Abstract
Contemporary psychology is experiencing tremendous growth in neuroscience, and there is every indication that it will continue to gain in popularity notwithstanding the scarcity of academic positions for newly minted Ph.Ds. Despite the general perception that brain correlates “explain” or “cause” the mind and behavior, these correlates have not yet proven useful in understanding psychological processes, although they offer the possibility of early identification of some disorders. Other recent developments in psychology include increased emphasis on applications and more global representation among researchers and participants. In thinking about the way we want psychology to evolve, psychologists need to pay more than lip service to the idea that complex questions in psychology require multiple levels of analysis with contributions from biological (brain, hormones, and genetics), individual differences and social and cultural perspectives. Early career psychologists who can attain a breadth of knowledge will be well-positioned for a team approach to psychological inquiry. Finally, I offer the belief that an emphasis on enhancing critical thinking skills at all levels of education offers the best hope for the future.
I am writing this manuscript from the 28th floor of a building in Hong Kong with a large window that overlooks a multilevel interchange in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. The major highways are backed up with impatient drivers eager to get to popular destinations, and roads that lead in other directions are less densely clogged. All of the roadways include a mix of prestigious cars, including trendy Teslas, BMWs, and Mercedes, as well as smaller cars, large busses, and various types of motorcycles weaving in and out among the strings of cars—their drivers bent on getting to their destination faster, but inhaling gas fumes as the price for their agility. Crashes can be seen occasionally, some small fender-benders and some smash-ups that claim the lives of those on the roads where the traffic moves the fastest. This seems to be an apt metaphor for a roadmap to the present and future of psychology.
Connecting the Past to the Future
When plotting current and future directions for psychology, a look backward to where we have been serves as a good starting point. One of the advantages of aging is that the term “living history” has personal meaning. When I started in psychology as an undergraduate, the dominant paradigms included running rats in mazes, presenting nonsense syllables on memory drums, and explaining why cold mothers caused autism and distant fathers caused homosexuality. Psychology’s abandonment of these practices and beliefs was a welcome change in direction, and with the benefit of hindsight, it seems obvious that psychology needed to make a U-turn away from these practices.
Neuroscience holds a privileged place
In the middle of the last century, Skinner advised psychologists to study only what was observable, and because the brain and mind were obscured from sight, psychologists should ignore the “black box” of brain activity and thought. Advances in brain imaging now provide tantalizing glimpses into the inner workings of the black box, and not surprisingly, the emerging field of neuroscience has created a new and popular path for psychological science. Neuroscience has become so popular that workforce pundits (Stix, 2016) have asked, “Are there too many neuroscientists?” Academia cannot provide enough jobs for the burgeoning numbers of neuroscientists, many of whom will need to find alternative positions, and it is uncertain whether fields outside of academia will be able to provide for all the qualified graduates. The current glut in neuroscience students is like the roads clogged with too many cars heading to the same popular destinations. For some dedicated students, the long and crowded pathway to their career is worth the slow ride and intense competition, but students who are uncertain about pursuing a neuroscience career would do well to consider alternative routes.
Compared with our sister sciences, psychology is a young science and neuroscience is still in its infancy. There remains a wide gap between brain activity and human thought and behavior, and too often we fail to “mind the gap” (Halpern, 2000). For example, the developmental research literature is filled with studies showing that adolescents often have poor impulse control and behave in ways that defy rational thought (Modecki, 2008). When imaging studies showed that the frontal cerebral lobes of many adolescents were not yet fully developed, many professionals and the lay public responded as though this finding “explained” or caused the irrational behavior (see Luna & Wright, 2016, for a review). In some cases, jurors and judges were more likely to acquit a defendant or recommend a lighter sentence when brain images were presented in the court room as evidence of innocence or, at least, reduced culpability (Feld, 2013).
