques are destructive in that the statistical machinations -- a black box to anyone without true statistical expertise (which includes just about all psychology professors) -- distract the lay reader from the absence of conceptual sophistication as well as the lack of scrupulous data collection.
5H Alienation: Driving a Wedge between the Wits of the Researcher and the Facts of Human Experience
Good science is broad and open-ended at the outset, especially when grappling with mysteries or frontiers about which little is known. And it is phased and fluid, informed by the flexible and divergent thinking of the researcher. Too much in our scientific research is 'fixed' by some perception that the process represents a contract. We are expected to select hypotheses, a research design, and materials and procedures. Too much is made of the fact these decisions are a priori. We can never shift gears or react to data with adjustments on the fly. In police investigations, such adjustments would be regarded as good detective work. But for some reason, in academic circles, this is considered cheating or unprofessional. Unfortunately, in our emphasis on the professional development and persona, we make it impossible for us to realize our own potential as scientists and the potential in our own work. Each unit of psychological research is like a ballistic missile or 'dumb bomb.' The kinetic agent which should reside in any individual unit of research, is only permitted to occur across or between research studies. To extend my metaphor, we only adjust our trajectory after we learn we've dropped our bomb on the market square. I will have more to say on this later.
Good science requires a strong relationship between the wits of the individual researcher and the constellation of facts surrounding the phenomena under study. But within psychology, flexibility is not only discouraged within any given process of research, but it is also discouraged in the planning stages. By demanding parsimony and rigor from the outset, our requirements for publication and career mobility both discourage and extinguish the freedom and flexibility needed by researchers to adapt conventional designs and apply scientific principles to unique or difficult questions. The norms that form the loadbearing pillars of our ADHD science, which I will take up shortly, not only disconnect the individual researcher from the phenomena under study, but also alienate the researcher from his or her own conscience and talents and from the raw facts comprising the phenomenon. The individual researcher becomes an interchangeable worker in the knowledge production factory and his or her products, the research itself, becomes an anonymous brick in the wall of our trade journals. Other metaphors I have heard for this alienation, which include 'cookie cutters,' 'formula,' and 'method madness,' are also appropriate descriptions of what passes for modern psychological inquiry.
5I Even Quantitative Research Hampered by Template or 'Cookbook' Mentality
Even researchers who use quantitative methodologies like myself are subject to discrimination. The scientific paradigm canonizes only a handful of statistical procedures, which is to say they vest legitimacy in a loose collection of bounded statistical analyses, which deprives the individual researcher of his or her freedom to assign and manipulate according to his or her wits numbers to the facts of human experience. Broadly construed, mathematics is an invaluable means by which to express, track, and trend relations among the units or entities that make up our phenomenal world. Unfortunately, psychology professors have co-opted the Statistics text as a cookbook, a series of recipes for producing research findings. Subscribing to this one branch of mathematics is an enormous self-imposed limitation that is exponentially exacerbated by its rank-amateur bastardization and industrialization.
5J Modern Psychological Research One-Sided, Divisive, Polarizing
Any good social science, and especially a science of human nature, requires a confluence of exploratory AND confirmatory data analyses, qualitative AND quantitative data, descriptive AND inferential statistics, rationalism AND empiricism. Unfortunately, the non-theoretical and non-phenomenologcial Psychology of today minimizes the former in each pair in favor of the latter, truncating the tree that is psychological research so that it no longer has functioning roots (phenomenology) or crown (theory). Consequently, it can be said that researchers neither have their feet on the ground nor their head in the clouds.
5K Livestock?: Researchers Alienate Facts from Contexts -- from Individual Organism, from Dynamic System
ADHD information gathering procedures have distanced researchers from the facts of human experience, their data consisting of scattered and superficial behaviors milked from a captive audience of students that are treated like livestock. This type of data mining decontextualizes the facts about a phenomenon of interest, removing them from the whole person for delivery to a sausage-grinding statistical formulae that produce an inferential statistic on a career timetable. Conclusions drawn from this statistic are likened to psychological laws or principles, but which really resemble rules for which every individual is an exception. To put it another way, these professors, who are aspiring scientists and professionals first and students of the psyche second, adopt a paradigm that produces something with all the appearance of formality and finish but underneath this self-serving gloss, the phenomenon of interest is never really explored. Good detectivework and exploration requires that the researcher preserve the integrity and dignity of the individual, studying the facts of interest in the context of the whole system. Good human science research requires a relatively more indepth probing of a relatively fewer number of research participants treated as a series of n = 1 experiments, finding sources of variance and drawing conclusions within persons before seeking commonalities across persons. Only after the requirements of this first step are satisfied will the second step pay honest dividends. Unlike God, psychology professors cannot create something from nothing.
