Research Skills for Psychology Majors: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started

Philosophy of Science

Psychologist care about the Philosophy of Science much like everyone cares about air. We live and breath and depend on air but we hardly know how it works, nor do we take much time to understand the philosophical basis for

our various activities as psychologists. One could argue that this is evidence that we are in a phase of science that Thomas Kuhn called “normal science,” that is, we agree on the ground rules of what we’re doing and we spend our time acting on the basis of these rules rather than debating them. We breath the air but don’t experience much angst about it. This is an enviable state of affairs that some other disciplines, such as anthropology, cannot claim to share.

The assessment of the state of psychology in the previous paragraph is vintage about 1975. In the Third Millennium, the state of the air and psychology’s philoso-phy of science are both actively debated. Global warming is not directly important to this chapter, but it may be quite important to you later on in life. The philosoph-ical basis of psychology is also in flux, and if you remain in psychology, especially academic psychology, you will have to grapple with its complexity many times in your career. This change can be attributed to several sources, including globaliza-tion of psychology, the rise of indigenous psychology movements, the changing demographics of the world psychology powers (USA, Western Europe), the rise of new psychology powers (e.g., in East Asia), and the failure of social science to live up to its expectations. The famous Chinese curse, now almost a cliché, comes to mind:

May you live in interesting times.

In this chapter, we will describe the mainstream, normative conception of science shared traditionally by American (and most other) psychologists and then talk about its critics and alternate conceptions. We will introduce some of the main problems and debates in the normative view. We will also discuss a related area, the Sociology of Science, and talk about a new feature of globalization, indigenous psychology. Discussions and debates in this area of discourse are famously obtuse and dense. Hopefully, this one won’t be.

Metatheories

Philosophies of science are influenced by, and often constitute, the metatheoretical orientations of communities of scholars. Metatheories are general conceptions or assumptions about the nature of things: of people, the world, science, and so on. These conceptions guide the development of more specific, detailed theories and beliefs. Metatheories are at the basis of religious belief systems, personal world views, individual and cultural values, political orientations, and science. Everybody has them, but they are often not well articulated or even “conscious.” When individuals are asked to reveal their metatheories, they often cannot do so or they

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Kong-zi (Confu-cius)

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express them in ways that must surely be considered illogical to an outside observer. Some metatheoretical dimensions are important to philosophy of science but most have implications for a wide range of human concerns. The sidebar includes a list of many of the frequently discussed metatheoretical issues. Meta-theories relevant to philosophy of science are dis-cussed in this chapter.

The Physics Model

Early in the previous Century, American psychology made a conscious decision to emulate the way of knowing of the natural sciences, the center of which is physics. The “physics model” (author’s term) refers to the traditional philosophy of science accepted, implicitly more than consciously, by most working psy-chologists up until the 1980s, and still by the majority of psychologists. This model is also labeled, loosely, “positivism” or “neopositivism” although this is not a precisely accurate usage.

The Physics Model, as employed in the social and be-havioral sciences, has the following characteristics:

1. A real world exists2. Humans can know this world3. The events of the world are fully determined, although in a highly complex manner4. The world can only be known through empirical research combined with rational analysis5. Humans are a natural phenomenon to which a determinist universe applies6. Research will eventually build theories and mod-els that are universal7. All theories are tentative, subject to additional research8. Final theories or “laws” are attainable but always subject to new, better theories

A Real World Exists

This point may seem ridiculously obvious, the film The Matrix aside, but Western philosophers have never accepted it at simple, face value. Our only evidence of a real world is through our sense organs, aided by research instrumentation, so to start with we need to assume that our mental representation of the sensed world corresponds to what’s actually out there (and that people can accuarately communicate what they sense to each other then agree on it). But in the

Metatheoretical Dimensions

1. The essential nature of human beings

dualism: are people merely natural products (animals) or do they possess something that transcends nature, such as a soul?

mind/body dualism: is mind a natural extension of the body, or is it somehow distinct or special?

free will/determinism

goodness: are humans essentially good, evil, both, neither?

progress: is humanity “progressing” in some manner, or recapitulating earlier forms in new ways?

human subjectivity: how is the apparent subjectivity (know-ing self) to be accounted for?

