Academic recycling

In his 1998 article A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry, Eric Kandel spelled out a convincing case for a more biological, brain-based approach to psychiatry, and by extension psychological research as well. The intervening years have widely vindicated this program, in part thanks to the explosive growth of functional neuroimaging. But other voices at other times have sounded a note which is cautionary and contrasting.

One example is the article Is Psychology the Science of Behavior? by Marion White McPherson, published in the 1992 American Psychologist special issue on the history of American psychology. The conception of this article may have predated the contemporary explosion of brain-based psychological research; the comments are targeted at the longstanding behaviorist program, but McPherson's comments on potential risks of reductionism are still relevant in the new domain.

The article begins with a speculative history of reductionism in behavior science. Psychology is not unique among the sciences in having evolved from a non-scientific endeavor, but this transition is recent enough that some awkwardness is still visible. Behavior was chosen over mind as a focus of investigation to escape the morass of spirit and theology; quantifiable elements of behavior became the primary focus of psychology. McPherson is, in my opinion, unduly critical of these pioneers for filtering their experimentation thus. She argues that the extreme filtering of behavior down to a few numbers for each experiment betrays the true complexity of behavior, wryly commenting "the practice of defining psychology as the science of behavior while neglecting it is difficult to understand." But the scientific method requires quantification of some sort, and it is no crime for any individual investigator to define the scope of her experiment in whatever way is necessary for logistical and analytical tractability.  

Where I begin to agree with McPherson is that this practice over time has seduced us into a complacency about the complexity of real problems. In the same year, social psychologist John Booth Davies published The Myth of Addiction, a book using attribution theory to explore how the science (or, in some cases, mythology) of addiction has fallen prey to oversimplifications and even misunderstandings which could have serious consequences for treatment and prevention. Attribution theory is the study of the factors that influence how people come up with explanations for things. One of the central points is that statements are often functional rather than representational. If I ask you "How are you today?" it is likely that the answer you choose to give will be based at least as much on what kind of social interaction you want to foster as it will be on some kind of objective, factual answer to that question. Indeed, there may not be single, objectively true answers to questions about human experience and behavior, and it is even less likely that such facts as might exist will be reliably accessible to introspection. In the book, Davies points out that much of addiction lore is based on the statements made by people in treatment for addiction. He describes research carried out using undercover investigators "on the street", who ask addicts questions about their use and situations and receive answers quite in conflict with the answers received from the same people in a clinical setting.

It would be merely a different sort of reductionist error to interpret this as demonstrating that addicts lie to clinicians (although undoubtedly this does happen sometimes). The point is that addicts, like anyone else, make statements for functional reasons, which means there is indeed important psychological information present, but the important information may not be just the superficial factual content of the statement.  

Of course, this adds another layer of difficulty to the scientist's work. But this is a challenge to rise to, not an obstacle to be daunted by. The program of study of biological correlates of behavior has been immensely successful exactly because of the incredible ingenuity the scientific community has mustered in overcoming the difficulties of, say, functional neuroimaging. Our next task is to bring this same level of ingenuity to understanding the full complexity of human mind, emotion and behavior. From the present perspective it may not seem clear how to do this; the kind of ingenuity needed to understand biology and machinery is quite different from that needed to understand emotion (which might better be called "insight" than ingenuity), and it seems to be unusual for them to coexist. Nonetheless, the wide interest in interdisciplinary programs like affective neuroscience, social cognitive neuroscience, and so on suggests that this new program is well underway.