Introducing Psychological Research
When we say research, maybe the first thing
you think of is an extended stay at the library,
all-nighters spent scouring the internet for
articles hidden behind paywalls, piles of
your drafts marked with red ink pens to indicate
needed revisions, and group mates messaging
you, “uy, nasaan na yung part na ikaw yung magsusulat?”
It’s no surprise then that many find research
to be a scary task, that no one would willingly
imagine a research career for themselves.
Well, this lesson aims to change that.
Or at least make research less scary.
This lesson is about why we should do research,
and what science and psychology have to do with it.
So why do we do research?
We can start with four reasons.
We do research everyday for everything
We usually think of research as something
that scientists and specialized professionals
do.
But at its core, research is all about collecting
information in order to answer a question
and give solutions to the problem that started
our investigation.
For example, when you were thinking about
college, why did you choose to take your current
degree program when there were others?
You most likely considered your interests
and future career prospects.
Maybe you asked your family, friends, and
significant others what they think.
Maybe your life circumstances led you to ask
if you’d be able to go to college in the first place.
 
Again, all of these are information that you
used to answer the problem “What degree
program should I take?”
We can list a lot of problems we face in everyday
life and all the information we research to
make a reasonable decision.
When selecting food, we look at the calories
and nutritional content, or if it would taste good.
 
When leaving the house, how early we should
go to account for traffic, or whether to go out at all.
 
When a friend says something out of character,
you consider where they’re coming from and
what unusual circumstances could have pushed
them over the edge.
You get the idea.
And psychologists have noted that people do
try to make sense of everything by asking
questions about themselves, others, and the
world they live in.
Social psychologist Fritz Heider said that
we are naive scientists who ask again and
again “Why do people behave the way they
do?”
From this, we come to have commonsense psychological
beliefs that we use to explain the motivations,
intentions, and goals of others.
Personality psychologist George Kelly puts
it more simply: we are persons-as-scientists
who take information, make informed guesses
about how people and the world work, test
out these hypotheses, and make conclusions
based on our experiences.
Of course, making conclusions solely based
on our experiences can lead to skewed conclusions,
because we behave relative to our interpretations
of the world and not exactly things as they happen.
 