2. The appropriate manner for studying humans and societies

natural science methods: can we extend the methods of natural science to the study of humans?

special methods for humans: must special methods be used to study humans that take into consideration other features of this list, such as free will?

universalism: can the study of humans reveal universal laws of causality?

cumulative knowledge base: in studying humans, can we expect to build a body of knowledge that is cumulative and develop theories that generally improve, or are we just going around in circles?

theoretical polytheism: can more than one high-level theory (e.g., behaviorism and cognitivism) be correct?

language: can human languages represent or communicate adequately the substance of social science?

culture: are cultural universals possible, or must all psychol-ogies be culturally bound? Does language represent reality differently, and does this difference make it impossible to make generalizations or comparisons across cultures?

3. The relationship between people and society

volunteerism: are people free to create social institutions and economic systems as they prefer, that is, society is the collective creation of individuals, or...

social determinism: are people the end products of strong social forces that have a trajectory of their own, molding individuals to their needs or functions?

individualism/collectivism: are people basically individuals out for personal gain, constrained by the power of society, or are they basically social beings distracted by their personal needs?

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4. The universality and historical stability of knowledge gained

relativism: are universal laws of human behavior that are valid across cultures, times, and genders impossible? Must all generalizations about humans be limited to times and places?

indigenous psychology: can their be one psychology that applies to all humans, or must their be different sciences of psychology for each culture?

5. The relationship of the scientist to the subject of study

values biases: are the values held by social scientists an impediment to their research, always biasing them in ways they may not be aware of? Do the value biases of the researcher make scientific psychology impossible?

shared subjectivity: can the scientist ever truly understand the point of view of the subject/native?

6. The political relevance and uses of the knowledge gained

science and ideology: is social science an ideology reflecting or imposed by a particular social class or culture? Are the findings of social science and psychology used to maintain the privilege of any group of people?

practical applications: can scientific psychology be used to understand and solve real-world social issues and prob-lems?

7. The nature of domestic and international political relationships and political economy

individual rights: shall the individual’s rights be paramount, or should they be secondary to the needs of the com-munity?

form of democracy: are the masses sufficiently wise and informed to directly rule a nation, or must it be ruled by elected and appointed officials (or through nondemocratic methods)?

international relations: can the relations among nations be guided by international law and moral principles toward an optimistic hope of peaceful and equitable world commu-nity; or is power and violence the rule among nations in a pessimistic world system in which each nation must be expected to extract as much as resource as possible for its citizens, with no regard for the well-being of others?

social darwinism: do the best and brightest naturally rise to the top of society, and is this process a proper basis for domestic political decisions?

social class: is the elimination of social class differences pos-sible? Desireable?

Input vs. output equality: shall the goal of equality among citizens be applied at the input side (equal opportunity, etc.) or at the output side (equal outcomes)?

philosophy of science, some philosophers argue that no true universe exists; the universe is simply what we think it is. From this perspective, natural science is a social construction, an artificial edifice created by sci-entists through social and political processes. Needless to say, this interesting perspective is not the majority opinion.

“Realists” in the philosophy of science hold that there is indeed a real world, and that it is up to scientists to discover it. The Realists present a compelling meta-phor to illustrate this idea: think of all of the universe as represented in an enormous book, a volume that contains all the truth that is out there to be found. Scientific research allows us to turn the pages of the book, one at a time. As we learn one more truth, a page is turned. All of these truths already exist in nature, we must simply keep turning the pages. Some pages are more easily turned than others, and some pages receive greater attention due to the many soci-etal influences on the direction and resources of the sciences.

In social science and psychology, the Realist position is not quite so obvious, as discussed in a later section.

Humans Can Know This World

Implicit in the Realist approach is the assertion that the universe is knowable; the pages of the big book can be turned. Can humans in fact turn all these pages? The Realist approach does not assume that we humans are the ones who will turn all the pages, but they are opti-mistic that with sufficient Newtons, Darwins, Einsteins, time, money, and favorable political conditions, we’ll do well. Social and behavioral scientists evidence the same optimism, although their tasks are more difficult.

The Events of the World are Fully Determined

The Physics Model assumes a determined universe: everything has a cause, and every event has an effect (albeit sometimes minor). Fully understanding these causes and effects is exceedingly difficult, and some-times specific predictions are practically impossible, leaving us with probabilistic predictions: there is a 75% chance that cause A will produce a specific effect, etc. In the physical universe, the components do not make choices and there is no volition. If subatomic particles could make choices, physics would be rather different.