5L Anti-intellectual? Sterilization of Scientific Process Extinguishes Thinking
At various stages of the scientific inquiry we need contributions from both human reasoning (i.e., an ability and inclination to contemplate, muse, reflect, and apply logic, drawing constructively from our experiences and imagination to build theories or just say 'what if?'). Unfortunately, psychology professors know how to formulate hypotheses but they do not know how to think hypothetically. Moreover, there was once a time when hypotheses were derived from sophisticated theories or understandings of human nature. In such cases, the hypotheses represent miniature encapsulations or representatives of the theories, testable predictions based on the theories. Today it would seem that psychology professors mass produce these highly circumscribed hypotheses from the outset, predictions uninformed by any theory or adequate survey of possibilities. The null hypothesis testing system provides them with a recipe, and none of the meals are cooked from scratch.
Modern psychology professors have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. While they have a good case against the reified and dogmatic aspects of old psychoanalytic meta-theories, they appear to use this argument as an excuse to suspend all manner of casual contemplation and reflection, the kind of quality thinking that lays the groundwork for data collection (i.e., "what do I want to know?;" "what kind of data will be most likely to shed light on my question?";
and "how do I go about acquiring it?").
What Do I Want to Know?
This is an important step in the scientific process because it identifies the scope of the investigation. I for one have a BIG question about a very NATURAL FRONTIER (i.e., dreaming). But most academics define the scope of their inquiry so narrowly that nothing of any interest is learned about the psyche. They do this for a few reasons: (1) they are interested in some pragmatic or utilitarian topic [e.g., aviation cockpit design]); (2) a highly circumscribed
question lends itself more readily to that artificial scientific paradigm we call the 'null hypothesis testing system;' and (3) it also allows them to publish more frequently and in small units (articles of 3-4 pages that are more easily accommodated by journals), which is necessary to remain competitive in a saturated job market predicated on 'publish or perish.' ('Publish or perish' is
actually misleading. In today's competitive market, the formula is to weight the number of publications by the reputation of their respective journals).
Well, to get that interview for the tenure-track assistant professorship (and ultimately tenure), most candidates have had to publish in graduate school (usually as a sixth author of a four-page publication), publish more than once a year, receive funds for their research from some external agency, and present their findings at regional conferences, but it is usually articles that are of the 'so what?' variety or 'junk.' We are SPAMMING our body of knowledge with trade papers analogous to junk e-mail. And our questions do not reflect a
childlike and intellectual curiosity about the psyche. They are not the questions of explorers, intellectuals, muses, or detectives, but of clerks and job hunters. In our SUVs, we are always looking for the quickest, smoothest, and most scenic route around the mountain, while we should be hiking over it.
What kind of data will be most likely to shed light on my question?
In my 'dreams of cancer patients research,' I began with the assumption that not much of anything is known about dreams. I admitted ignorance, reveled in the mystery, and embraced the prospect of discovery. Therefore, I designed a study that was so flexible and adjustable as to (1) efficiently provide me a wealth of information that I can consult if necessary. In so doing, I assumed that I would not necessarily need all this information nor know at the outset why I would need it. But it would be there. (2) Allow me to react to or follow-up on questions that arise DURING the process of analysis. I am assuming here as a detective and explorer that I may encounter data that will inspire me to shift direction slightly. In short, I want to design a study in which a WEALTH OF DATA can guide me in the development of a THEORY which, in turn, can re-orient me in how I approach and organize that same body of data. There were among my professors critics who demanded formal hypotheses and, once I porposed a few sham hypotheses, they demanded that the hypotheses pattern my whole plan for analysis. The hypotheses not only constrained my thinking, they blinded me to my data, but hey, it allowed me to credit other people in the field for their remotely related research. I don't know what it is about psychology professors and their citation fetish.
How do I go about acquiring it?
To realize my goal of a flexible approach that allows me to make use of maximum resources (DATA, THEORY), I need a lot of raw information. (I liken my research to one of those shells on the beach that are broad at its opening and progressively narrows to a closed point). I usually begin with an interview (and a semi-structured one at that permitted to vary in response [within certain constraints] to the individual nature of the answers provided me by my research participant). Of course, I had to overcome objections to semi-structured interview protocols. Psychology professors prefer standardized and psychometrically sound instruments to nimble thinkers.
