Abstract
As Theory & Psychology has reached its 30th anniversary I reflect on the state of the discipline and the state of theory. I argue that we need good theory (in its broadest sense) more than ever, not only because of its role in psychology’s critical wing but also because of the requirement to continually regenerate theory if it is to be useful and responsive to lives as lived. Theory in a broad sense continues to grapple with questions of ways of being that are grounded in historical and material realities. This is especially true for new indigenous and postcolonial psychologies and their attempt to reconfigure the science of psychology.
About five weeks into my self-isolation at home due to the coronavirus pandemic that began in March of 2020, I had a fantasy. It occurred to me that almost all psychological research had come to a full stop, certainly all research involving human participants, save for that being done online. So, my fantasy went, perhaps psychologists would take this as an opportune moment to reconsider their entire discipline. Everywhere groups of psychologists would ask, what questions does this discipline ultimately answer? Whom does it serve? What would happen if there were never answers to the questions we normally pose? Consider this a wish for a contagion of disciplinary self-reflection. 1
How often in a career can you engage, however briefly, in a full stop and step off the treadmill of seeking research funding, conducting research, and the endless push for publications, not to mention all the ancillary work that goes with it (teaching classes, training graduate students, hiring research assistants, buying equipment, traveling to conferences, etc.). Stopping, and of course it will be momentary, would have allowed us to ask just what the value is of much of our research activities. And by value I mean broadly not only its pragmatic utility but also its epistemic foundations. For anyone who has visited the psychology journal literature of say, 10 or 20 years ago, it can be disconcerting to see that most of that literature is already irrelevant despite having been cutting edge and exciting at one moment. But beyond giving its authors some endorsement for a job, tenure, or promotion it has otherwise slipped into the archives of the discipline (my own work included). On top of that we have gone through, or are still in, take your pick, a replicability crisis. Although we share this crisis with other sciences, it has consistently appeared that the crisis has hit psychology the hardest of all disciplines. Confidence in our research findings is at an all-time low. And here I am not even considering outright fraud such as that recently perpetrated by Diederik Stapel.
And while I was at it, I also fantasized that all the methodologists stopped and asked themselves just what methodologies are meant to accomplish. Perhaps they will consider that they are not only tools to be bandied about wherever someone picks out a problem, euphemistically called a “research question.” Indeed, when we are thinking about just what psychology should accomplish perhaps we can begin with problems of real consequence, as the late Dan Robinson would remind us from time to time. And instead of having the tail wag the dog, ask what methodologies might be appropriate to the question at hand.
But even this is not the deeper problem besetting the discipline. For years many scholars, observers, and critics have noted the ingrained epistemological and ontological questions bedeviling psychology. 2 These concerns include the degree to which we can know what psychologists claim to know and how they have come to know what they claim to know as well as the place of this knowledge in aiding and abetting certain forms of life. Without necessarily wanting to cite former United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld here, what we have are known-knowns as well as known-unknowns. What we cannot grasp are the unknown-unknowns. 3 We do not have sufficient knowledge or sufficient confidence in our knowledge-generating methods to know if they are actually successful. A great deal of our history suggests they are not. We also do not know if we have conceptualized our objects of investigation sufficiently soundly to even begin serious investigations. This is our more troubling source of insecurity.
But let’s dismiss my fantasy out of hand. It is fairly certain that there is no sense in which the coronavirus crisis of 2020 (and beyond) will lead to a reconsideration of the discipline or its problems. If anything, serious global or national crises have typically led many academics, and particularly psychologists, to come to the aid of the nation/people/victims and whoever might benefit from their services. We have seen this turn by psychologists in times of war and at times of other major crises such as the attack on New York in 2001, now generally referred to as 9/11. Typically this occurs in the absence of any secure knowledge of the current crisis—witness the vast outpouring of expertise after 9/11 and of what the event purportedly meant, “psychologically.” And witness the complicity of the American Psychological Association in upholding torture and modifying its code of ethics to make “participation in interrogations” possible by simply redefining what constitutes “participation” (see Hoffman et al., 2015). And witness the rush to expertise following the onset of the current coronavirus pandemic; everything from explaining the hoarding of toilet paper to common sense advice on children’s extensive use of social media during the crisis can be found in multiple places online, expertly provided by psychologists. It is opinion, carefully hedged and provided by a well-meaning professional undoubtedly, but opinion nonetheless. And it expresses psychologists’ need to be relevant in the obvious absence of any foundations for that relevance.
