RIP #5: A Science of Behavior

(Original posted October 23, 2023)

I know, I know… you’ve all been sitting around, nothing to do, waiting with baited breath for another psychology paper to read. Wait no more! It’s time for another RIP!

As a bit of history, the fields of social and personality psychology existed for quite a while as totally separate subdisciplines in psychology. And, if you’re unaware, there was a catastrophic fallout between these two subdisciplines in the 1960’s and 1970’s — this is now known as the person-versus-situation debate. I won’t get into specifics here — the important “big picture” point is that social psychology absolutely whomped the crap out of personality psychology, claiming that (at best) personality didn’t matter, with many big-deal scholars going so far as to claim that personality itself doesn’t even exist. Personality, they claimed, was just a byproduct of the situation, and the situation is all that actually matters in shaping and causing variations in human thought, feeling, and behavior.

Now, let’s take a look at the methods favored by these two subdisciplines: in one corner, we have personality psychology, the champ of self-report methods. Personality psychologists were all about asking people to describe themselves and their traits. They’d say, “Hey, tell us about your personality,” and individuals would respond with questionnaires and surveys. It was like peeking inside their minds and hearts to understand their internal characteristics. In the other corner, we’ve got social psychology, the master of quantifying behavior. These folks were less interested in what people thought about themselves and more intrigued by what they actually did. They’d set up experiments and observations, watching how folks behaved in various situations. It was all about actions, not just words.

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Formal Treatment

“But his protest is not likely to be heard. For the prestige of statistics and scientific methodology is enormous. Much of it is borrowed from the high repute of mathematics and logic, but much of it derives from the flourishing state of the art itself. Some statisticians are professional people employed by scientific and commercial enterprises. Some are teachers and pure researchers who give their colleagues the same kind of service for nothing—or at most a note of acknowledgement. Many are zealous people who, with the best of intentions, are anxious to show the nonstatistical scientist how he can do his job more efficiently and assess his results more accurately. There are strong professional societies devoted to the advancement of statistics, and hundreds of technical books and journals are published annually.  

[…]

If we are interested in perpetuating the practices responsible for the present corpus of scientific knowledge, we must keep in mind that some very important parts of the scientific process do not now lend themselves to mathematical, logical, or any other formal treatment. We do not know enough about human behavior to know how the scientist does what he does. Although statisticians and methodologists may seem to tell us, or at least imply, how the mind works—how problems arise, how hypotheses are formed, deductions made, and crucial experiments designed—we as psychologists are in a position to remind them that they do not have methods appropriate to the empirical observation or the functional analysis of such data. These are aspects of human behavior, and no one knows better than we how little can at the moment be said about them.”

Skinner, B. F. (1956). A case history in scientific method. American Psychologist, 11(5), 221–233. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047662

On Being Interdisciplinary

Just over a decade ago, I left one Ph.D. program to join another. I was working on a lot of traditional questions in Psychology, and approaching them in relatively traditional ways — nothing about it was especially satisfying to me. Well, okay, nothing about it was satisfying at all. But that’s another story. So, I found myself jumping ship, heading down to Texas to pick up a Psychology Ph.D. while working with someone who was, at the time — and, frankly, still is — one of my heroes, both intellectually and personally: Jamie Pennebaker.

I arrived with a solid foundation in traditional psychology — inferential statistics, study design, all the standard tools of the trade. But, very quickly, I realized that those things weren’t as crucial as I thought they would be. Jamie told me to go talk to some folks over in the computer science department and get trained in machine learning. I was deeply hesitant about whether I would be able to actually learn something that sounded so completely alien and complicated. So, I told him point-blank, something along the lines of “I don’t even know what machine learning is.” His response was refreshingly blunt — with a characteristic Jamie smirk, he shrugged and said “Me neither. But you probably should.” And just like that, I found myself plunging into a whole new world.

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RIP #4: Asking Questions

(Originally Posted September 27, 2023)

The weather is getting chilly, we’re all back in the daily grind and — for me — it brings back vivid memories of sitting in old classrooms in various psychology buildings at the beginning of a new school year. Psychology buildings tend to be old and dusty, especially compared to CS buildings — ahh, the aroma of old wooden desks, the faintly vanilla smell of old books, the chilly rooms on grey, windy days, and the narrative, philosophical discussions about how we know anything about “the human condition.”

