(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.
As social scientists develop throughout graduate school, there becomes a point at which they are expected to start generating their own hypotheses — we’re expected to develop a depth of knowledge that allows us to form our own postulations in the form of “if X is true, then Y should logically follow, and we should be able to observe Z effect as a result of experimental manipulation.” However, this is a very rigid, almost Draconian approach to scientific inquiry and — importantly — this isn’t particularly stimulating or interesting for the researcher themself. Part of the fun of doing research about people is that there is near-infinite scope for ways us to arrive at answers to questions about the human condition — qualitative, quantitative, ethnographic, field studies, laboratory experiments, and the like.
While this all pertains to how we arrive at answers to psychological questions — something that is just as important, but is far, far less discussed, is how we create our research questions in the first place. For a students of the human condition, asking interesting questions is often the most fun part! Sitting around, chatting with friends about the meaning of life and why people do what they do — the whole reason that we get into this game is because we’re curious people who can’t help but just go around and wonder about everything.
So… we have in our arsenal a whole battery of research methods that we can use to answer questions. But what are the various (philosophically sound) ways in which we can come up with the questions themselves? This week’s RIP deals exactly with this topic.
In my opinion, this paper is like a super-concentrated dose of “how to think like a psychologist.” At first blush, it might seem a bit dense or even almost technical. Don’t worry about that as you read — rather, I’d urge you to approach this paper more as a broad perspective on all of the (completely valid) ways to be curious about the world, ranging from thinking about your own personal experiences to reflecting what words mean to us and how that might connect to a “greater truth” about the human condition.
And, with that, please do enjoy William McGuire’s “Creative hypothesis generating in psychology: Some useful heuristics.”
McGuire, W. J. (1997). Creative hypothesis generating in psychology: Some useful heuristics. Annual Review of Psychology, 48(1), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.48.1.1