If there's one message I try to get across to new students who come to work with me, it's this: keep your eyes open. There are research ideas everywhere. And one other thing, your heart can lead you astray over the next few years, or at least cloud your vision. Be especially wary of that. Here's what I mean.
A good psychological scientist is like an artist. An artist finds inspiration in the most unlikely of places and notices things that the rest of us fail to even register: a lonely old lady lost in the crowd, dust mites swirling against rays of sunlight, a passerby smiling to herself on the street, the way the skin folds against the crook of a knee. Similarly, just like for the reductionist investigating some controversial area of human nature, for the artist there is a certain beauty even in ugliness. You might find yourself wanting to look away, but often there's an empirical bounty waiting for those who look closely.
Psychological scientists are also like novelists. Novelists often carry about a notebook in their pockets, scribbling down thoughts, ideas, and plotlines for a story. Hemingway advised budding new writers to start with their own real-life observations. When describing the weather in a scene, he said, look out your own window first. This is a good idea for the psychological scientist as well, to jot down our reflections of the everyday world in order to motivate experiments and studies. Only for us, the plotlines informing our observations are called "theories."
Let me give you an example. In the 1970s, psychologist Gordon Gallup was conducting cognitive research with chimpanzees, trying to determine whether they, like humans, had the capacity to recognize themselves in mirrors. Gallup's chimps acted "as if" they recognized themselves, opening their mouths in front of the mirror and wiggling their tongues, putting their backsides to the mirror and inspecting their ano-genital regions, and so on. But critics countered that, as interesting as this sort of "mirror contingent" behavior may be, it doesn't necessarily mean that chimpanzees have a self-concept. Perhaps they're just really good at learning rules about the relation between proprioceptive states and the mirror; in other words, "move mouth like this and interesting pink thing appears in weird glass." Gallup was having trouble devising a litmus test for demonstrating a genuine self-concept in great apes, one that would convince even the skeptics. Then, serendipity called in the form of a thirty-cent razor blade. As he was shaving in front of his own mirror one morning, Gallup nicked himself, and he instinctively reached up to wipe away the blood. Obviously, he didn't reach out and touch the part of the mirror where the blood spot was reflected, but realizing "that's me" he reached up and touched his own face.
And this is the origin of the modern dye-mark self recognition test, where nonhuman primates are surreptitiously marked with a non-tactile, non-olfactory bit of bright dye on a prominent part of their face (just above their eyebrow ridge, for instance) and then placed in front of the mirror. (Chimps and orangutans touch their own face, by the way, while most gorillas and other species of primate don't. But those details are for another post.)
Talented novelists tend to view themselves from the third-person perspective, also, as though the self were a character heading towards some already scripted, surprise denouement, and the individual is just an observer of his or her own life story along for the great read, with plot twists and all. Given this frame of mind, even the slightest details of one's subjective and emotional experiences are vigilantly attended to with a sort of objective passion. For the gifted writer, just as the psychological scientist, "I" becomes the universal man: a portal by which all people can be described, explained, and understood. By "objective passion," I mean the state of being emotionally displaced from the actual experience, not emotionally disengaged. That is to say, it's not a matter of becoming cold and unfeeling, but instead feeling the experience more acutely, simultaneously from both the first- and third-person perspective.
Here's an example. The evening after my mother passed away, my distraught family and I were all huddled together in the living room downstairs, trying to get some sleep after the very taxing past few weeks. In the early hours of the morning, the wind chimes outside my mom's window started to jingle. When my sister mentioned this casually the next day during lunch, we all said we'd heard it too, and thought how strange it was since there was no wind. We all confessed to spontaneously attributing this to my mom telling us she was OK. This fascinated me. On the one hand, I definitely didn't "believe" my mom's ghost was communicating to us through the wind chimes. But on the other hand, just like my siblings who did believe this to be the case, I made the same knee-jerk attribution of meaning to the event. My heart told me to believe, while my scientific training said don't be silly, but at least there's an interesting study lurking here.
As a psychological scientist, the experience piqued my interest enough to develop a new experimental paradigm in which children were placed in a room with what they were told was a friendly, invisible princess (named "Princess Alice" after my dead mom, kind of creepy in retrospect, but I thought it was a nice way to honour her memory), and we then measured their behaviour in response to various, rigged events happening in the room. In one game, we told these kids that Princess Alice would help them find a hidden ball inside one of two boxes by somehow "telling them" whenever they chose the wrong box. On each guessing trial, they had 30 seconds to make their choice by placing their hand on the lid of one of the boxes; on some of the trials, we made a table lamp flash on and off or a picture fall to the ground as soon as their hand touched the box, reasoning that if children saw these as communicative messages from Princess Alice, they'd move their hand to the other box.
The youngest kids (3-4-year-olds) didn't get it; they just shrugged and kept their hands put, generally saying the lamp and picture were simply broken. Children in the middle age group (5-6-year-olds) said Princess Alice did these things, but they didn't move their hands either; rather, they didn't see these unexpected events as signs, but they conceptualized Princess Alice as some funny invisible lady running around the room making things happen. Only the oldest children in the study (7-9-year-olds) saw the events as communicative messages and moved their hands to the other box, later saying it was Princess Alice's way of "talking" to them. (These findings, published in Developmental Psychology with my colleague Becky Parker, allowed me to argue in later work that such superstitious thinking is a developmental accomplishment requiring advanced social cognitive and symbolic abilities, not a ‘pre-scientific' holdover of early childhood.)
There are many, many such stories of psychological scientists being inspired by their own peculiar or everyday experiences. Introspection is often bedeviled by empiricists as being a misleading path to scientific knowledge; I understand all of the arguments in this vein, in terms of having one's own view occluded by private subjective biases. But it'd be wrong to throw the baby out with the bath water. When introspection is used as an idea trough for gathering insight into a previously unexplored research question, that's where innovation can really break through. Gallup didn't stumble onto the idea for his brilliantly simple dye-mark test in any of the existing literature on the evolution of the self-concept; he found it staring at him right in the face.
So here's how I usually wrap up this little lesson to my new students. Be as informed as possible about what other researchers have done and by all means read, read, read. But don't forget to live your life also, since there are plenty of good ideas and unspoilt theories to be found there too.
--by the way, if you or someone you know is a promising student who'd be especially receptive to this approach, do drop me a line.
