Consider two vastly different kinds of information. The first is the data collected by experimental psychologists today in a laboratory setting. The second is the information recorded in the Bible, Hindu Upanishads, and Analects of Confucius.
Data are defined as information and facts that are collected and (usually) organized in some fashion. So both the experimental psychologist's laboratory records and scripture are data, Yet the data are of vastly different natures.
Consider, for example, how we treat the data.
The American Psychological Association advises its members to retain any experimental data they collect for at least five years. One purpose of this is to allow the researcher and others to inspect the data if there are any questions about it. Five years after publication, however, the data can be disposed of -- and often is viewed as valueless.
Compare that scientific data with the data represented by early records of our civilization. The idea of throwing out the Bible after five years would strike most people as ridiculous if not repugnant. Whether atheist, irreligious, or religious, people recognize that the Bible, and similar works such as the Upanishads and the Analects are priceless cultural records.
So which source of data about humankind is of greater scientific importance?
Professor Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California at Davis posed this question, and answered essentially: both sources of are equally of value.
We know how experimental data is used in science, but how do scientists make use of the writings of the wisdom traditions represented in the Bible, Analects, and Upanishads, among others?
Sometimes scientists can read such traditions to identify big ideas or questions in their field. To research his 2006 book, "The Happiness Hypothesis," Jonathan Haidt, professor at the University of Virginia, "...read dozens of works of ancient wisdom." To identify the "big questions" of personality psychology for a 2008 article (PDF), portions of Greek philosophy, the Bible, and other documents central to Western intellectual history were reviewed.
There are also increasingly well-developed formal scientific rationales for studying wisdom traditions.
To be sure, wisdom tradition writings are far from ideal data. Their historical narratives rarely meet contemporary standards of scholarship. Events and ideas often are recounted to justify a particular way of living, rather than more impartially. Huge gaps exist in the historical record. Yet such wisdom traditions can be of crucial scientific value in certain circumstances.
For example, Professor Simonton argues that such data allow for the analysis of certain questions which "...cannot be addressed any other way."
A key question I have been examining in these posts is: Can we confirm that peoples who lived in different cultures several thousand years ago judged one another much as people do now?
A number of psychologists have argued recently that humankind has evolved a "person-judging" mechanism or instinct in their evolutionary past. An ability to judge others served a number of aims important both to the survival of the individual and social groups. Choosing a good hunting partner, for example, could be a matter of life or death.
Our human evolutionary past, however, has left behind no fossil record of our mental processes or psychological states. Nor can scientists very well run laboratory studies in our ancient past, so they must examine what data they have.
The best records available, in this case, are wisdom-tradition records, and, where possible their discussion or description of judging others. These earliest records provide a singular bridge between our civilization of today and the earliest recordings of reflective, psychological thoughts, 3000 years ago. Any continuity -- or discontinuity - between the two periods is of scientific interest.
If judging others is universal, in other words, I ought to be able to find evidence for it in each wisdom tradition. This illustrates one example of Simonton's argument that psychohistorical analyses, "provide the means to establish the generality of results obtained from more conventional research methods" -- studies on judgment, in this case.
There even are certain methodological advantages to historical research. One doesn't have to worry, for example (as someone might in an experiment conducted today) that the researcher's expectations will influence the religious writers of thousands of years ago. Historical writers were singularly unconcerned with any present-day expectations: such psychohistorical procedures are "necessarily ‘unobtrusive' and ‘nonreactive,' and thus are uncontaminated with experimenter effects" (quoting again from Simonton; see below).
The traditions were themselves created not for some exclusively scientific purpose but rather because their stories, histories, and ideas were intrinsically "worthy of the ‘historical record'" (see notes below).
Or, as Huston Smith, the religious scholar, put it: studying such teachings is like: "skimming off the cream of...[religious] history." When doing so, the religions "...begin to look like data banks that house the winnowed wisdom of the human race."
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Notes.
The rule for retaining data is from p. 137 (3.55) of the (2001) Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.): Washington DC: American Psychological Association.
The examples of informal uses of ancient data come from p. x. of Haidt, J. (2006). The happiness hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. New York: Basic Books/Perseus Books Group. "...read dozens of books of ancient wisdom..." and from the Methods section of Mayer, J. D. (2007). The big questions of personality psychology: Defining common pursuits of the discipline. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 27, 3-26. Person-judging mechanisms and instincts are discussed in the works of David Buss of the University of Texas and David Funder of the University of California, Riverside.
A key work by Simonton, D. K. (2003). Qualitative and quantitative analyses of historical data. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 617-640. Questions that "...cannot be addressed any other way," "provide the means to establish the generality of results...," and "necessarily ‘unobtrusive' and ‘nonreactive,' all can be found on p. 629; "worthy of the ‘historical record.'" is from p. 618.
The concluding quotes regarding the world's wisdom traditions that conclude the post are from p. 5 of Smith, H. (1991). The world's religions. San Francisco: Harper Collins.
The title of the post was changed +15 hours after posting from, "Can Biblical Content Inform Scientists about Psychology?" to "Can Psychological Hypotheses be Tested Using Biblical Content?"
Copyright © 2009 John D. Mayer