Paradoxically, the emergence of various brain imaging techniques has also helped to popularize social psychology, because it is now possible to “see” the way experience can alter brain structures. After only a few weeks of practice at the visuospatial game Tetris, brain areas presumably associated with visuospatial abilities grew larger, and the same areas shrank to their pretraining size when the game training stopped (Haier, Karama, Leyba, & Jung, 2009). The brains of poor kids and middle-class kids look different, which “shows” how poverty gets into the brain (Lipina & Colombo, 2009). Although these impressive-looking images (which are highly processed and bear little resemblance to a photograph) do not explain the effects of experience on behavior, they have allowed social psychologists to share some of the limelight with the high-tech neuroscientists. For example, correlating brain activity when an individual is experiencing stereotype threat has made the concept of stereotype threat “tangible” (Krendl, Richeson, Kelley, & Heatherton, 2008). For some reason, the evidence of changes in brain activity provided validity to the concept of stereotype threat, which had been confirmed with behavioral research in hundreds of studies. Of course, everything affects the brain, so finding a brain region that is activated offers neither an explanation nor cause, but somehow a brain image that correlates with thought or behavior is given precedence over the thought or behavior. These findings give a new and literal meaning to the aphorism “a picture is worth a thousand words.”
The biological revolution in psychology is, in some ways, analogous to the cognitive revolution that occurred many decades ago when the majority of research psychologists gave up the exclusive study of observable behavior to embrace research on thinking, remembering, and feeling. The difference is that cognitive psychology has proven its usefulness over many decades, and neuroscience still remains “a bridge too far” (Bruer, 1997). Cognitive psychology is increasingly being nudged into the position of an interface between neuroscience and behavior instead of standing on its own as a major way of knowing about the mind and behavior. As Bruer (1997) reminds us, there is no direct bridge between neuroscience and other areas of psychology such as mental disorders, learning and education, and personality, and thus far, neuroscience has had few direct applications. Perhaps, some day, neuroscience will fulfill the promise of helping us understand psychological processes, but so far, its usefulness is hotly debated. On the positive side are arguments that neuroscience is a basic science that can help psychologists identify some disorders such as reading disabilities before behavioral measures reflect the disability (e.g. Gabrieli, 2016), but others strongly disagree (e.g., Bowers, 2016).
The problem is not in the study of neuroscience, but in the “seductive appeal of mindless neuroscience” (Satel & Lilienfeld, 2013). Despite what appears in the popular press, there are no “Democratic” or “Republican” brains and no “God Spot” in the brain. Even more damaging is the deliberate misuse of neuroscience to claim, for example, that we can find the origins of stereotypic beliefs about women and men by examining female and male brains. The many claims of “brain-based learning” overlook the fact that there are no direct links between “neurological and learning processes” (Stern, 2005).
Many of psychology’s subdisciplines are becoming more applied
Psychology, at least in some subdisciplines, is taking a more applied route than in the past. Work by Roediger and his many collaborators (e.g., Roediger & Nestojko, 2015) has made substantial advances in enhancing long-term retention and in the process has made research on education exciting and trendy. For example, some medical schools are using spaced-practice to improve retention for surgery students (with very large effect sizes; Kerfoot, DeWolf, Masser, Church, & Federman, 2007) and other medical schools have eliminated all lectures based on psychological research showing that active involvement is a far superior way to learn (Straumsheim, 2016). The use of frequent retrieval as a way to enhance retention has worked its way into the popular learning literature and into textbooks on how people learn. Psychology is being applied in a wide range of settings, which is a noble use of our expertise. Empirically validated applications are required in clinical practices, guidelines for effectively organizing businesses and other groups, and training programs to develop better leaders. The popularity of behavioral economics is a good example of labeling because much of the work in this area is directly traceable to cognitive psychology, except that the topic being examined concerns money, so it also pays better. Governmental agencies are using psychology to persuade consumers to use less energy, make organ donations, and reduce littering. Similarly, much of the work in human factors is based on traditional paradigms used to study sensation and perception.