Let’s also be clear, people do need help in disasters/pandemics. They are afraid, anxious, depressed, and suffer from psychological distress. So I do not mean to deny or denigrate the very real needs of people and the fact that psychologists do provide aid to individuals in the form of counseling, psychotherapy, and consulting. But what I do question is the rush to expertise that characterizes psychologists’ psychological pronouncements. This expertise is often based on the most flimsy of foundations, characterized in simple terms and typically common sense disguised as psychological science. More important, in disguising itself as expertise it ignores the historical realities, material conditions, and vagaries of human life. It misses (often deliberately) the depth of people’s experience in favor of simple pronouncements.
Theory redux
Thinking through the problems of the discipline is one facet of theory. The term “theory” is of course so broad and so widely used to make it almost useless in determining what one actually “does” to create theory. As Robert Merton (1949/1968) noted, the word theory threatens to become meaningless. Because its referents are so diverse—including everything from minor working hypotheses, through comprehensive but vague unordered speculations, to axiomatic systems of thought—use of the word often obscures rather than creates understanding. (p. 39)
And this was well before those movements characterized as “postmodernist” and “poststructuralist” of the 1980s and 1990s, 4 which elevated high theory above other academic pursuits. Meanwhile, however, psychology has more or less maintained a kind of theorizing that still characterizes the majority of its human research areas. As a strategy for generating new theory, psychologists have clung to the tried and true; functionalist claims built upon inferential statistics without any commitment to ontological entities. Save for its new attachment to the neurosciences it has been business as usual for psychologists.
But perhaps, one might object, academics do the best they can under the circumstances provided by their generation, the state of science, and the possibilities provided by the context of their research. One would expect nothing less. I believe, however, that this is a red herring. Those who practice a discipline build the constraints of that discipline. Any institution that hires a psychologist is given over to the outlines of the discipline as determined by the majority of those engaged in its research, practice, and teaching, particularly those at its most vaunted institutions. It is supposed to be a kind of majority rule, or a faux democracy if you like, based on the ways in which science is practiced, that is, by a free and open exchange of knowledge production, tools, and outcomes. 5 All of which are governed by institutional priorities. Among the latter are not only institutions of higher learning but also all those institutions that govern the discipline itself: statutes in a wide range of jurisdictions that govern practice, learned societies that govern standards, publishers that determine journal type and style, and so on. Hence the constraints on any discipline are considerable, as surely any sociologist of the professions can explicate. A successful research program must address itself to these constraints if it is going to find an audience.
I grant all of this. The danger with our kind of enterprise is that it is self-perpetuating. Once established it is difficult to dislodge and contains within it sufficient resources to convince a populace that its goods are worthy of further development still since, like all sciences, these goods require time and research to come to fruition. You wouldn’t want to cut funding for biochemistry after all, given all it has accomplished. Why do so for psychology? And psychology does produce results, libraries full of journals and books testify to this. Yet somehow the discipline does not cohere, despite the long attachment to a kind of ideal about physics once expressed so well by Max Planck who, when giving a lecture at Columbia University, said in 1909 that the goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system of theoretical physics, in fact the unity of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures. (as cited in Heilbron, 1986, p. 51)
This particular view of science still feeds upon the imaginations of psychologists even as most have long learned and acknowledge, at least in principle, that it is an outdated and largely false view of progress in science.
What I am not arguing for, however, is the dismantling of psychology—it would be foolish to do so and would merely be replaced by something similar under a different name. Psychology is woven into the very fabric of the contemporary world. As an accepted authority on subjectivities and the constituent problems of “mind,” it functions as a vehicle for self-understanding and self-explanation as well as forms of social controls that are rarely seen but often used. That is, one of the many places that psychology is extremely powerful in contemporary postindustrial life is as its function to both make visible and hide forms of exploitation and oppression by providing a language of individualism, neuroscience, internal functions, and other such processes that construe and reframe the capacity to see and experience what is at hand. In this way psychology is a master at creating disguises. It is not false, but not entirely true either. It fudges at the edges, practices at creating a universal language by applying to everyone what is true of no one. And it proposes a form of being that may be anathema to life as lived. I am reminded here of the recent article by Martínez-Guzmán and Lara (2019) on what they call the “positive psychology regime of happiness” (p. 336).
