25 Years Toward a Multilevel Science

When APS was initially founded, the fledgling society organized a series of meetings of scientific psychological societies. At the first of those “summits” in 1989 (attended by representatives of some 50 psychology organizations), the agenda included the drafting of a mission statement for the new national organization. Among the debated issues regarding the APS mission was whether the statement should refer to the advancement of “psychological science” or of “the psychological sciences.” In addition to the fissure between psychology as a professional practice and psychology as a scientific discipline that had prompted the founding of APS, it was difficult to think of psychology itself as a single, integrated science. The sheer number of different societies represented at the Summit reflected the fragmentation of the field. Subdisciplines such as social psychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and psychobiology appeared to be going in separate, insular directions, with little cross-communication or research collaboration across the subfields. Within universities, debates were being waged about whether departments of psychology should be positioned among the biological/life sciences or within the social sciences, and several departments either had already or were considering splitting into two separate academic units along that division.

Given the degree of balkanization of the field, many attendees at the APS Summit felt that the new national society should be conceptualized and organized as a loose federation of distinct specialty organizations representing the plurality of the psychological sciences. Others argued that there were both historical and epistemological cases to be made for conceptualizing psychology as a single scientific discipline, and that the new national organization could play a role in maintaining the integrity of the field. Discussion of this issue was both lively and revealing, but ultimately the champions of an integrated discipline prevailed. The mission statement read “. . . advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology . . .” and agreement was reached that the (then named) American Psychological Society should be an undifferentiated organization that would hold an annual national convention for the discipline as a whole and publish a discipline-wide research journal.

Fast-forward 25 years and that optimism about the prospects for an integrated science appears to have been vindicated. To be sure, our field is still characterized by a high degree of specialization—inevitable for a discipline as broad as the study of mind and behavior—but today our recognized subspecialties include hybrids such as developmental psychopathology, social neuroendocrinology, and social-cognitive neuroscience. Situated cognition, gene expression, and the “social brain” are now part of our shared lexicon, all reflections of a mature recognition that understanding complex behavior requires a multilevel integrative analysis that links social, psychological, and biological levels of organization. Social psychology and behavioral neuroscience are not remote cousins but integral parts of a multilevel systems approach to the life sciences (Brewer, 2004; Cacioppo, Berntson, Sheridan, & McClintock, 2000).

It is important to note that multilevel analysis does not imply reductionism. Although some express concern about “overprivileging” the brain in our enthusiasm to link to the neurosciences, the truth is that the more we learn about the human brain, the more we discover how top-down processes alter lower level brain functions and how context-dependent brain activity is. Social cultural influences on genetic expression, cardiovascular function, and immune systems response give evidence of the mutual influences between levels of organization from the social to the biological. Studies using both EEG and brain imaging demonstrate top-down effects from social construals to early perceptual and evaluative processes. For example, a program of research by Van Bavel and Cunningham and their colleagues has shown that the current intergroup context and associated social motives influence rapid attention and brain activity (amygdala and fusiform gyri activation) in response to presentation of ingroup and outgroup team member faces. Assignment to cross-racial teams overrides the influence of racial cues on these responses, suggesting that current social categorization can trigger top-down alteration of relatively early aspects of perceptual and evaluative processing (Van Bavel & Cunningham, 2010). A similar message emerges from recent research on socio-cultural regulation of the brain in the newly emerging subfield of cultural neuroscience (Kitayama & Uskul, 2011).

Research that directly links social psychological, developmental, and biological processes has produced important new insights on the mutual interactions across levels of organization. But a multilevel orientation does not require that all psychological researchers work at the interfaces between levels. There is a continuing need for research at each level in its own right. However, if psychological scientists pursuing advances in social, developmental, cognitive, perceptual, and neurological domains of knowledge continue to work in the same departments, attend some of the same conventions, and read some of the same journals, the opportunity for successful multilevel integrative analysis is greatly enhanced. And in that case, we can be grateful that psychology has survived these last 25 years intact.