One of my favorite psychologists, David Myers, once remarked that:
“As a Christian monotheist. . . I approach life and work with two unoriginal assumptions: That (1) there is a God and (2) it’s not me (and it’s also not you). Together these axioms imply my surest conviction: Some of my beliefs (like yours) contain error. We are finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity. This. . . understanding is why I further believe that we should hold our own untested beliefs tentatively, assess others’ ideas with open-minded skepticism, and when appropriate, use observation and experimentation to winnor error from truth.”
I believe that this quotation gets at the heart of what it means to think like a psychologist and a scientist. In fact, it is an excellent summary of the core insights that have most benefited me because of my study of Psychology. These insights include the following:
1. Most people rely on personal experience, personal observation, and authority to inform their beliefs, opinions, and lifestyles.
2. Personal experience, personal observation, and authority have serious problems as sources of knowledge.
3. To the extent that phenomena are measurable, science provides the most reliable foundation for knowledge.
4. Not all science is equally valid. Good experiments often are the best source of information on what is true, particularly when there is a concern about what causes what.
I will discuss each of these ideas more below, in turn.
Insight #1: Most people rely on personal experience, personal observation, and authority to inform their beliefs, opinions, and lifestyles.
Ask a large group of people, as I often do in my teaching, how money relates with personal happiness, and you will receive a variety of opinions. Some believe that a good deal of money is necessary for happiness because money provides opportunities to do as one wishes. Some people, on the other hand, will say that they have seen people who have very little money and yet who seem very happy. Others might say that a certain amount of money is necessary to meet basic needs, but after that point, money is fairly irrelevant to personal happiness.
This suggests to me that asking people about their opinions is not necessarily that helpful if you want to better understand the way the world works. If one wants to make progress in understanding, it is important to go deeper. For the time being, the answer to how money relates to happiness is besides the point. The real question is how people come to believe whatever they do. In fact, if I were to boil down everything I have learned in my studies, I would simply assert this question:
“What is the evidence?”
Let me elaborate. I have learned that the world is filled with claims of various kinds about what is true. However, it is important to remember that these are just claims. To further understanding of a phenomenon, it is important to probe deeper about the evidence people have, and then you can decide whether the claim is justified or not. This is the essence of critical thinking. To the extent that it is important to accurately understand the way the world works, critical thinking is essential.
Ask people over and over again how they reached an idea about what they believe, what their evidence is, and what you are likely to find is that almost everyone will say that the ultimate sources of their knowledge are either (1) personal experience or personal observation or (2) authority. For instance, I imagine if you thought yourself about why you believe whatever you do about the relationship between money and happiness, your ultimate source of information would come down to one of these “ways of knowing.”
Insight #2: Personal experience, personal observation, and authority have serious problems as sources of knowledge.
How reliable are beliefs that are based on personal experience, personal observation, and authority? If you think about it, I think you’ll realize how limited these ways of knowing something to be true really are.
Personal experience and personal observation are, by definition, personal. That is, they must be filtered through our perceptions, which always tend to direct our attention toward what we wish to be true. Second, they also are limited because they only concern what appears to have happened for a very circumspect number of people, such as ourselves, our family members, or our close friends.
To illustrate this, consider the pervasive claim that teaching that matches students’ preferred learning style best promotes learning. Why do people believe this? Often times, it is because they have performed poorly in an educational setting and then need to come to an explanation for why this occurred. Of course, many people will be biased in thinking about this because they do not want to admit that factors within their control may have been involved. Even if it were true that a mismatch between a teacher’s style and a learning style was involved, this does not provide very good evidence that this is a phenomenon that applies to others. After all, everyone is unique and every situation is different.
Reliance on authority is another common “way of knowing.” This common practice refers to whenever people accept something to be true because they learned it from some outside source, without attention to the evidence for the claim. This often occurs when people accept what they hear from the media, teachers, books, trusted friends, and other authority figures without critical reflection.
Of course, authorities often are wrong. As Albert Einstein once remarked, “unthinking reliance on authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” Perhaps the key word in this quotation is “unthinking.” Authorities may provide a beginning point to reflect on something, but again, the real question is not the source, but the quality of evidence provided. Personally, I don’t want to accept something as true just because someone “says so.”
