Abstract
When George Kelly originally proposed his “person-as-scientist” metaphor in the 1950s, he based it on an “everyday” conception of science, often associated with the view of persons as “naïve” scientists. But the view of science entailed by Kelly’s (1955) personal construct theory was considerably richer and less naïve than the prevailing positivist view of psychological science at the time, which construed the scientist as a disengaged collector of facts and a framer of hypotheses operating according to fixed principles of instrumental reason. Kelly’s scientific person, in contrast, was a fully engaged, agentic, creative, reflexive, and situated actor whose emotions and intentionality were inseparable from his or her intellect and rationality. Kelly’s critical insight was that scientific sense-making, in this rich everyday sense, could shed considerable light on human functioning in general. This important volume by Osbeck, Nersessian, Malone, and Newstetter takes much of its inspiration from Kelly’s seminal insight, offering “a new reading of the ‘person-as-scientist’ metaphor” (p. 2) in the context of in-depth, qualitative interview studies of the practices of modern scientists.
In the authors’ new reading of the person-as-scientist metaphor, the “everyday” conception of science can no longer be taken for granted but, rather, needs to be augmented through detailed empirical study of how modern scientists actually work. According to the authors, “the activities and articulations of persons working as scientists in situ” are “a relatively untapped source for generating and honing ideas we categorize as ‘psychological’” (p. 2). The research reported in this volume is part of a multi-year investigation of laboratory research practices spearheaded by Nersessian and Newstetter as principal investigators. The focus of investigation was a group of biomedical engineering researchers of widely varying backgrounds and expertise at two highly regarded laboratories at a major research university. Qualitative interviews were conducted in these laboratories over a period of 2 years, supplemented in some cases by an additional 2 years of follow-up data collection. The research originated within the newly emerging psychology of science tradition, which applies psychological perspectives to the understanding of science practice; but the work ultimately goes beyond that tradition in offering insights pertinent to general psychology as well.
Qualitative interview methodology is consistent with the authors’ assumption that sense-making and identity negotiation are the essential tasks of the modern scientist working in the highly collaborative, interdisciplinary contexts they studied, as these tasks are more informed by the discursive than by the merely material aspects of scientific practice. Nonetheless, the material aspects of the research environments they studied—a tissue engineering and a neural engineering laboratory—are substantial, as both involve model systems with biological and engineering components. It presents a significant challenge to the psychological reader to understand these complex research settings sufficiently to follow the presentation of results in the volume, and the authors are to be commended on the understanding they demonstrated in their execution of the research. Readers who are prepared to invest the effort to understand these complex research environments will be richly rewarded when presented with the detailed results of this inquiry. What emerges is a complex picture of collaborative laboratory research practice in which the cognitive, emotional, social, and material dimensions of scientific problem solving are very tightly interwoven. Based on their eclectic, interpretative method of grounded coding, the authors extracted a number of overarching themes from their interview data, whose similarity to the generic categories of general psychology suggested the overall focus of the book.
Along with these general themes, this volume also presents some very compelling, specific examples of scientific activity from the concrete, proximal perspectives of the scientists who engage in it. Among its most striking features is the surprising informality of much of scientific reasoning. The common sense way of “experimenting” often begins with some vague intuitions and an impulse just to try something out to see how it works. This seems to be the way of sophisticated, technical science as well; the director of one of the laboratories, for example, described how he arrived at the original idea behind his current research program as follows:
But then I thought, the idea hit me—I can’t exactly say where it came from—which was perhaps you could make a cell culture [model] system that could learn something …. And so I thought, OK, well I figured, if we were gonna create an in vitro learning system, it has to be somehow connected with the outside world. (p. 69)
Another noteworthy feature of scientific reasoning documented by the authors is a pervasive resort to metaphor and anthropomorphization. Scientists in both laboratories frequently attributed human-like characteristics to their artifacts; for example, there was an especially prevalent tendency in one of the laboratories to speak of the maintenance of the biological component of their model system in terms of the need to “keep the cells happy.” While anthropomorphic thinking is typically regarded as “unscientific,” what the authors found is that it actually increases with scientific experience and expertise, where the material aspects of research practice become fused with its social and emotional aspects. This, of course, flies in the face of the classical image of scientific detachment and instrumental reason.
Naturally, there are limits to qualitative interview methodology in this context, even when the interviews are conducted in situ. The complex collaborative interdisciplinary research environments under study are embedded in larger social, political, and economic structures, including historically constituted frameworks of value that, as the authors acknowledge toward the end of the volume, were not addressed in their research. Much of this larger sociopolitical context is presupposed and tacitly taken up in practice rather than readily articulated in an interview situation. There is tacit knowledge, also, at the level of local practices, which could easily be missed in an interview. As one research participant succinctly noted, in response to an interviewer’s interpretation: “You only see part of it” (p. 212).
The authors of this volume nonetheless offer a compelling portrait of the modern scientist as an actively engaged, situated, holistic, sense-making person, which is not far removed from George Kelly’s metaphorical person-as-scientist. They are right to conclude that their portrait of the scientific person has substantial implications for a general psychology of persons.