My data goes through many metamorphoses, but even as it changes form, it is never lost and can be revisited. This raw interview information is STEP 1. There is a lot of information here and it is as raw as it comes and by that I mean it is the actual and individualized responses to open-ended questions in a semi-structured interview. STEP 2 usually involves coding the information. After a review of it all, the data organizes itself (i.e., suggests a few
category schemes based on typical patterns of responses unanticipated
before the study was designed).
This is critical. Academics want me to formulate a hypothesis and design a study to evaluate the hypothesis as 'right or wrong' (i.e., reject/fail to reject). The problem here is that the raw question, when transformed into a testable experimental hypothesis and then into the corresponding statistical hypothesis, loses its meaning and usually both its scope and depth. It becomes a dichotomous (yes/no type) question, at which point the academics are interested only in adjudicating (answering) it. If they reject the null hypothesis, they have a positive result and they can celebrate by writing it up for submission to a journal. Problem is, the original question on which the hypothesis was based never got examined. They acquire only as much data as necessary to answer the yes/no question statistically (through a very cookie-cutter set of analyses that yield what is known as an inferential test statistic). Frontiers are never settled, phenomena never explored, theories never built, and meaning never addressed.
So in STEP 2, my raw information is assigned codes or ratings, which can now be used in some statistical analysis. My analyses are usually of a descriptive or exploratory variety at first and, where I do use inferential test statistics like t or F or r, I then usually treat them as descriptive statistics and make them the raw data in subsequent analyses. Now by this point, I have also (in addition to interviews) administered a few questionnaires (which yield
quantitative data from the outset), reviewed the levels of chemicals in their bloodstream as found in their medical charts, and collected 2 weeks worth of their dream material. I look for relationships among all this rich data, some of these analyses are purely exploratory and others guided by theories inspired by the patterns (typical clusters) of responses that emerged in the data. To extend the study, there is usually a post-dream-collection interview, which is not designed before the research is undertaken but during data collection to
extend my knowledge. (For some reason, academics consider these post hoc adaptations as some kind of sordid cheating and fraudulence but it is just good detectivework. It seems to be okay when they do it as part of a follow-up study. They just consider that separate from the original study). In any case, this is how I conduct my research, and while it gets treated as a pilot study, it produces something we see so rarely in modern research: ideas worth testing, questions worth asking.
5M Bureaucratization of Knowledge Lends Temporal Truth to Ontologically Absurd Claims of Social Constructionists
In what amounts to the industrialization and bureaucratization of knowledge, behavioral fragments are mined like coal from the walls of General Psychology classrooms and dumped en masse into a furnace where it is melted and forged into conclusions by sloppy, biased, and opportunistic thinking. While I have made this same statement before (e.g., milking data from livestock), this new metaphor seguays well into the statement that follows: "I can see the impurities in our 'metal.'"
Mainstream empiricists may not like it when social constructionists argue that our knowledge is 'socially constructed.' Unfortunately, social constructionsts are correct, not as a general principle (as social constructionists would have you believe), but because the mainstream empiricists contaminate essential or foundational science with all these superfluous and arbitrary norms, norms that embed research in the loose fabric of that is our institutions rather than firmly grounding it in the nature of the phenomena under study. Granted, there is much about nature that changes and thus our findings are likely over time to present an image of an evolving phenomenon. However, our findings paint a picture of a contradictory and fickle phenomenon because our research reflects the changes we make to our own institution. This is ironic in the sense that our norms discourage and punish instances in which the findings are questionable because they may have been influenced by the bias of the experimenter, and yet when viewed on a macroscopic scale, it is quite apparent that the norms of our obese scientific culture perpetrate a collective bias. Our knowledge is intimately bound up with its institutional context, lending weight to the mission of social constructionists who argue that there is no transcendental rationality, no universal principles, no “truth.” Want to repel the social constructionist juggernaut? Just do good research! It seems absurd, and in my opinion it IS. The empirical absurdity (bias) elicits an equal and opposite absurdity (social constructionism), a compensatory cog in that machine known as the historical dialectic. The unfortunate reality of the situation is that each side (social constructionist, mainstream empiricist) appears to be right because the other is absurdly wrong. The absurdity of each lends justification to the other. Neither side seems interested in addressing themselves to the lack of an emic tradition in our field, and by that I mean, our disregard for the facts of individual psychology.