Most junior graduate students in the social sciences become socialized in the world of actually doing research by having research questions handed to them by their advisors. In psychology, these aren’t so much framed as “problems to solve” so much as “here’s a question that we don’t have an answer to yet. But we expect that the answer will look like either X or Y, because Z theory says so.” And so, we dutifully put together a study to see if, for example, people who are are more “cognitively” egocentric are also more “socially” egocentric, run the study, and subsequently write up the results into a paper that doctors still prescribe as a powerful treatment for insomnia due to its potent narcoleptic effects.

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RIP #3: The Big Five and Life Outcomes

(Originally posted August 30, 2023)

What’s that you say? You’re ready for another RIP? Well, let’s do it!

For RIP #3, I want to share a major paper in personality psychology that (I find) most people outside of personality psych don’t know about — Ozer & Benet-Martinez (2006).

Some of you — especially if you attended the workshop — have heard me talk about nomological networks and, essentially, how we “define” the psychological constructs that we’re studying by triangulating what, precisely, they are related to.

Now, you all have heard over and over (and over, and over, and over) again that the Big Five is really the dominant model of personality. And, when you talk to people who use the Big Five, they’ll often rattle off a huge list of associations/correlates of each of the Big Five. “Oh, extraverts live longer, are happier, are rated as more attractive…” etc. etc.

How the heck do personality psychologists know all of this stuff? Are they just really good scholars? Did they read a thousand Big Five papers and memorize all of the things that the Big Five correlate with?

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RIP #2: Clark and Watson (1995)

(Original posted July 31, 2023)

As an early graduate student, most (perhaps all) of my research involved mapping some type of in-lab behavior (responding to cognitive probes, movement behavior, etc.) to self-report questionnaires of individual differences. I did studies on the Big Five, emotion regulation, aggression, sexuality… you name it. And for all of these domains, I used “off-the-shelf” questionnaires that had been published by other researchers. I thought “hey, if they’re peer-reviewed, well-validated, and everyone else uses them… they must be pretty good measurement tools!”

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Oh Coney Dogs, My Coney Dogs

Anthony Bourdain regularly observed that virtually all cultures have their own spin on “meat in tube form” — hot dogs, all kinds of sausages, bratwurst, and so on — all cherished for their deliciousness. Today, let’s celebrate one particular variation: the beloved hot dog. It’s now officially summertime, after all — peak hot dog season.

I firmly believe that there’s no wrong way to enjoy a hot dog. Across the U.S., countless regional variations add their own twist to toppings, styles, and even buns, from the famous Chicago-style dogs to the lesser-known Washington D.C. half-smoke, and everything in between. Each style has its fans, and rightfully so. After all, if they weren’t delightful, they wouldn’t be so popular. Rather than joining in on the cacophonous online bickering over the “correct” way to enjoy a hot dog, let’s just appreciate each variation for its own awesomeness, shall we?

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RIP #1: The Beginning

(Originally Posted on July 17, 2023)

Hey gang! I’d like to bring to life a fuzzy thought that has been bouncing around my head for the past few weeks — infusing the lab with the perspectives/lessons that I’ve internalized over the years working in the disciplines of psychology (and the social sciences more broadly), the humanities, and being a frequent dabbler in the dark arts of computational methods.

That is to say: every now and again — with no regular schedule or specific goals in mind — I’m going to share what I will call “Ryan’s Important Papers” or “RIPs”. Wow, the acronyms write themselves.

I’ll admit — 80% of the time, when someone sends a paper my way, I tell them “Wow, looks interesting! I look forward to reading it!” … and then I don’t read it. I’m a busy guy. We’re all busy, and nobody likes getting “vaguely interesting” papers dropped on their desk — that just feels like homework.

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Ryan’s Important Papers (RIPs) — A Prelude

There’s the old adage of “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” I don’t think that that’s true, exactly, but I appreciate the spirit of the idea.

I love science, and I love talking about science. I’m a scientist by day, then I go home and do more science just for fun. It’s a great gig, and what you might expect is that I have a great enthusiasm for sharing the things that find interesting, exciting, or rich with meaning. And you’d be right.

I joined the HLAB in the Summer of 2023 — it’s a stellar group of very, very sharp computer scientists and CS Ph.D. students working on questions of the human condition by using state-of-the-art computational methods. It’s an intellectually diverse group of folks — people with backgrounds in Physics, Computer Science, Psychology, Public Health, and on and on — all working on incredibly fascinating questions across the spectrum of psychological research.

Having joined the lab, I wanted to unpack my suitcase that was filled with decades of rather formal psychological training. My mind has been filled with papers, findings, theories, and ideas throughout my personal, professional, and academic life, which has been deeply enriching. However, it’s not enough to simply hold onto these ideas and cherish them like collectible figurines, taking them out to selfishly appreciate them by myself.

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