Social Psychology's Dark Future

This post lays out my worst fears for the future for social psychology, the field to which I have devoted my adult life. It is a companion to another post that lays out my best hopes for the same field. The combination exemplifies my intellectual style of trying to contemplate important issues carefully “both sides from the inside.”

Social psychology continues to change in its methods, practices, and values. Are these building toward a better science that will shed ever clearer light on how ordinary people think, feel, and act? Or is it losing touch with what made it great, and descending into investigating dubious and peripheral problems, producing little that will be of interest to the social science community’s efforts to construct a correct understanding of the human condition? In this post, I focus on reasons to think the latter. This is a deliberate exercise in intellectual pessimism, worst-case scenario thinking, and negativity bias. One can imagine any or all of these dark scenarios unfolding.

• The replication crisis wreaks sweeping changes to the field’s research methods, and the cure is worse than the disease. Researchers stop measuring actual behavior and instead measure what people say they would probably do. These responses are biased by self-enhancing motives and bear only a weak relation to actual behavior. Fear of non-replication stifles creativity. Raising methodological standards also hampers creativity.
• Replication purists insist that large samples will replicate better than small ones, so all researchers should seek large samples. All else being equal, large samples are undeniably better. But all else is not equal. The burdensome constraints of directly observing behavior make large samples impractical. (Think of re-running the classic Milgram, Festinger-Carlsmith, Schachter-Singer, Darley-Latane studies with n=60 per cell; enormously labor-expensive, considering that each single data point required at least an hour per subject, including paying for experimenter and confederate.)

  Instead, researchers shift to what can be done effectively with large samples, thereby eliminating direct laboratory observations of genuine behavior in favor of having research participants sit at computers and make ratings. Essentially, we map out people’s fantasies and thought processes, losing touch with reality. The other social sciences will come to know this about us and shrug off our work as trivial fantasies.

• Also possible, political bias infects our science, to the point at which our findings cannot be taken seriously, except among select scholars who share the same biases and seek to build a phony worldview to support political activism. We follow the path of the humanities, politicizing our research, and gradually losing credibility. Young researchers who enter the field are required to uphold its collective fictions (including suppressing data that question them). The scientific commitment to the truth is disparaged as a stale-pale-male artifact.

  Instead, careers and contributions are judged by their relevance to particular political ideals. This starts with requiring conference presentations to state what they do for ‘social justice’, and soon the journals follow suit, and research grant committees also. Editors can be fired for publishing papers that are politically incorrect. Gradually, the research community comes around to accepting that the purpose of social psychology is to support a particular political worldview, rather than seek the truth even if it is not what we want. (Probably, though, social psychologists would continue to pretend to be pure scientists, exploiting the credibility of science to support political activism and social engineering.) Instead of struggling to understand the complex tradeoffs and diversity of human behavior, social psychologists divide the world into good and evil, and they do what they can to furnish data for the political causes they favor.

• Recruitment of new scientists into the field ceases to bring the best scientists. Already, I know multiple social psychologists who have stopped encouraging their best and brightest students to enter the field — indeed, some professors actively discourage promising students from going to graduate school in social psychology. Various non-science criteria take precedence over achievement and merit in hiring new faculty. The ideals behind these involve making society better and sharing opportunities. But if that policy is followed en masse, it is hard to think that future social psychology will have the talent to thrive as it has in the past.
• Increasing censorship and editorial bias will alter the knowledge base and in the process corrupt it. The escalating emphasis on supporting political goals requires sacrificing scientific objectivity and suppressing findings and theories that go against the preferred view. I have studied many different areas of research in my attempt to reach an integrative understanding of human social life, and one thing I have learned repeatedly is that it is delusional to insist that reality is the way we fondly imagine it should be.

  Any honest generalist has grown accustomed to accepting findings that he or she does not like. If we insist on findings that fit a particular worldview, we will build a false understanding of reality. The dark future would include more and more cases of papers being censored and retracted for political reasons. The field’s published literature is based on political ideals, not search for truth, and as such becomes untrustworthy.

• Bureaucratic burdens intensify, slowing the research process to a crawl and choking off creativity. IRBs increase their power, requiring 70-page applications for permission to run a simple study. Just getting approval starts to take many months. Graduate students cannot get enough research training in six years.

Bottom line: Social psychology is abandoning the methods that made it great, which were based on staging live social interactions in the laboratory and observing behavior. Instead, it largely studies the effects of thoughts on other thoughts. Bureaucratic, methodological, and political forces gradually hamper and corrupt the research process.