Part of a series exploring how economic thought leads to cognition and cognitive behaviour
As a discipline current day psychology appears to have stalled; it’s difficult to find questions that it answers.
As with all fields productivity goes through peaks and troughs as discoveries are made and new avenues for development arise.
Currently functional neuroimaging provides a way forward for researchers to measure a biological response to stimuli. Previously the skull would have precluded this from being done ethically. Whereas before approaches at the forefront of development in the field considered the brain as a black box, these techniques allowed us to peer inside.
For all of the advances made over the last two decades, particularly with respect to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) psychology doesn’t seem to have advanced. We have a lot more studies. We have a lot more esoteric material. We have a lot more questions on whether we could reproduce these findings even if we wanted to.
But as a field psychology is built on weak foundations.
We don’t have definitions of our behaviour. It is no good finding activation in a brain scan if we can not say what this is a response to. We are prone to reverse inference but worse we are prone to creating our own inferences.
As an example, a former government advisor recently said that the addictiveness of fixed odds betting terminals to gamblers could be seen in a brain scan. The area of activation was in the visual cortex at the rear of the brain. It responds to most things that move. At risk of indulging in the behaviour that I’m illustrating as a betting man I would put it down to that rather than proof of addiction.
If psychology can’t answer the basic questions of itself what is the point of creating more complex ones?
There is no greater success in failing to answer a hard question than an easy one. Both results fail to give you correct answers.
This is where we are fooling ourselves.
We look to ever more convoluted scenarios to unlock the mystery of the brain. As if we find one magic piece of the puzzle everything will fall into place.
We have gotten the study of psychology backwards.
We are attempting to perform symphonies before we have learnt scales.
Photo credit: © Dana Rothstein