It is one reason theory remains an important feature of the discipline. Theory is the site of both the loyal and the more radical opposition, 6 etching out alternative features of subjectivity, creating means for expressing dissent, but also trying to understand the more difficult features of our current circumstances. These include, but are not limited to, the deeply embedded nature of psychology in our ways of being, its role in constituting consent and quietism, its location in colonial and majority world structures, its history of racism, misogyny, and classism, its place in the networks of acquiescence with globalization and the ever-problematic tension between change and the view that the way the world is must be the way it has to be. These are not questions open to experiments or simple research studies for our methods are often designed to blind us to these broader questions. It is a psychology grounded in history and the material circumstances of life. They ask for a deeper analysis of the place of psychology in life while, at the same time, we must rely on psychology to occasionally help us or help others understand their private torments. For our private torments are not removed from our public stages, indeed, they function upon them as required features of the life of the postindustrial world. And the very language of psychology that masks intent is also the language we occasionally draw on to help us. Such is psychology’s paradox.
In addition to its ambivalent language, the question of the empirical adequacy of psychology’s research remains contested territory. For empirical adequacy is also a topic requiring serious theoretical inquiry. And I don’t mean only for those interested in statistical or methodological matters. To make a knowledge claim on the basis of some set of research results is to engage in a complex set of moves the structure of which is a kind of Wittgensteinian language game. Psychology codes in multiple ways what we take to be optimal human being, that is, the kinds of persons we aspire to be through the investigation of our present.
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Whether that be an investigation of, say, “prosocial behavior” or “executive function,” the very choice of investigatory tools is not neutral. Our tools are themselves extensions of the kinds of claims we seek to make and the kind of psychology we wish to grow. Debates in psychology often hinge on this very notion: we disagree because the tools we use to make knowledge claims lead us in very different directions. Think only of the debates concerning empirically validated therapies. They are not only the outcomes of detailed investigations but also serve as gatekeepers to the profession of psychotherapy. The tools used to validate therapies are hardly neutral. Dan Robinson said on the pages of this journal some years ago that, It is in the nature of the interplay between ontology and epistemology that, lacking a settled a[nd] defensible ontology, there is no rational basis on which to choose a mode of inquiry. In order to establish what there is it is necessary to have the right sort of method, but then the right sort of method already presupposes at least a provisional answer to the question of what there is. (2007, p. 193)
It is at this juncture that the press for indigenous psychologies is so important. For what other peoples have demanded is their right to define the “what there is” for themselves and not to have it defined for them. Indigenous psychologies are complex and multifaceted and do not adhere to any single scheme of a “science” or a “social science.” It will mean eventually recasting what we mean by a science of psychology. It also means, in the words of Danilo Guimarães (2020), that we engage in epistemological and ethical reflections on the relationships between us as educated professionals and those whom we wish to assist in their knowing. Furthermore it calls for resistance to the appropriation of those traditions to a jejune psychology made in the mold of a highly restrictive empirical and postpositivist science (Ellis & Stam, 2015).
The long-term dominance of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples of participants as the source of psychological knowledge requires us to ask just what kind of psychology we now have (Henrich et al., 2010). The importance of qualitative studies that shed light on the experience of others rather than shoehorning their lives into simple psychological categories is one place to begin. But we also need to organize and think through new ways of doing psychology and hence the importance of theory. That also means continually reevaluating the nature of science as it is expressed and formulated in psychology.
That Theory & Psychology continues to thrive is one hopeful sign that the very diversity of psychology contains within it the seeds of change. As it reaches the culmination of its 30th year of publication, it is still a surprising and vital source of original material, remarkably wide-ranging while not devoted to a single cause or championing some single-purpose project. In this it remains a standard bearer for the continuous development of theoretical strategies that could reveal to us the ongoing need to conceptualize and reconceptualize over and over again the most fundamental problems of the discipline. For the fact that we have not yet found ourselves able to be unambiguous on most questions in psychology should be abundantly clear by now, despite the untold millions of dollars (or pick your currency here) and vast number of human careers devoted to these questions in detailed research studies.
In closing, I am delighted by the successes of Theory & Psychology and the many serious attempts of its authors to give voice to alternative worlds and ways of doing psychology that may yet blossom if they have not done so already. And most of all I am grateful to its editor for carrying on this quest as well as for allowing me the privilege to scribble a few more words after all these years.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
