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As 2011 draws to a close, it seems like everyone is taking a look back at the past year to see where we have been and to get ready for 2012. A couple of years ago, I wrote about how people like to use landmark dates (like New Year's, birthdays, and anniversaries) to take stock of life. While you wouldn't want to spend all year in navel gazing, it is important to take an inventory of life every once in a while to get a sense of the larger trends.
When I look at Psychology over the past year, there are some definite strengths as well as some cause for concern.
The Highs
Psychology continues to use basic research to illuminate questions of practical interest. Quite a bit of work shows that people's current state affects their broader attitudes. In 2011, studies observed that when the temperature is unseasonably cold outside, that lowers the strength of people's beliefs in global warming, while unseasonably high temperatures increase people's belief in global warming. Other studies demonstrated that high temperatures increase belief in global warming, because they make it easier for people to think about concepts relating to high temperatures.
Another cool study this year explored why we hold the door for people behind us. Clearly, we all want to be polite, but this research also used some clever methods to demonstrate that we're trying to minimize the amount of energy we have to expend.
There was also some fascinating research on subliminal advertising. We all worry that somehow subliminal messages will turn us into robots. It won't. If you already have a goal to do something, then a subliminal message can push around your choices a bit, but otherwise, seeing something flashed on a screen won't have that much of an influence on your behavior.
Research also explored how much we know about our romantic partners. The stereotype is that people who have been together for decades know each other so well that they can finish each other's sentences while couples who have just started dating are just learning about each other. An interesting study this year suggested that people who have been together for years may not know as much about each other as they think.
The field of Cognitive Science also took a major leap forward this year when Watson, a computer system designed to play the game Jeopardy, beat the best human players in the world. A lot of folks were unimpressed by Watson. After all, if you were sitting at home with Google, you could probably beat a lot of the world's best Jeopardy players as well. You ought to be mighty impressed at Watson, though. I wrote a couple of blog entries about that this year. Here's one. And another.
It was also a big year for little words. My colleague Jamie Pennebaker wrote a fascinating book, The Secret Life of Pronouns that explores the relationship between thinking and the words we use. He demonstrates that there are very subtle changes in our use of the small words of language like our pronouns (I, you, me) when we are lying, when we are depressed, and when we are in positions of high or low status.
The Lows
As exciting as 2011 was for the science of psychology, there were some low points as well.
The field was rocked by yet another cheating scandal. Diederik Stapel, a social psychologist from the Netherlands was found to have made up the data in a number of his papers with provocative findings. This is the second high-profile case of scientific misconduct in the field in two years. That is a disturbing trend.
Few scientists actually commit fraud, of course, and cheating of this type tends to be caught, because scientists typically try to repeat the most interesting experiments. But, a few papers also explored research techniques used by many scientists. It turns out that some research methods that are used by many scientists may inflate the chances that we observe differences between experimental conditions that are not really there. This work suggests that cognitive scientists are going to need to start being more careful in our research practices.
The Future
When you read any retrospective that goes over the past year, there is usually a section where the writer looks into his or her crystal ball to predict the trends for the next year. As editor of the journal Cognitive Science, I don't have to look into a crystal ball. I have spent much of the last year reviewing and editing papers that will appear in the 2012 edition of my journal. While I can't let you know what is coming, I can say that there are a number of exciting research papers on the way. I look forward to writing about them in the coming months in Ulterior Motives.
Happy New Year.
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And to start out 2012 right, check out Smart Thinking, to be published January 3, 2012.