So what makes psychological and scientific
research different from common sense psychology?
Both serve the same purposes: Research in
psychology aims to describe what is happening
to us and the world around us, explain what
processes and causes lead to these occurrences,
predict what will happen in the future using
what explanations and relationships we believe
give rise to these actions, and apply insights
from research to modify our behaviors and
make our lives better.
Psychological research just happens to be
more systematic, going beyond our individual
lenses and making the perspectives of many
people meet in the middle.
Research allows us to get more accurate, thus
more useful, information
Common sense psychology does derive information
from many sources of knowledge, but they’re
all limited in ways that make them not as
accurate or useful as insights coming from
psychological research.
Sometimes, we get information from tenacity:
these are the habits, beliefs, ideologies,
and superstitions that are passed down and
circulated around society.
These include everything from the well-intentioned
“not going to bed with your hair wet at
the risk of headaches or blurred vision”,
to the more concerning “not going home immediately
after visiting a wake at the risk of the deceased
following you.”
In other cases, we make decisions based on
gut-feel intuitions or our selective interpretations
of our own experiences.
We also get swayed by the opinions of experts
on particular topics, or by popular bandwagon
appeals toward certain preferences.
Of course, though these sources might be useful
in making trivial choices, they all suffer
from common problems that render them inaccurate.
One problem is confirmation bias: we are prone
to remember when the advice given by these
sources work, and ignore the cases when they
don’t.
So even if they prove to be false, we keep
on holding on to them despite lack of evidence.
Another is the present/present bias: Did following
the suggestions given by these sources actually
lead to the desirable ends we got?
Or is something else at play?
These sources are not good at identifying
what processes are actually working to give
good results, and ruling out what is irrelevant.
We also have bias blind spots: authorities
and bandwagons, just like everyone else, can
have preferences which color their opinions.
Biases, when unchecked, can lead to advice
that don’t work for everyone, or reflect
only the limited lenses of the people they
come from.
Two other sources of knowledge are actually
part of how we do research at present, and
they come from psychology’s long philosophical
history.
Rationalism, based on the ideas of “theory
of forms” Plato and Rene “cogito ergo
sum” Descartes, emphasized that knowledge
is derived from how we think about things
and how we process information to come up
with new conclusions.
Indeed, English philosopher John Stuart Mill
and German physiologist-turned-psychology-founder
Wilhelm Wundt talked about creative synthesis,
or how complex ideas can be traced to the
organization of more basic thoughts.
Nowadays, rationalism lives on through the
process of deduction: When we have an overarching
explanation for why things happen, we derive
specific predictions that follow from these
overall theories which we then apply to specific
situations.
You’d usually see deductions in if-then
format, or a series of premises which, when
linked, lead to a conclusion.
Meanwhile, empiricism, as can be seen in the
writings of “potentiality-actuality” Aristotle,
John “tabula rasa” Locke, and Francis
“scientific method” Bacon, argued for
the opposite side: knowledge can come only
from experience and observation of the world.
Makes sense: you need observations that become
knowledge first before you can organize anything.
In the present, the process of induction does
something similar: We create explanations
based on generalizations, or a conclusion
informed by seeing what’s similar among a lot of observations.
However, both rationalism and empiricism have
limitations too, but of a different kind.
That is, like tenacity, intuition, experience,
authority, and bandwagons, rationalism and
empiricism are helpful only to the extent
that the original knowledge content is actually true or valid.
But at the same time, these two only result
in acceptable explanations if the process
of reasoning used to reach a conclusion is
valid as well.
For example, you could say that resources
are limited so they will run out when they get used up.
Then someone may come up and add that happiness
is a resource.
So does that mean we should stop people being
happy so we won’t run out of happiness in the world?
 
Here’s another case: It rained for the past
five days and you need an umbrella to not get wet.
 