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The World Can Only Be Known Through Empirical Research

The centrality of empiricism to science was outlined in the chapter Psychology is a Science. Scientists also accept the importance of rational analysis–the application of logical consideration to the information at hand–but the source of this informa-tion is in the world, not in the mind.

Psychologists are trained in graduate school to view the collection of data–empiri-cism–as their greatest obligation as scientists. You will get a flavor of this mandate in this course, but the full treatment awaits your matriculation in a doctoral-level research program.

Humans are a Natural Phenomenon to Which a Determinist Universe Applies

It is at this point where the Physics Model becomes difficult for social and behav-ioral science. The classical view in psychology has been “monist”—mind and body are one in the same phenomenon. Psychological research assumes that psycho-logical phenomena of all kinds are fully determined and that humans do not make choices in a trully free manner. There is no free will, but only the illusion of free will. However, this determinist view of the person is so completely at odds with our subjective experience as living people, and with the fundamental beliefs of many religions, that it has snarled behavioral science since the beginning.

In social science and in social psychology, August Comte’s famous 19th Century question has been at the heart of an ongoing conflict that rages through psychol-ogy, sociology, and other social science departments:

How can the person be both the cause and the consequence of society?

Comte is pointing out the problem that, on the one hand, society is made of people and their products. The ideas in people’s minds, their behaviors, skills, psychologies, etc. are the substance of society. In a sense, society is being continually created or recreated by the total of all these people-things all the time. But where did these people-things come from? In a determined uni-verse, they must have been caused by something, such as by the enculturating and socializing processes of societies, in the context of biological factors. So: if society creates these people, how can they create society? More to the point, if society creates its own components (people) how can there ever be social change?

Many religions believe that humans have a soul of some kind, an aspect of the person that comes from outside the physical universe. In many religions, it is eternal and transcends the corporeal (physical) existence of the person in a body. The soul can be a repository of the moral history of the person, and/or it can exert a causal influence on the person’s thoughts and behaviors. Because the soul is connected to or an extension of a non-physical entity (a god) that is outside the physical universe, it takes its holder outside the physical universe as well, and the deterministic universe of the Physics Model no longer applies. By “no longer applies,” I do not mean that nothing the person does is ever determined through natural psychological processes, but rather that the person’s thought and behavior can be so affected. If they can be affected by

How Does Newness Come Into the World?

In The Sa-tanic Verses (1988), the novel that resulted in his being condemned to death by the Ayatolla Khomeni, Salman Rush-die asks this difficult question: “how does newness come into the world”? In a world of pow-erful traditions and traditional social relationships, how does anything different or creative ever take place?

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the soul, then a scientific understanding of the person is fundamentally impossible. By “fundamentally impossible,” I mean that, in the end, we cannot ever achieve a complete natural science understanding of humans; but we might do a pretty good job nonetheless.

In the day-to-day world of psychological research, the problems of free will, deter-minism, and the soul are generally ignored because they are unsolvable. Psycholo-gists themselves cover the widest range of religious orientations, from atheists to deeply religious believers. However, a non-religious assault on the application of the Physics Model to psychology has also been mounted in the last few decades; this challenge is discussed in a later section.

Research Will Build Universal Theories and Models

The key term in this phrase is “universal.” Universalism in psychology is the as-sumption that we can come up with good theories, and eventually laws, that apply to all people in all places and times. Such universal theories must of course in-clude components that account for places and times to the extent that they affect psychology. Universal theories assume a universal basis for human psychology, that is, that at some basic level all people are the same. This level is not just biologi-cal, but also psychological in that the very basic psychological processes and the processes of psychological development are the same in all people. People in dif-ferent societies and of different ethnic groups grow to have different psychological characteristics due to the interaction of biological and environmental influences, most notably cultural practices. Nonetheless, they are the same down deep.

The opposite of universalism is relativism. Relativism takes several forms, but the core idea is that people’s basic psychological processes vary over times and places. Culture enters the person at a very early point and shapes basic processes. In other words, whereas universalism would say, “Chinese use the same cognitive processes as Americans to think different thoughts,” relativist would say, “Chinese use different processes and think different thoughts.” Indigenous psycholo-gists (covered in a later section) are usually relativists.

