Thanks for a very interesting post. I am a child neuropsychologist and I am very interested in keeping up to date on child neuropsychology and write a blog on the subject. I regularly scan journals for interesting information on the subject. There are so many potential interesting questions to be addressed and answered. However, I find that I have to scan 100's of articles looking at very specific questions to find anything interesting. I wonder who is actually reading any of this stuff other than the same group of researchers looking at the same very specific areas of knowledge. The net result is very slow progress scientifically in child psychology. I think your post highlights why this may be the case. Time for a rethink!

Thanks for your very interesting post.  When I am reading psychology, I find what you find.  When I am reading neuropsychology, I find distinct progress, slow but very definitely there.

Warmly, Norm Holland

I'm puzzled too. If psychology has become non-cumulative, this doesn't make it like the humanities in anything but this one respect. Who in the humanities does experiments like the one you cite? Perhaps the science/humanities labels need to be put aside in favor of discussions of assumptions, methods, aims, etc. I do not doubt that the field of neurology has made fascinating discoveries in recent years, but I find the relations between neurology and psychoanalysis both complex and problematic. The idea of progress, when unexamined, can be used to support tendentious arguments.

Thanks for your comment, MMS. I suspect my weighting of cumulation leading finally to general principles has to do with my personal need for certainties of the kind one finds in the sciences.

"Discussions of assumptions, methods, aims, etc." leads to the humanities. And such discussions, as we know from philosophy, are potentially endless. I think psychologists like to believe they are coming up with conclusions. As they are, but within very tightly defined limits.

With respect to this current topic, lend an ear to this podcast of novelist Ian McEwan talking about the relation between the sciences and the arts and humanities:

http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index-mcewan-2009-05-07.html

Best, Norm

Yes, thanks for a very interesting post, to which i was referred by Neuroanthropology. The issue of cumulativeness puzzles me quite a bit these days, because i realized that non-cumulative disciplines suffer from a kind of amnesia. They tend to forget what people 5, 10 or 50 years ago wrote, and either recreate what was already said in their field (without acknowledgement) or discuss 'The Classics' (without discussing all the other fellas who already discussed the classics). This is deeply, deeply sad - so much work, and all for nothing! I would not want to be a researcher in such a field.

But like you, i would not see this as an argument against the humanities per se. They are obviously needed and fulfill a social function. But this function is not science. It may be in this regard that the kind of psychology you criticize ends up between two chairs - and falls to the floor. Richard Feynman famously called this 'cargo-cult science' (http://www.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html). He even used behaviorist psychology as an example. Such psychologists copy the look, the feel and the rhetoric of serious experimental research ("my data predict that..."), but they get the details wrong and end up being neither science nor humanity. Sad.

Having often encountered arguments against psychology as a "hard science," I think the accumulation argument is a particularly good one, and thank you for raising it. That said, I'm a little confused about the benefits of a forced distinction between psychology and neuroscience, or between the "invisible" mind and the concrete brain. In my estimation, the brain and the mind are the same thing. I guess it is fair to say that the brain gives rise to the mind, but ultimately, there is no disconnect between the two, and any suggestion that there is one is only detrimental to the plight of both fields. Neuroscience rarely comes up in philosophical discussions of questions like, "is there such a thing as a self without environment?"

Many psychologists are doing research about the brain and the mind, just as neuroscientists are. Both of them look at one tiny thing at a time. I think that part of the problem in progress is that the brain/mind is incredibly complex, perhaps moreso than anything else humans have ever studied. In fact the brain IS us, in a much more real sense than our hearts or our elbows, which are much easier to study in a linear way. I'm hopeful that more collaboration among fields that are essentially studying the same thing under different names will eventually lead to a more cumulative progression of research and results.

Perhaps you're not seeing the science for all the trees, so to speak. In social psychology, psychology of decision making and related fields there is a tradition of cumulating knowledge in meta-studies. They provide the overview single studies can't (because, as you say, they're usually very narrow). This is also a good way to identify patterns that can help explain why some studies will find an effect while others won't. When you look at a broad selection of studies you may notice patterns or differences between the two "camps" of studies that will better explain the knowledge of the effect.

The last sentence should of course read "... that will better explain the effect.".

You're right about meta-studies or "reviews." They do help one to see how various lines of experimentation are related and perhaps cumulating. But the problem, for me, is combining lines of experimentation. When I ask students for a large generalization about human psychology derived from current research, they don't come up with anything. The field you (Anonymous) point to does suggest a major generalization: that we do not decide rationally so much as emotionally (sub-cortically). And I will be interested to see how it plays out in psychology, as opposed to philosophy (Plato) or psychoanalysis (Freud).

As for psychological method, you don't want to miss this:

Applause, Norm