A past discussion led me to start reading Kurt Danziger’s “Reconstructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research”. Some of these ideas and analyses, for how scientific psychology came to be what it is, are revealing. In this thread I’ll share random bits. https://twitter.com/ivanflis/status/1266047181645111297

Chapter 1: Introduction.

sets expectations for what he’ll be addressing and the method (which is historical). One main point = scientific activity has, essentially, a social nature. Another main point = psychological science doesn’t deal with natural objects, but constructions

“It deals with test scores, rating scales, response distributions [...] and innumerable other items that the investigator does not just find but construct with great care”. Thus. scientific psychology is a domain of constructions.

Unlike the natural sciences, psychology couldn’t/didn’t/wasn’t able to claim objective insights based on its theoretical sophistication and so it relied on its methods to gain its scientific status

Resulting in concerns around methodological orthodoxy rather than theoretical orthodoxy, when evaluating/discussing research, culminating into methodological fetishism. I find this interesting, as it’s one explanation for the obsession with the hypothetico deductive approach

To the exclusion of other methods, and a lack of theoretical sophistication (or formal theory development) in psychology.

Another important point in this chapter is how the data production procedures in psychological science also include an essential social process, between the experimenter and the participant, which is often ignored by the researcher.

And when these social aspects have been recognized, they’ve been relegated to the status of artifacts (eg, demand characteristics), as “disturbances of the process of research that do not belong to its essential nature”. Danziger argues that this occurs because of researchers’

“pretense that psychological experiments are not in principle different from experiments in the natural sciences. Because in the latter case experiments are able to treat whatever they are investigating purely as a natural object,

“it is believed that human data sources must be treated in the same way if psychology is to function as a proper experimental science “. But this isn’t the case

Now, why did the experimental method prevail over introspection? According to Danziger, it isn’t the true overruling the wrong but simply about “rival conception of what was to count as scientific psychological knowledge”.

And the conception that won out had nothing to do with being the right method but, rather, was determined by social forces. This section nicely explains the point in detail:

And what maintains the status quo is that a research article, to be accepted by the research community, must conform to the standards of what constitutes acceptable knowledge in the field.

To me, this explains why psych journals want mechanisms & hypothesis tests, to the exclusion of observational studies.

Next comes Chapter 2: Historical Roots of the Psychological Laboratory.