The Physics Model has no place for relativism! Chemistry is chemistry; biol-ogy is biology; the same processes work now as they did in the Beginning, amen.

All Theories are Tentative, Subject to Additional Research

Theories are logically coherent, testable conceptions of how some part of nature works. Laws are proven theories. Social and behavioral science have a lot of theories but few laws. Natural science, however, has more laws, but the interesting work is still at the theoretical level. Until a theory becomes a law (and even afterwards), it is always a tentative, unproven conception that must be subjected to empirical research.

In 1900, Newton’s physics seemed like a sure thing and was presented as the laws that you learned in High School. A few decades later, Newtonian phys-ics had been shown to be “merely” a special case of Einstein’s Relativity theories (no relationship to relativism). Einstein’s theories are generally considered to have

“The good God does not play dice with the universe”

Albert Einstein disliked the probabilistic nature of Quan-tum Theory and made this famous statement in 1927. Subsequent research proved Einstein wrong (although Hawking recently did suggest one early throwing of the dice in the evolution of the uni-verse). Einstein later regretted having made this statement.

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been way ahead of their time, but as early as the 1920s Neils Bohr’s Quantum Theory presented still another (although not fully competing) view of the universe. While modern experimental physics has corroborated Einstein’s theories, theoriz-ing and research in physics by people such as the brilliant Stephen Hawking contin-ues to push the edge forward and we must assume, almost as a matter of principle, that Einstein’s theories are not the final word.

Final Theories or “Laws” are Attainable

This last tenet of the Physics Model is essentially an expression of the assumption that we will keep turning the pages of the big book of the universe, and as a result we will uncover more and more laws of the universe. For psychology, this is a problem because we don’t always appear to be turning the pages particularly fast. On the one hand, we perform a massive amount of rigorous, high quality research that gives us a better and better understanding of psychological phenomena; but on the other, we have failed to achieve a paradigm that explains these phenom-ena in a unified, consensually accepted, elegant manner (although some schools in psychology do think they’ve accomplished this). In other words, we don’t have a “grand theory” of the stature of those in the natural sciences.

Psychologists who work in the philosophy of science have responded to this problem in several ways. At the most optimistic side, they point out that our disci-pline is still very young and in a few hundred years we’ll be at the same point that natural sciences are at now. Or, perhaps we just need a brilliant individual who can penetrate the hailstorm of incoming research findings and see the essential un-derlying theoretical truth that explains human psychology. This is the “waiting for Newton” school of thought.

Another possibility is that psychology can (and maybe is) a paradigmatic science, but our version or “texture” of the paradigm is simply different than that of natu-ral science and we should not hold ourselves to such a high ideal. Our subject matter is highly variable, and probabilistic approaches are the best (and perhaps only) way to understand the subject. In this vague conception, we never expect to have the predictive power of physics, and we accept the idea that our theories will be weaker and smaller in their scopes.

At the most pessimistic end of this debate, several schools of thought argue that humans cannot be studied from a natural science perspective. Humans are funda-mentally different creatures and the Physics Model does not apply to them, both in terms of what can be discovered and the methods by which we should conduct research. This assumption is not based on religious conviction or concerns about the presence of a soul, but rather views humans as “transcendent” of nature, a special being that has developed (somehow) a free, creative, inventing, undeter-mined mind. (More on this, later.)

Norms of Science

Science, like all human activities, operates on a set of norms. These norms indicate appropriate beliefs and behavior for scientists. Two of the central norms, realism and universalism, were discussed previously.

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Communism

Wait!, don’t phone up Achcroft to report this book as a threat to national security. In this context communism is not a political or economic system. The norm of communism is simply that scientific knowledge should be shared. The knowledge of science is the property of the world, not of the scientist, and new findings must be disseminated. Actual practice falls pretty far from this norm. Scientists who work for private organizations must turn their findings over to their employers and their publication rights are negotiated. Nations guard scientific findings that are related to their national security. Individual scientists occasionally hide their findings from their colleagues until they are published in order to maintain a lead in their fields.

Disinteredness

An ideal of normative science is that science is value-free. The values and biases of the scientist can not and should not interfere with rational judgment, choice of research topics, evaluations of theories, and so on. In natural science, personal values and biases affect science when scientists hold on to pet theories or refuse to accept theories for irrational reasons.

