Article summary of Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology by Meehl - Chapter

What are the twenty difficulties in conducting research in certain areas of psychology?

1. The response-class problem

This difficulty or problem is about that it is difficult to slice up behaviour in measurable units. For example, what is important to getting a degree? Is it sitting an exam, writing a sentence, writing a letter or is the firing of a neuron that is responsible for the movement of the arm and hand important? This problem is already evident in the experiment of the Skinner box and becomes even more problematic when studying human behaviour.

2. Situation-Taxonomy problem

This is kind of the same as the respons-class problem, but then it is applied to stimuli or to situations. For example, every theory of personality defines behaviour as a function of the person and the situation. So, the situation should be defined: is it the whole culture, the region a person lives in, a t town, a house, a room?

3. Unit of Measurement

This is about the questions in rating scales and in psychometrics. This is a problem, because there is often no agreement in whether, for example, an interval or a ratio scale should be used.

4. Individual differences

Individuals differ in their dispositions and even more problematic, in the way their dispositions are shaped and organized. This makes it difficult for researchers to conduct research and compare individuals on the results.

5. Polygenic Heredity

Most of the research done in the soft areas of psychology are things that are influenced by polygenic systems. This means that there are many different influences on for example, introversion. In other words, introversion is probably the result of a confluence of different polygenic contributors such as anxiety, dominance, need for affiliation, etc.

6. Divergent Causality

This difficulty is about that a small event can lead to many different (divergent) outcomes. For example, many students marry other students. But, the way that they get to know these other students vary from individual to individual and it depends on things such as to which classroom they get allocated.

7. Idiographic problem

There are many factors that influence certain things, for example personality. These factors also interact and therefore every individual is quite unique. This is a problem for research, because the research methods should therefore be extremely large and complex. This is the same for the statistical analysis, which also should be sophisticated enough to analyse all the factors and their numerous interactions.

8. Unknown Critical Events

This problem is related to divergent causality and the idiographic understanding. This problem is about that it is hard to know which events in the development of personality have been critical. Sometimes these critical events are unknown to the researchers as well as to the individual. These critical events can also be inner events such as fantasies.

9. Nuisance Variables

For research it is good to sort variables in three classes: variables that we manipulate, variables that we do not manipulate but can control (or keep constant to reduce the influence of them on the results) and variables that are ‘quasirandom’, which means that they only contribute to the measurement error or the standard deviation of a static. But, there are also variables that are not random but that are systematic and that are influenced by other variables. The problem is that it is not always easy to determine the size and the sign of these relationships. One of the biggest of these ‘nuisance variables’ is socioeconomic status, which is very hard to control for, because this variable has a big influence on many aspects of people’s lives.

10. Feedback Loops

In psychology it is known that an individual’s behavior affects the behavior of other person. This fact also makes that conducting research on behavior can be very complex.

11. Autocatalytic Processes

Autocatalysis means that one of the end products leads to catalyzing the process itself. In psychology examples of these processes are depression and anxiety as affects or economic failure as a social impact. It is very difficult to get a clear view of situations in which autocatalytic processes are involved.

12. Random Walk

Sometimes things happen randomly. Then the quantification of this behaviour becomes difficult. For instance, luck is one of the biggest reasons for individual differences. Social scientists seem to neglect this sometimes in their research.

13. Sheer Number of Variables

There are many variables that contribute to a psychological disorder or to a personality trait. Because of this, there are also a lot of nuisance variables and all these variables also lead to idiographic development through divergent causality.

14. The Importance of Cultural Factors

Sometimes researchers forget to include cultural factors that lead to certain disorders or diseases. For example, a physician will treat someone with a stomach ache in the same way, regardless of their social class. This is a problem, because sometimes a problem can be solved or prevented by looking at the cultural factors (like, someone belongs to the lowest class regarding SES and therefore he or she has many deficits in his or her diet which lead to stomach ache).

15. Context-Dependent Stochastotogicals

In Psychology, the term ‘nomological network’ is used to represent the relations between constructs. The constructs are ‘nodes’ which are linked to other constructs through strands. Meehl states that ‘nomological’ in psychology is a synonym for ‘meaning’ and it could even be misleading. He says this, because the relationships are not as strict as suggested by calling it a nomological network. In psychology, instead of strict relationships, there are correlations, tendencies, statistical clusterings, increments of probabilities and stochastic dispositions. The author therefore suggests a “stochastological network”. With this he tries to make clear that the results obtained in psychological experiments are dependent on the context in which the measurements were obtained. Because it is hard to determine what influences what and how big this influence is. So, in soft psychology, the context is very important. But, we do not know the complete list of the contextual influences, the function form of context dependency for the known influences and the numerical values of parameters in those functions and lastly the values of the context variables.

16. Open Concepts

It is often hard to come up with operational definitions for theoretical concepts. Even if researchers come up with operational definitions, these seem to lack theoretical background and technologies to measure them. This means that there are a lot of ‘open concepts’ in psychology, which further complicates research.

17. Intentionality, Purpose and Meaning

Humans think, plan and intend way more than any other species. This makes them stand out compared to other species, but again leads to complexity in researching their behaviour.

18. Rule Governance

People or human beings do not only do things out of inner motivation, they also do things because they think that is what is expected from them. They feel obligated to follow certain rules. In research there is not a clear definition of when a rule can be considered as a rule. So when conducting research, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether one performs some kind of behavior because of real, internal motivation or because he or she is following a certain rule.

19. Uniquely Human Events and Powers

Because many of the research in psychology, such as digestion and reproduction, comes from studies with animals, some things are very difficult to research. For example, Richard M. Elliot stated that the reason for the lack of high quality research on humor is that humans are the only species that laugh. So, because some things are uniquely human, it makes it difficult to conduct research. Except for laughing, other examples that are unique to human are seeking revenge for things that happened years earlier or has discussions on discussions.

20. Ethical Constraints on Research

There are many ethical constraints in research in psychology. For example, it is unethical to let a group of children from as old as 10 years smoke and then compare them to children who did never smoke. Meehle names five noble traditions in psychology that have lead to great insights. In the times of these traditions, the ethical constraints were a lot less than that they are now. The five noble traditions are: descriptive clinical psychiatry, psychometric assessment, behavior genetics, behavior modification and psychodynamics. He states that Freud did not perform any t-test, but that he would choose Freud’s clinical observations over most of the researchers’ t-tests. All these traditions have not focused on statistical significance testing.