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I once sat in on a class at M.I.T. taught by sometimes physicist, sometimes novelist Alan Lightman. He read his short story "Smile," a love-at-first-sight tale told through the inner mechanics of the eye. For nearly the entire piece, Lightman describes the process of vision in extreme detail: "Each particle of light ends its journey in the eye upon meeting a retinene molecule, consisting of 20 carbon atoms, 28 hydrogen atoms, and 1 oxygen atom." Then, at the last line, he shifts the focus from the technical level to the behavioral one:
All of this is known. What is not known is why, after about a minute, the man walks over to the woman and smiles.
The point of "Smile" is that despite the scientific complexities of sight, it's far more difficult to explain how we act in the face of attraction. Yet if posed a question like Do you know more about attraction or ocular physics?, pretty much everyone would go with the former.
I was reminded of Lightman's story while reading a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (pdf here) about the popular belief that psychology is the "easiest" science. Many people think they understand some aspect of psychology that continues to baffle empirical researchers, when in fact all they really know is an anecdote or two about how a good friend endured a bad break-up or a death in the family. They take the solution that worked for this person, apply it to all similar scenarios, and officially understand people.
A little armchair psychology can make for good conversation. But as a reflection of a broader disbelief in psychology's scientific roots, the practice can have frightening consequences. In the "Scooter" Libby perjury case, for instance, the judge ruled that hearing from memory expert Bob Bjork would be a "waste of time." As MSNBC reported, Judge Reggie Walton
wrote in his opinion, "the average juror may not understand the scientific basis and labels attached to causes for memory error" but jurors encounter the "frailties of memory" as a "commonplace matter of course" and do not need the guidance of a memory expert to use their "common sense" in the understanding of how memory works.
Anyone even slightly familiar with the work of Elizabeth Loftus knows that our common understanding of memory has glaring flaws. (The best profile of Loftus, and one of the best profiles of a scientist I've ever read, appeared in this magazine in 1996.) Yet, as the authors of the JEP paper point, out, "common knowledge challenges are almost never made" by judges regarding experts in the natural sciences.
That's not at all to argue that Loftus's work, in particular, is infallible; were I a judge, I'd certainly welcome opposing experts. But conclusions like Walton's imply that such work isn't even wrong, it's irrelevant. Which, of course, is wrong.
The authors of the JEP study, three psychologists from Yale, set out to discover the age at which this bias against social science begins to appear. First, through pretests with adults, they settled on a few basic questions relating to physics, chemistry, biology, economics, and psychology that were equally difficult to explain. They then asked grade-schoolers to rate the difficulty these concepts.
The paper ran four experiments to reach its conclusions, but briefly put, children began to consider social sciences less difficult to grasp than natural sciences by roughly 2nd grade. A hierarchy of difficulty existed even within psychology; neuroscience concepts, for instance, were considered more difficult than those of social psychology. Economics was judged as more difficult than psychology early on—likely because it relies on mathematics—but by 8th grade this view had nearly disappeared.
The reasoning of these children, the authors report, differed little from Judge Walton's: psychology is self-evident, and can be understood through common knowledge. As the authors argue, a person with a flawed understanding of psychology is less likely to receive concrete evidence of the error than, say, someone who thinks that gravity is a hoax, or that 2+2=5 (audio link):
[F]or abilities for which actual performance is more private and difficult to measure objectively, adults tend to overestimate their ability. ... People might therefore also estimate that phenomena related to their own immediate and internal mental experiences, namely those of psychology, are easier to understand than are those related to more objectively observable events, such as those of physics. They may be confronted less often with clear evidence that they do not understand a social science phenomenon than with clear evidence that they do not understand a natural science one.
In response to this paper, economist Eric Falkenstein recently concluded that "social sciences are much harder than the physical sciences or math, in that our progress has been much slower here than in these areas." He continues:
Figuring out why Haiti is so poor, or how interest rates affect investment, is really difficult. However, it is easy for someone to articulate an answer to hard social issues that is not obviously wrong, which makes it easy to think one knows the answer.
But as Fellow Headcase Cardiff Garcia argues, the question of which science is the most difficult is largely "unanswerable." He recalled an experience from college with a professor whose students claimed geometry was easier than calculus:
"Really?" he asked them. He then wrote a geometry problem on the board and asked the students to solve it. They couldn't, and gave up after a while. "That's okay," he told them, "nobody else has ever solved this problem either." ... The point is that it doesn't make much sense to say a subject is hard or easy ... . It all depends, really, on the problems you're talking about.
When the problems we're talking about are personal, we like to feel like we have a handle on them. "[I]f one thinks that one can provide simple explanations for psychological phenomena, one might also think that they are easy to experience and to control," the JEP authors write.
All of this is known. What is not known is why, to get through the day, we grasp at this illusion of control.
(HT BPS Research)
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