Social and behavioral scientists can be thought of as living inside the subject matter of their research, so values and biases are difficult to avoid. Psychologists choose research topics that have personal mean-ings for themselves and cannot be expected to work in these research areas in a value-free manner. The way in which the research is conceptualized and conducted is also subject to values and biases that come from living in a culture, community, social class, religion, sexual orientation, generation, and more. Psychologists respond to this problem by trying to follow the principles of scientific methodology presented in this book and by submitting their results for examination by other experts in the field, a process called “peer review.” Nonetheless, the point is often made that American psy-chology suffers from values biases such as individualism, middle class orientation, liberalism, anti-religiosity, secularism, etc. Some of these charges are misplaced but others are not.

Organized Skepticism

The scientific community, through peer review, replication, and skepti-cism, will weed out bad ideas and promote good ones. The peer review process is designed to facilitate this goal. (See sidebar.) Other ways the scientific community regulates its production of knowledge include determining who receives research grants (mainly through a different kind of peer review), who can deliver papers at major scien-

Peer Review - The Great Mandala

1. Spend a few years planning, conducting, analyzing, and writing up some research.

2. Send the paper (in APA format) to a journal editor.

3. The editor decides if it’s not too terrible, then sends it to three people who seem to be doing similar research for their comments.

4. Hopefully, at least two of the three reviewers agree on the quality of the paper.

5. The editor makes a decision:

a. Accept as is (this never happens)

b. Accept with revisions as suggested by the reviewers

c. Reject but give the author the chance to rewrite the article and go back to step #2.

d. Reject outright

6. The author rants and rails against peer review (except in outcome a) then either tries again or becomes an administrator.

DNA for free:www.ornl.gov/hgmis

DNA for bucks:www.celera.com

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Sagan On Aliens

“It would be an absolutely transform-ing event in human history [to discover aliens]. But, the stakes are so high on whether it’s true or false, that we must demand the more rigorous standards of evi-dence. Precisely because it’s so exciting. That’s the circumstance in which our hopes may domi-nate our skeptical scrutiny of the data. ... So, a kind of skepti-cism is routinely applied to the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence by its most fervent proponents. ...”

Public Broadcasting Service, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/ Jan. 2003

tific conferences, who gets tenure and promotion, and who is elected to preside over scientific organizations.

This system is far from perfect, to be sure, but in the long run it keeps science running along the right track. The main barrier to the introduction of new ideas in a science is the conservativeness of scientists: they like new ideas in principle, but in fact they are always very skeptical about any particular new idea. This is exactly how the system is supposed to work. New ideas must pass a higher bar to entry than research that simply hashes over old ideas. Radical new ideas must pass an even higher bar. In the words of Carl Sagan, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” (Sagan was referring to UFOs.) In geology, one of the most radical ideas of the 20th Century was the concept of plate tectonics (drifting sections of the earth’s crust produce moving continents, mountains, earthquakes, etc.). Geologists fought over this seemingly impossible process for years before it became established truth. (The idea was first advanced in 1912 but not accepted until the 1960s!)

Psychology’s version of UFOs would probably be parapsychology (telekinesis, telepathy, precognition, etc.), and you shouldn’t expect to see acceptance of this idea until truly extraordinary proof is presented. The reluctance of geolo-gists to embrace plate tectonics was due to their inability to find a mechanism that would explain the movement of massive structures. The same inability to identify a process hampers the acceptance of parapsychology. (It is also prob-lematic that the effects don’t hold up in good research.) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Social Constructionism, Relativism, and Postmodernism

The main competition to a Physics Model approach to science in psychology as well as in social science is a set of ideas sometimes referred to collectively as social constructionism. Social constructionism is in turn associated with a large, amorphous movement in social science and the humanities known as postmodernism.

The central ideas of social constructionism are greatly at odds with the Physics Model, which is referred to pejoratively by members of this move-ment as “positivism” (a partly incorrect use of this term).

Social constructionists (SCs) object to the passive nature of the subject in the Physics Model. The “subject” means the person being studied, and generally all humans. A passive subject is driven by strong determinist forces. On the other hand, the active subject has free fill and approaches the world in a proactive fashion, making choices and creatively changing his or her own life and the surrounding society.