Modern psychology is more representative of the world
Only a decade or so ago, I lamented the lack of rigorous cross-cultural studies. We cannot have a universal psychology if the only people we study are from Western industrialized countries. Several factors have come together to make cross-cultural studies much easier to conduct. Mechanical Turk, the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) website, and other easily accessed sites make the collection of international, cross-cultural data fairly easy. E-mail makes correspondence with colleagues around the world more convenient than dropping a note under a neighbor’s door. Concerns that psychology is still missing large segments of the world’s population are warranted. Few poor people, especially from areas that are not well-connected via the Internet, are going to participate in studies conducted online. But the inclusion of many more people who were previously overlooked by psychologists is encouraging.
A Roadmap for a Better Psychology
Which of the various approaches to understanding the mind and behavior is “best”? I suppose that readers recognize a trick question when they see one. Regardless of what we are trying to understand—eating disorders, dyslexia, happiness, aging, optimizing the conditions to support learning, child development, and so on—all of the topics need to be studied with multiple levels of analysis. There is an underlying biology that correlates with the topics we study, individual differences are critical to any understanding because people are variable, and social and cultural influences are also critical components to a full understanding of any of the phenomena we strive to understand as psychologists. Thus, important problems need to be addressed from multiple levels of analysis, but of course, no individual can know enough to conduct multiple levels of analysis by his or herself. This is why questions in psychology need to be studied by teams made up of members that view the problem with their preferred lens, which could include genetic studies, hormone variations across the life span, brain structures and patterns of neural communication, individual learning histories and experiences, social influences on how a phenomenon is expressed and valued, and cultural influences. I urge readers to keep in mind that most of the “critical measures of education” (Gabrieli, 2016, p. 613) and other psychological phenomena are behavioral, so biological levels of explanation are not useful when considered independent of the other levels; we need to use cross-level analyses for complex issues.
For early career psychologist, I offer advice that may go against the grain in a world in which academic psychologists are valued for their increasingly narrow slivers of expertise. If you want to prepare for a future with diverse teams addressing interesting topics from different angles, you will need to remain general in your knowledge. It is a sad sight when two psychologists find that they cannot communicate about their work because each person works in an area so specialized that few people can follow what she or he is doing. Of course, no one can have endless breadth, but there is a critical balance between depth and breadth of knowledge, and I am urging for a bigger push toward breadth.
A Little About Me
It is always difficult to talk about myself, probably because I know so many of the biases that creep in—old standards like the fundamental attribution error, cognitive dissonance, lack of knowledge about what I don’t know, over-justification, the Lake Woebegone Effect, and many more. As I look back on my several decades as a psychologist, first and foremost I hope that I have had a positive influence on the thousands of students in my classes and the many others who have read my textbooks and articles. I hope that I provided a view of psychology as an exciting field. I loved the study of psychology from my first introductory lecture which I heard from the legendary Henry Gleitman at University of Pennsylvania, and my passion has not faded over the years.
I have two main areas of work—the psychology of sex (or gender if you prefer) differences in cognitive abilities and the enhancement of critical thinking skills in adults. I have a passion for both topics. I am very careful in my approach to the controversial questions that relate gender to cognitive abilities and stay close to the research as I explain my “take” on this area. Of course, a topic as controversial as this one has led me into hot water and some gruelingly unpleasant situations such as being cross-examined by hostile lawyers in several legal cases, facing criticism from both sides of the political spectrum, and constantly having to explain that differences are not deficiencies and that the differences we see today may be similarities tomorrow.
I cannot imagine any topic more critical to the future of the world than the development of critical thinking skills. Irrational voters are a threat to all of us, and there is ample evidence that better thinking can be an outcome of education if we make critical thinking an explicit learning outcome, assess our success, and revise as needed. I have written many materials for enhancing critical thinking (books, assessments, computerized games with Keith Millis and Art Grasser) and have collected data using many types of dependent variables showing that critical thinking skills can be learned and applied in novel settings (i.e., far transfer can occur when instructors teach for far transfer; Halpern, 2014). I have been and continue to be a strong advocate for explicitly teaching critical thinking skills at all levels of education, but especially in colleges and universities. I am among those who believe that critical thinking can be “an effective (partial) antidote against ideological fanaticism” (Lilienfeld, 2007). I hope that readers will join me in promoting this agenda.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.