Could you conclude that you’d need an umbrella
tomorrow?
The process of deducting happiness conservation
is valid based on philosophical principles
of argumentation, but the content of the argument
is not so you ended up with a weird conclusion.
Also, predicting if it will rain tomorrow
relies on accurate data, but a faulty process:
You can’t assume certainty in induction
because you can only conclude as much as what
your data tells you.
So it’s possible it will rain, but you can’t
be certain if it would.
Okay.
If these sources of knowledge have their own
merits and limits, then what does science
rely on to make reasonably good conclusions?
We have the scientific method, a systematic
process of identifying questions, acquiring
information, and making conclusions.
Different sources list different steps, but
the process goes something like this: observe
the world and look for a problem you want
to solve, make a hypothesis or informed prediction
about why things are the way they are, collect
data to test how well your prediction holds
up, then analyze your results to make a conclusion.
Whether you can support or need to refine
or refute your hypothesis, the scientific
method loops back: Your findings can inspire
new questions, or allow researchers in the
future to look somewhere else for answers.
Science is an iterative source and process
of knowledge creation, so it’s a never ending
question-and-answer cycle.
We use research to know ourselves and our
society more, so we can make better decisions
and changes that benefit us in the long run
We’ve been talking about science as if it’s
just a source of knowledge.
But really, science is also a process of thinking
about the world, and it is run by people who
respond to the needs of the society in which
they are present.
Indeed, psychology has responded to three
contexts which shaped how we do research.
Our historical context, the progression of
thinkers, theories, and technologies influence
what explanations we make and what methods
we use in our studies.
For example, psychology borrowed heavily from
chemistry, physics, and other natural sciences
from the 1800s to the 1900s when deciding
which methods are most useful in unraveling
the mysteries of the human mind.
Because of this, we ended up relying on experiments,
objective surveys, and other quantitative
methods which are also the staple of natural
science studies.
But in the 1970s, brought about by the Civil
Rights and Feminist Movements and the Stonewall
Riots, psychologists and researchers across
the social sciences realized even more that
reducing human experiences to numbers just
isn’t enough to make sense of the complex
times in which we live.
Thus, the qualitative revolution brought about
the return of interviews, phenomenology, focused
group discussions, and other narrative-based
methods.
The qualitative revolution is also a good
example of psychology’s second context:
the sociocultural environment.
The zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, tells
us whether a particular method or research
topic is appropriate, prioritized, or even
relevant given the needs and interests of
a particular society or culture.
For example, psychological research is often
described as WEIRD, reflecting the typical
characteristics of most published studies
relying on Western, educated, industrialized,
rich, and democratic samples.
Then, post colonial liberation psychologies
in the 1970s and large scale migration and
globalization across the decades pushed social
scientists to grapple with cultural diversity
in their studies.
With that, research based on WEIRD people
are no longer applicable, relevant, or even
enough for an increasingly international psychology.
The last context concerns the moral implications
of our research.
Psychology is not only a scientific endeavor
that aims to investigate human behavior and
educate students: It is also a practice aimed
at individual wellbeing and advocacy toward
positive social change.
The findings of psychology can be used for
both good and evil.
Insights into human functioning have been
instrumental in promoting gender sensitivity,
destigmatization of mental illnesses, and
humane justice systems inasmuch as it has
been abused to support racism, homophobia,
and dehumanization.
For instance, findings in psychological testing
and neuroscience have been used to justify
the discrimination of African Americans and
immigrants in the United States, arguing that
their scores in culturally-inappropriate intelligence
tests are symptomatic of their intellectual,
genetic, and neural inferiority.
The same problematic arguments have been used
to rationalize eugenics, colonialism, social
inequalities, and cultural hegemony across
the years.
In the Philippines alone, national psychological
associations have spoken out on issues of
the misuse and politicization of psychological
tests, reassertion of embracing diversity
in sexual orientation, gender identity and
expression, and the role of psychology in
empowering democracies through citizenship
and responsive governance.
Simply, psychology is not a field existing
independent of the world around it.
Psychology exists within, responds, and contributes
to the people, societies, and cultures it studies.
Research shows us the limits of what we know,
and motivates us to understand (and make people
realize) what we don’t
Science is often viewed as the arbiter of
truth, the absolute and eternal facts of the
universe.
But this isn’t the case: science works in
terms of probabilities, not certainties.
What does that mean?
Science, and psychology by extension, has
four characteristics.
First, science is objective, or at least transparent
and reflexive.
Scientific objectivity does not mean the complete
absence of bias, but an awareness of what
could possibly skew our conclusions, which
we then use to minimize how our perceptions
can influence the data.
Next, as an empirical endeavor, the conclusions
that science comes up with ultimately rely
on what information is available.
Whether we create explanations based on what
we observe or by putting together what findings
and insights we’ve had in the past, our
theories fundamentally rely on what evidence we have.
 
As a consequence, science is probabilistic.
As philosopher Karl Popper argues, our scientific
findings are cumulative yet tentative and falsifiable.
 
For example, the statement “all swans are
white” can be true.
Even if you see one, one hundred, or one million
white swans, it will never prove that all
swans are white because it’s likely you’ve
missed a billion other swans.
And if one of those swans turned out to be
black, then your statement is falsified.
Remember when we said that modern scientific
research uses both induction by generalization
and deduction by hypothesis-testing?
Well our field also relies on a third process:
abduction, how our explanations are best guesses
of what’s actually happening in the world
as constrained by what we know.
That’s what we mean when our explanations
are tentative: they are dependent on what
evidence we currently have, and are strengthened
or weakened by what new information we get.
The fourth characteristic of science is that
it’s public, with our findings intended
to be shared with other researchers and the
general population to inform not only further
studies, but also daily decisions and even
public policy.
That’s why we have the field of scientific
communication, which aims to translate the
complexities of scientific reports into outputs
useful for citizens, policy makers, businesses,
and other sectors.
And that’s where science has another problem.
In recent years, anti-intellectualism, science
rejectionism, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscientific
explanations have gained greater prominence
in public attention and influence on policy making.
 