The Realist basis of the Physics Model is rejected by SC; instead the world is “phenomenal,” that is, it only exists to the extent and in the manner in which it is perceived by people. But since all people see things differently, the “real world” is not a constant at all.

SCs reject universalism. They believe that culture (including gender, class, and so on) makes an “early entry” into the person so that people are fundamentally

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different psychologically across cultures. This difference is so great that there is no basis for comparisons across cultures. Comparisons always start with some assumption of similarity, but without this anchor comparisons cannot be made. Culture and the person are often said to be “mutually constitutive,” that is, they create each other, continuously (this is the SC answer to Comte’s question).

The SC approach to research is similar in some ways to the idiographic approach favored by humanists in psychology. Nomothetic research compares people to each other on dimensions (personality, intelligence, etc.) on which they are as-sumed to vary in a meaningful way. For example, it assumes that the dimension “intelligence” applies equally well to all people. A person with a 120 IQ has more of something than a person with a 110 IQ, and this “something” is the same thing (in different amounts) for these two people. Ideographic research, on the other hand, holds that people are unique and can’t be compared to each other on dimensions. The goal of the researcher is to un-derstand the uniqueness of each individual. SomeSCs charge that positivists replace the person with variables (dimensions).

Although some SC researchers use nomothetic concepts (comparing people on constructs that mean the same thing to all), they favor a qualitative re-search methodology. Quantitative research represents concepts as numbers by measuring them (e.g., IQ=125), whereas qualitative research uses many different methods to describe the subject using language. For example, a qualita-tive approach to understanding the effects of TV on children’s aggression would involve observing children, interviewing them, analyzing the implicit meanings of the TV shows they watch, analyzing the place of TV in modern society, and so on. A quantitative approach would include performing experiments, measuring violent behavior, and assessing personality using tests.

The Physics Model assumes that there is a real truth to be found, it is universal, and it is logically exclusive; for example, both a theory and its opposite cannot both be true. Some SCs believe that a single truth cannot be found and that there are actually many truths. What is true for me does not have to be true for you; what is true for Americans does not have to be true for Chinese. Truth is a matter of personal taste. Mainstream scientists find this position absurd:

“It cannot be a matter of taste whether you believe or do not believe that pollution is a menace, that the underdeveloped countries are getting poorer, that the multinationals are promoting a nuclear arms race, that war is instinctual, that women and blacks are inferior, or that the green revolution is a hoax. Let Feyerabend [a radical SC] stand before the ovens of Dachau or the ditch at Mylai and say that our scientific understanding of sociocultural systems is ultimately nothing but an ‘aesthetic judgment’.” (Harris, 1979, p. 23)

Many SCs view the Physics Model as the product of white male middle class western European ideology (transplanted to North America). As such, it is seen as biased toward supporting the ideology and agendas of its creators to the

The ovens of Dachau. Dachau is a very pretty town on the bus route from Munich. When I was there in 2000, children played soccer on a field next to the camp. There was a large McDonalds.

Confused yet?

Question: What’s the difference between the Mafia and a Social Constructionist?

Answer: The Social Construc-tionist makes you an offer you can’t understand.

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detriment of others: women, non-whites, non-Europeans, the working class, etc. You may ask, “what about value-free research, then?” The answer is that social constructionists do not believe that research can ever be value-free, but instead see all research as either explicitly or implicitly (or unconsciously) value-laden. To put this in concrete terms, the feminist research approach claims that research is biased in favor of male values and goals and perpetuates male power. A very simi-lar argument is made on behalf of the African-American or Afrocentric research approach. To some this claim sounds outrageous, but in fact it is not without merit (the argument is complex). In mainstream research, we would say that the answer lies in being even more scrupulous about acting in accordance with our value-free norm, in considering cultural differences, by including everybody in developing research programs, and through examining our own attitudes and values. Social constructionists reply that we are hopeless: the positivist research model cannot be reformed because its assumptions or starting points (read: metatheory) are faulty. Mainstream scientists respond along the lines of “if science is but art, then it is not very pretty art and we should all give it up and go study sculpture.” And the debate continues.

