(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.
During the person-vs-situation debate, social psychologists succeeded in undermining the very field of personality psychology and, with it, self-report methods. There was a marked and massive drop in personality research for over a decade, and people shied away from self-report in favor of behavioral assessment as the “best” way to study human psychology.
But… during this time, personality psychologists fought back. Eventually, they dealt a massive blow back to social psychology with Funder & Ozer’s 1983 paper showing that every criticism made by social psychologists about personality psychology was not only wrong, but could be applied to social psychology as well. Personality psychology was back in action and, ultimately, what happened was a “melding” of the two fields. People came to a mutual agreement that human behavior is the product of both personality characteristics and the situation. This is now called the interactionist approach and is pretty universally agreed to be true. It’s easy to see this as obvious in retrospect, but this was a deeply serious debate with a lot of empirical, philosophical, and theoretical implications that changed the shape of psychology as a discipline.
What happened afterward? Well, one thing is that social psychologists came around to the idea of self-reports as a valid measurement tool. Why go through some elaborate, painstaking process of setting up behavioral observation and experiments if we can instead simply give people a 5-minute questionnaire and get the same information? Self-reports are fast, easy, and cheap — why not just use those instead? And hey, if we want to measure behavior, why not just set up a study on a computer and have participants do that instead? It’s certainly easier to log data via a mouse and keyboard than it is to have RAs code video tapes of what a person does when they’re sitting in a room with other people.
There is nuance that I’m skipping over here but, to paint with broad strokes, a consequence of this whole debate is that objective measures of human behavior dropped off massively, and self-report methods and “contrived” computer-based laboratory studies became the dominant measurement strategy for most things things psychological (excluding brain studies, etc. etc.).
But… are self-reports really the best approach here? When we use self-reports, are we really studying what we should be studying as psychologists? What about when people are clicking images and moving things around on a computer screen? Isn’t this all just so… artificial and removed from actual human behavior out in the real world? Can we even claim to be studying anything important about the human condition if all that we’re measuring is questionnaires and mouse-clicks?
This is precisely the topic of today’s RIP:
Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Funder, D. C. (2007). Psychology as the science of self-reports and finger movements: Whatever happened to actual behavior? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 396–403. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2007.00051.x
This is a hugely influential “critique” of social/personality psychology from ~15 years ago — Baumeister and colleagues stopped and asked “so, what exactly are we even doing here as a field?” Despite its age, people still lean heavily on the arguments raised in this paper today, and with good reason. I won’t claim that the field has actually “fixed” the problems raised in this paper, but just about every psychologist doing research today carries on their work with a small bit of embarrassment over the issues raised in this paper.
Beyond this – and even without the history lesson – this is a really important paper about how we measure things about people, when, and for what purposes. It is a critical call for us to study the actual things that we care about rather than using (potentially) superficial proxy measures that may be only vaguely indicative of the things that we think matter about human behavior.