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Being able to spend my days talking to people about social psychology research is a great privilege. The behavior involved in everyday social interactions and relationships is an intriguing subject. I love teaching my students about the classic studies that fascinated me as an undergraduate and the latest research that’s happening now. And sharing this with an even broader population by writing about social psychological research for Psychology Today is really satisfying.
But sometimes I get frustrated by people’s reactions to the research. I don’t expect my students or readers to accept research findings on blind faith — After all, that would be unscientific! But over the years I’ve often encountered a very peculiar, dismissive attitude toward the findings: It's "common sense", or it's "false." If it's something that matches people's intuitions, they will say something like "Well, that’s just common sense. Why bother to do a study to test that?" If it’s something that does not match people’s intuitions or their own personal experience, they'll say "The study is wrong."
It’s Obvious.
Let me tell you about some findings from the literature on divorce. People who start their marriages with the most love and affection for their partners tend to have a decline in satisfaction over time, but are unlikely to divorce, while people who had poor relationship quality at the outset tend to eventually get divorced, especially once their children are grown. Does that seem obviously true? Wait, that’s not right. That’s not what the research showed. The results really showed that those super-happy couples quickly come crashing down in the early years of marriage, and if they divorced, they tended to do so within the first six years, while those miserable couples were equally likely to divorce early or late. Oh wait, I got it wrong again. These are the real results: Couples who were especially unhappy early in their marriage were the most likely to get divorced early on (within the first six years), whereas when later divorces (seven or more years into the marriage) were examined, it was the most blissfully happy newlyweds that were most likely to get divorced.1 Sure enough, when I wrote about these findings on my blog, one commenter stated "So prevalent and obvious, it's hard to believe anyone wasted time and money on yet another study telling us what we already knew." Ouch, makes you glad you're not the researchers who spent 20 years collecting that data.
When you think about each of those three versions of the results from the divorce study, they all make sense intuitively. You can come up with reasons why each one would be true and perhaps you can even think of a divorced couple that follows that pattern. But they cannot all be true, since they contradict one another: some things that seem intuitively obvious might indeed turn out to be true, but some must be false, even though they’re equally intuitive. When considering relationship trends, as a whole, your intuitions may or may not be correct. And without scientific research to test our intuitions, we wouldn’t know when we were wrong, and when we were really onto something. Social scientists seek to understand general trends, and give us insight into what patterns of behavior are most likely to occur, over a population.
Studies show that research findings in social science and education are especially likely to be considered "obvious" when presented to laypeople.2,3 However, when participants are presented with true and false social science research findings, their ability to correctly distinguish fact from fiction hovers between 50% (chance levels) and 75%.4,5,6,7 When people are asked to rate how obvious the findings are, people rate true and false findings as equally obvious.7 And when reports of findings are presented along with an explanation of why they’re true, which is how they're usually reported in both the media and educational settings, they are even more likely to be seen as obvious.7,8
One reason that we tend to think findings are obvious once we've heard about them is the hindsight bias. The hindsight bias is our tendency to hear about an event and then believe we could have predicted it all along.9 The phrase "Monday morning quarterback" describes this phenomenon. After the game is over, it seems obvious what the players should have done, and the coach seems foolish for not anticipating it. But without the benefit of hindsight, it's probably not that obvious. Similarly, once you know the results of a particular study, they seem obvious in hindsight.
It’s Wrong.
I would never say that scientific studies are infallible. Scientists may sometimes be arrogant, but we’re not that arrogant. In fact, a typical study has numerous flaws. These flaws are usually discussed by the authors themselves in their academic papers, and there is debate among researchers about which theories are correct.
However, declaring a study's findings invalid because they don't gibe with your intuitions, or because you can think of a few real world counterexamples (which, of course, don’t undermine statistical explanations), is an unfair dismissal of the research. Many studies have shown that people often have difficulty accepting scientific evidence that disconfirms their beliefs.10,11 So you should be aware of this potential bias when you hear about research findings.
Should you accept all research results at face value? Of course not! But there are many ways to get past gut-level dismissals of research findings that don’t "feel" right. There are plenty of legitimate things to criticize in most studies. Maybe the sample of participants in the study was especially likely to show those results for some reason. Maybe there is a problem with the way the researchers measured a key variable. Maybe there are other, extraneous, variables that the researchers failed to take into account. Maybe (for the statistically sophisticated) there is a problem with the data analysis. Maybe the researchers' interpretation of their results is suspect. And in fact, many thoughtful students and readers do discuss these flaws when they hear about research findings. But often, we jump to conclusions (either agreeing or disagreeing with the findings themselves) without considering these possibilities.
When you hear about the brain, you probably don't have many intuitions about how it works, and you’re more likely to accept cognitive psychology and neuroscience findings on faith. But when you hear about research on topics that you have some intuitive grasp of, like those studied by social psychologists (e.g., close relationships, prejudice, conflict, conformity, group dynamics), you take a more critical eye. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with being critical of social psychology studies. Criticism is part of scientific inquiry, and we social psychologists are certainly plenty critical! But the "it’s obvious" or "it’s false" attitude is not helpful in expanding our understanding of human behavior. In fact, it's paradoxical. And with so many personal and public policy decisions affected by our interpretations of research, people's reactions to social science research findings really do matter.12,13
Gwendolyn Seidman, Ph.D. is an associate professor of psychology at Albright College who studies relationships and cyberpsychology. Follow her on Twitter for updates about social psychology, relationships, and online behavior, and read more of her articles on Close Encounters.
References
1 Huston, T. L., Caughlin, J. P., Houts, R. M., Smith, S. E., & George, L. J. (2001). The connubial crucible: Newlywed years as predictors of marital delight, distress, and divorce. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 237-252.
2 Gage, N. L. (1991). The obviousness of social and educational research results. Educational Researcher, 20, 10–16.
3 Yates, G. C. R. (2005). "How obvious": Personal reflections on the database of educational psychology and effective teaching research. Educational Psychology, 25, 681–700.
4 Barnett, M. A. (1986). Commonsense and research findings in personality. Teaching of Psychology, 13, 62–64.
5 Barnett, M. A., Knust, J., McMillan, T., Kaufman, J., & Sinisi, C. (1988). Research findings in developmental psychology: Common sense revisited. Teaching of Psychology, 15, 195–197.
6 Richard, F. D., Bond, C. F., & Stokes-Zoota, J. J. (2001). "That’s completely obvious . . . and important": Lay judgments of social psychological findings. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 497–505.
7 Wong, L. Y. (1995). Research on teaching: Process-product research findings and the feeling of obviousness. Journal of Educational Psychology, 87, 504–511.
8 Masnick, A. M., & Zimmerman, C. (2009). Evaluating scientific research in the context of prior belief: Hindsight bias or confirmation bias. Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology, 2, 29-36.
9 Fischoff, B. (1975). Hindsight ≠ foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 288-299.
10 Zimmerman, C. (2000). The development of scientific reasoning skills. Developmental Review, 20, 99–149.
11 Zimmerman, C. (2007). The development of scientific thinking skills in elementary and middle school. Developmental Review, 27, 172–223.
12 Miller, J. D. (2004). Public understanding of, and attitudes toward, scientific research: What we know and what we need to know. Public Understanding of Science, 13, 273–294.
13 Shapin, S. (1992). Why the public ought to understand science-in-the-making. Public Understanding of Science, 1, 21–30