Indigenous Psychology

The center of world psychology is in America. American psychology is larger and wealthier than any other psychology: it has the most research labs, the best research funding, the best journals, and it is conducted in the language of inter-national science, English. Many of the prominent psychologists in non-Western nations were educated in American or European universities prior to returning to their home countries. These “return-ing Ph.D.s” brought American psychology back with them, the result of which was the dissemination of American psychological theory and method everywhere except in the former Commu-nist bloc. However, as psychology in some non-Western nations has reached a critical mass in number of psychologists, organiza-tion, and resources, psychologists in these places have begun to question their acceptance of Western psychology. Indigenous psychologies have emerged, particularly in India and Asia.

Some of the common features of these indigenous psychologies include the desire for a psychology “by, from, about and for” the local culture. Local psychologists are urged to use local cultural sources to study the behavior of people in their local contexts using methods appropriate to this task. Above all, indigenous psychologists believe that their work must be relevant to local cultural patterns and local people’s concerns. Indigenous psychology movements are not all the same, but some common concerns they share are:

(1) a universal psychology might not be possible; instead, perhaps each culture must have its own psychology;

(2) the mainstream scientific way of knowing that came out of the West (the Phys-ics Model) may not be appropriate for research on non-Western people, or for understanding the effect of culture on their psychological processes;

(3) the choice of research topics must emerge from the local needs of the popula-

Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. This beautiful, well-funded think tank near Taibei, Taiwan is the center of indigenous psychology in the country.

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tion, not from trends coming out of the West;

(4) perhaps indigenous psychologists must rebuild their psychology from the ground up, founded on indigenous philosophical and cultural traditions rather than the Greek base of Western psychology.

To Western psychologists who follow the Physics Model, the idea of truly indig-enous psychologies violates several of their basic tenets and makes no sense. The goal of localizing psychology to meet the needs of local people is seen as impor-tant and laudatory; but rejecting scientific methods and universalism is viewed as essentially nonscientific. The indigenous psychologists are correct in their assess-ment of the hegemony of Western, especially American, psychology, however, and of the irrelevance of American psychology for their cultural values, local concerns, and available resources.

The bottom line issue concerning indigenous psychology is the validity of universal psychology: can we have one at all? Are people in different cultures really that dif-ferent?

Sociology of Science

The philosophy science is a branch of philosophy that considers what science can know and how it can know. Sociologist study what scientists actually do. The Physics Model is essentially a philosophical statement but scientists don’t neces-sarily follow these rules—or even know them. Sociology of Science (SoS) looks at what’s really going on in science. Robert Merton is usually credited with founding this branch of sociology in the 1950s and Thomas Kuhn with invigorating it in the 1970s. In recent years, this field has sometimes been called Social Studies of Sci-ence. A smaller Psychology of Science has also emerged.

The basic idea of the Sociology of Science is that the practice of a science is influ-enced by “social factors.” In the “turning the pages of the book” metaphor intro-duced previously, scientists are assumed to be turning the pages in more or less the right direction most of the time, but social factors affect how fast the pages are turned, which wrong paths are followed, who turns the pages, and who gets the credit. In other words, science marches on, but not in a social vacuum. Some of the social factors that affect science include:

Societal and economic needs. Scientists get accused of living in an “ivory tower” in isolation from the real world, but in fact the real world is always influencing their work. The needs of societies translate to actual research through two processes: research grant funding and comparative evaluation of research projects. In the United States, Congress sets guidelines for federal funding that federal institutions (see below) translate into allocation of funds. These political decisions reflect the needs of the society and other factors, as discussed in the Values section. Corpo-rations fund a great deal of research, some of which is theoretical science while the majority is applied science or technology development. They make relatively rational, market-driven decisions about where to throw their money. Consider what your life would be like if one of your parents held the patent for Teflon®.

Institutions. Science is rarely performed by lone geniuses who don’t sleep (e.g., Thomas Edison). Organizations that support a particular type of science through

Robert K. Merton

Read this. The title of this issue of the journal Indigenous Psychological Research is “The development of indigenous psychology (Bentu Xinlixue de Kaizhan).” Indigenous psycholo-gists prefer to publish in their own languages, not in English.

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grant funding or providing a place to work make a substantial difference in the progress of a science. The United States is a tremendously wealthy nation and has developed many institutions for supporting the sciences: The National Sci-ence Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the American Cancer Foundation, and many many more. The author complains: where is the “Institute for Cultural Psychology?”