Each person is a potentially rich source of data about his or her own psyche, and if the psyche were truly our concern, the breadth and depth of our interest in the individual research participant would be exponentially greater than what it is now. If I were successful somehow in turning psychological researchers on to the street, I fear they would make terrible panhandlers. I would have to advise them that the phrase “could you spare any change?” is more effective than “could you spare a quarter?” They are reluctant to survey relationships within the landscape of phenomena because they fear such a study would require too much of an intellectual contribution and more time than what is available to litter the journals with as many publications as are required to manage their impression on the tenure review committee. Relationships, in their view, are not their responsibility. The attitude is “I am relating these two levels of this independent variable with this dependent variable. As for other variables, let someone else do it.” In effect, each unit of psychological research ends up being not about a phenomenon per se, but about a particular “variable.” In order to glean something from a comparison of studies relating different “variables” to a phenomena of interest, norms have been established for methodology (i.e., one cannot compare apples and oranges). Unfortunately, the norms for methodology have resulted in a cookie cutter or recipe mentality, promoting mindless research and limiting the true explorers and detectives who need to exercise flexibility or originality. I feel compelled to present the liabilities of a science that prides itself on having “facilitated communication and integration” among “members” of its “community.” Perhaps the most glaring and undeniable flaw is that psychology has less to do with psyches than rat brains, pigeon droppings, and canine saliva. If I wanted to teach a gorilla how to work a Viewfinder, I would have become an anthropologist. There’s one field with the decency to hide the word “apology” in its title.
5N Games without Frontiers
So the social constructionists are valid, not in their perspective on the human psyche but on their criticism of the field of Psychology. I would go as far as to say that what we have in effect is social Darwinism (i.e., evolution as the natural selection of the fittest). The fittest are those whose research interests (1) “fit” manageably on that knowledge production line I call the NOMOTHETIC NULL HYPOTHESIS TESTING SYSTEM, (2) appeal to the lowest common denominator of our journals' review committees, or (3) attract external sources of funding. Among the “survivors” is research that addresses utilitarian, pragmatic, and technical issues with highly circumscribed and non-psychologistic hypotheses, unsaddled by the needs for theory and phenomenology. The detrimental effects on the quality of this research by the lack of theory and phenomenology, where present, are less conspicuous because the subject and object of the research is barely psychologistic. In other words, Psychology as a human science barely has a pulse. Having said this, I should add that psychology professors are not averse to killing to pulling the plug on patients with a weak pulse. The literature is replete with attempts to fit our fast-food research model to a psychologistic phenomenon like dreams. I have already implied that psychology has become too “Washingtonian” in its political agendas but I have not yet thoroughly defamed the field by linking it metaphorically to a town named “Hollywood.” Our research is like a large budget film production. The beatnik script would be obvious if not for the Hollywood set (i.e., laboratory) and props (i.e., white coats and electroencephalograph). Most Hollywood sets do not require real flushing toilets or back doors. By this I mean that our psychology professors conceal their vapid and disorganized thinking beneath dense and over-organized text. Intellectually lazy, existentially timid, and sloppy logic is concealed beneath seamless, gleaming metal technology and a design that marches in perfect step with the textbook. Impeccable—formally unassailable—it makes no official mistakes and is paraded with drill & ceremony into the APA Monitor or discovery.com (not to mention the dusty shelves and jaundiced pages of the university library annex, where it is as far removed from the public as it is from the reality of the psyche). But what does this sound and fury signify, with its lack of meaningful questions, and its dull and denuded data? Its conclusions may be correct within the confines of its wheelhouse, but what happens when you take them “outside” into the “light of day,” where they can be subsumed and recast within the scope of broader, less myopic research whose predilections do not reduce dreams to cognitive filing cabinets or brain secretions. After the play-dough is pushed through their square stencil, congratulations abound when a square is exactly what they find. But what if dreaming is a tetrahedron, as presumed by those who have no lab to command legitimacy, only wits? Just imagine if the only form the sculptor could liberate from the hunk of marble was that of his or her own chisel. I am speaking here of caricatures, products that bear too much of an imprint of the methodology and its constraints. I would like us all to critically examine the violence done to our most interesting questions when we worship at the altar of what I call "methodolatry." The breadth and depth of the information gathering process is restricted to what is necessary to produce an inferential statistic on our career timetable, one that is either likely to be positive and publication-friendly or that is likely to negatively reinforce our own fears of an irrational order. What passes today for the organized body of knowledge in Psychology is at best inbred and derivative drivel, sacrificing adequacy for parsimony, sufficiency for expediency, and worth for opportunity. To borrow a phrase from musician Peter Gabriel, I cannot help but feel Psychology is a collection of "games without frontiers."