Some, like astrology or phrenology (using
the bumps and indentations on the skull as
measures of intellectual capacities) are viewed
as trivial if not entertaining.
But others are more harmful because they have
direct impacts on our health system.
Vaccines and autism, homeopathy and essential
oils, magnetic fields or signal towers and
COVID-19, the list goes on.
These beliefs are problematic because, by
discounting scientific thinking, aggressively
attacking dissent, relying on problematic
if not fraudulent evidence, and sometimes
co-opting scientific-sounding jargon to seem
legitimate, they lead to greater confusion
and division about what solutions or interventions
are actually good for us.
That’s why in teaching the public about
science, we don’t just talk to them about
our discoveries but also how to be critical
in looking at and using information.
We call this scientific literacy: the ability
to understand how science uses rigorous methods
to ask questions and seek answers, and see
what science contributes to unraveling and
influencing our physical and social worlds.
On top of that, scientific literacy is about
realizing the limits of our scientific endeavors,
thus placing confidence critically on the
insights we discover.
Kathleen Bieschke and co-researchers tell
us that a scientific-minded psychologist should
then be critical not only about scientific
discoveries, but also the process of arriving
at them and how they are used in the service
of the public.
Thus, we contribute knowledge to extend our
understanding of our psychological abilities
while subjecting these insights to scrutiny
by our fellow researchers.
At the same time, we consume research to inform
our own studies and decisions, while examining
how our biases and perspectives shape how
we view the world.
Finally, psychology and science are deeply
situated in society and culture, so we should
always consider how they influence research
priorities, processes, and application.
At this point, it feels like we’ve been
on a rollercoaster of emotions and confidence,
from “Let’s science all the things!”
to “Does science work? What for?”
And that’s okay.
Though science can give us a false feeling
of all-knowingness and all-powerfulness, what
we actually have is a tentative, imperfect,
yet critical perspective in shaping how we
do research, education, advocacy, and practice.
We are not in possession of unquestionable
truth or eternal knowledge.
Instead, Martin Schwartz reflecting on scientific
stupidity, says that we “bumble along, getting
it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly
fine as long as we learn something each time.”
Brian Resnick agrees: “To be intellectually
humble doesn’t mean giving up on the ideas
we love and believe in.
It just means we need to be thoughtful in
choosing our convictions, be open to adjusting
them, seek out their flaws, and never stop
being curious about why we believe what we believe.”
 
Partly brought about by the replication crisis,
psychologists came to the realization that
we have to re-evaluate how we discover and
dispense knowledge, because public confidence
in our endeavors are decreased when we exaggerate
findings despite having little evidence to
support them.
It takes a healthy dose of intellectual humility
to admit we’re wrong, and some scientific
stupidity to stay curious in knowing what
is right.
“The claim that ‘we already know this’
belies the uncertainty of scientific evidence,”
writes the Open Science Collaboration, “Innovation
points out paths that are possible, replication
points out paths that are likely, progress
relies on both.”
In this lesson, we discussed why doing research
is important by giving four reasons.
In doing research everyday, we learned about
common sense psychology and the naive scientist
and persons-as-scientist metaphors for humans.
In comparing different sources of knowledge
with the scientific method, we showed how
scientific research contributes more accurate
and useful information.
We looked at the contexts of psychological
research to understand how studies can be
used for our benefit, and we rediscovered
what it means to be scientific while considering
the limitations of science and the spirit
of scientific stupidity and intellectual humility.
In the next lesson, we’ll revisit the scientific
method by identifying a general research process
that applies for both the quantitative and
qualitative traditions, and how this applies
to the skill of reading journal articles.
See you then!