Values. Although the proscribed norm is that science shall be value free, in fact the values of societies and of individuals influence science tremendously. This influence can have two effects: certain topics are studied at the expense of others; and the science itself is incomplete or incorrectly interpreted. We see the effect of values on research topics very clearly right now in the debate over research using stem cells and fetal tissue. Religious and ethical values, mediated by laws imposed by governments, limit and guide what types of medical research may be performed. These values bump into competing values for unfettered science, curing diseases, and making profits on newly discovered medical procedures.

Individual values also influence choice of research topics, especially in psychology where the subject matter is so deeply embedded in the researchers’ own societies. Psychologists often study what’s important to them personally as individuals or as members of social groups in society. The most easily seen examples of this effect are that a preponderance of the research performed on gender and gender roles is done by women; on ethnic minorities by ethnic minority psychologists; on im-migrants by immigrants. There is nothing wrong with this situation, but it begs the obvious, important question: if psychology were still composed of just white males, who would be looking at these issues?

Scientists’ values affect how they view their own data. Here I am not referring so much to the way they evaluate competing theories (although this also happens) but rather to the way they interpret their research findings and plan additional research in accordance with their values and metatheories. Social psychology presents a good example. The great majority of social psychologists are politically liberal. We chose social psychology because we wanted to do research that would benefit both individuals and society. This liberalism affects our choice of research topics and it also influences the approach we take to these topics. We study ag-gression and violence from the perspective that aggression is bad; helping from the perspective that it is good; prejudice from a very anti-prejudice position; relation-ships from a morally-neutral position involving premarital sex.

A value bias that shapes all of psychology is its middle class orientation. By definition, everyone working in academia with a doctoral degree is middle or upper-middle class (ignoring our poor salaries for the moment), regardless of the class backgrounds of our parents. As a result, without actually saying so up front, psychology favors the personality traits and behaviors of middle class people over those of working class people. The vast research base of psychology comes from middle class, mainly white, American college sophomores, making it easy to miss the concerns of other groups. The science that comes out of this value-biased re-search may be very good, but it should be examined for completeness: what is not being studied? what perspective is being ignored? whose concerns are not being met? who comes off looking good, or bad?

Historical events. Specific events in the history of nations turn the directions of

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sciences. When a nation must fight a war, science works in support of the war effort wherever it can; when it has a big problem involving a particular disease (like AIDS), it turns some research efforts in that direction; when hundreds of thou-sands of soldiers return from a war shell-shocked (now termed PTSD–Post-trau-matic Stress Disorder), clinical psychology is born. (This happened following World War II.)

Careers

When you complete your undergraduate Psychology degree, especially if you also finish graduate school, you’ll embark on a career in this or another field. A career is a life-long progression of closely related activities that takes place in a commu-nity of others who are engaged in similar activities. It is not the same as a job: you quit a job but you leave a career. In a job you work for an organization, but in a career you also work for yourself, and you acquire a reputation and a status within the community of peers that is carried from job to job. Your reputation and status are very important, particularly in highly professional careers such as scientist or medical doctor.

Scientists are very concerned about the progress of their careers, and in academia they pass through a series of gates as they progress: getting tenure and advanc-ing in rank; publishing research papers and becoming journal editors; getting a first position and moving on to more prestigious ones; winning awards; receiving research grants; training doctoral students who themselves are successful; moving into administrative positions; getting buried in the university graveyard.

All of these signs of career progress are achieved through competition with peers, one way or another. Scientists are highly competitive and this trait is revealed in very long working hours, careful career planning to achieve maximum results, and also, not incidentally, scientific progress. Career planning involves exploiting “niches” in the field where good work can be performed, funding is really available, progress can be made, and the career can go forward. Some of the social factors discussed in the previous section provide these niches, so one could think of this careerism as the force in the system and the social factors as the direction (that makes a vector, remem-ber?) These vectors add up to the direction that science goes in and how fast it moves. In other words, when we say “science marches on,” they are the ones who are walking. Sociology of science is interested in which way they go.

Important Advice

If you are at a bar and you have a choice between talking to a shoe salesman and a scientist, pick the salesman—he will have something interesting to say that you can make sense of. Serious scientists don’t make small talk well and they take notes while others talk. The stereotype that they don’t bathe is false.