For instance, I imagine almost everyone who has spent any kind of significant time in formal educational settings has heard something along the lines that “if you want to perform well in school, you have to study a lot.” This implies that there is a significant positive correlation between time spent studying and performance in school. Is this really true? I bet many people have heard of people who did well without studying very hard or who didn’t perform well and who did.
This brings me back to Myers’ quotation that I began with. The reality is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove anything without any possibility of error. Our beliefs almost certain are flawed; we are fallible. We should hold our beliefs tentatively. However, as Myers suggests, there are methods that may be helpful in the quest for truth.
Insight #3: To the extent that phenomena are measurable, science provides the most reliable foundation for knowledge.
Science is not perfect, nor can science provide valid information about every topic (for example, the actual meaning of life, what constitutes beauty, whether a Divine Force really exists and cares for us). However, to the extent that phenomena can be measured, science generally is thought to be the best way of knowing that we have. The reason for this is that science gets around some of the problems mentioned above related to the use of personal experience, personal observation, and authority. That is, science is relatively objective, generalizable across many experiences, and open to replication and public scrutiny. As a result, the discipline of Psychology relies upon scientific evidence to evaluate claims. It is unique in being the only discipline with an interest in understanding human behavior that does so.
The results of reliance on science are important. Some people have learned somewhere (probably through poor science education) that science is “boring.” I think people who believe this don’t understand science and probably have never engaged in real science. (Memorization of scientific results or “facts” doesn’t constitute scientific inquiry.) In fact, science is one of the most surprising, humbling, and fun endeavors known to man (and woman). Referring back to my earlier examples, who would have guessed how complicated the relationship actually is between money and happiness? In fact, research suggests that money predicts daily mood ratings (but not overall judgments of happiness) up to $75,000 per year in family income in the United States, but not beyond. Furthermore, although many report that “money doesn’t buy happiness,” almost everyone still believes that they personally would be happier if they had more money (no matter what their current income). As another example, research reveals that matching between instructors teaching and student’s preferred learning styles actually does not predict learning or memory. In fact, some studies have shown that a mismatch between an instructor’s style and a student’s learning style actually predicts better performance (perhaps because this makes the student work harder and the effortful processing they go through helps memory). Finally, research shows that there actually is very little, if any, correlation between time spent studying and performance. This suggests that some people spend a lot of time studying, but largely are inefficient, whereas some can get a lot out of relatively little time.
Insight #4: Not all science is equally valid. Good experiments often are the best source of information on what is true, particularly when there is a concern about what causes what.
Having said everything I have above, however, it is important that not all scientific research is helpful. In fact, I’d say most research conducted is a waste of time and money. There are different reasons for this, but the most important probably has to do with the kind of methods used in the research.
There are many different ways to conduct a scientific study. The most common kind of study related to human behavior is correlational. It is critical to realize that correlational research does not support conclusions that suggest what causes what. There are two major reasons for this. First, the bidirectionality problem in correlational research is that, even though you can find that two variables are related to each other, you don’t know which causes which. For instance, considerable research suggests that spanking is positively associated with kids’ problems. However, this research doesn’t show whether spanking caused kids’ problems or whether kids’ problems caused them to be spanked more. Second, the third variable problem is that, even though you find two variables are related to each other, you don’t know whether or not there is another variable – not being measured – causing the observed relationship between the two variables being studied. For example, research has shown (and don’t ask me why they’ve done this research) that ice cream sales in a particular city are positively associated with the number of muggings committed in the same city on the same day. Clearly, ice cream doesn’t motivate muggings, nor do muggings likely cause people to want ice cream. More likely, temperature causes the relationship to exist, such that heat makes people want ice cream and also makes it likely that more people will be on the streets, making more muggings possible. The reverse also is true. If it’s bitterly cold outside, no one wants ice cream and no one goes outside, making muggings more difficult.
Thus, when evaluating various kinds of claims through research, it is very important to consider what kind of study is being performed. If a correlational study is being conducted, you really can’t say for certain what caused what. Experiments do allow for causal conclusions, however, because they better isolate variables.
Consequently, I pay a lot of attention to research studies in the media. I figure that they are likely to provide better information than personal experience, personal observation, or authority. However, when I am exposed to research studies, I think critically about the methods used. I think about whether a study is correlational or an experiment, for instance, and then make my conclusions accordingly. If I find a well-conducted experiment on a topic that is important to me, I often integrate that knowledge into my beliefs and lifestyle. This is perhaps one of the most fundamental ways in which I apply Psychology to my everyday life.
