The Council of Social Psychological Advisers?
Continuing the thread on theories in social psychology and those in evolutionary psychology, there’s an interesting point/counterpoint over at Edge.org: Steve Pinker recently replied to some remarks by Tim Wilson. (This exchange was pointed out by a commenter on the last post. Thanks.) Wilson has now replied to Pinker’s reply. (I have written down a few thoughts here, but I think readers of this blog would enjoy having a look at the entire exchange.)
To start it all, Tim Wilson, the well-known social psychologist, was discussing his field, generally, and toward the end of his remarks, brought up evolutionary psychology, which, he says, “has become a dominant force in the field.” (In his subsequent reply to Pinker, he wrote that the field is still “is in its infancy,” which means that the field is still a baby yet already dominant, which seems to imply that it will be mighty indeed when it is all grown up.) Anyway, after asserting the field’s dominance, he then showed that he doesn’t really understand it, writing:
Evolutionary theory has its use. Of course, evolution is true, as a general theory of how the human species evolved. As an explanation for current social behavior, it can be a useful heuristic, if it can generate hypotheses that we would not have come up with otherwise that can then be tested with rigorous methods. But too often, there’s a very loose kind of theorization that goes on, where people just tell a story and assume that it’s true because it kind of makes sense.
Of course, evolutionary psychologists don’t assume their theories are true because they make sense, a misunderstanding about how hypotheses about function are tested. Wilson hedges with “too often,” but his criticism is a basic one, having to do with the epistemic roots of the field. He suggests that he could make up a story that the color of blood is adaptive: red blood attracts attention, and hence licking of wounds, facilitating healing, and – this is the important part – that it’s not possible to distinguish this (silly) idea from Pinker’s byproduct hypothesis, that blood is red as a side effect of blood’s hemoglobin-carrying properties. As Pinker articulates in his usual clear prose, hypotheses about function can indeed be tested against byproduct claims:
To test an adaptive hypothesis, one needs to set out the engineering specs of an optimal system for attaining the specified goal (which ultimately must be a subgoal of reproduction) in the organism’s environment. Crucially, to avoid circularity, the engineering analysis must invoke principles independent from the trait one is trying to explain—principles which may come, depending on the trait, from physics, chemistry, ecology, physiology, population genetics, game theory, network theory, the theory of computation, and so on. Then one empirically compares the engineering specs with the actual properties of the trait in question: the closer the match (particularly for improbable features of the trait), the greater the confidence that the nonrandom organization of the trait is the product of a history of selection.
Wilson, in his reply, seems to concede the broad point that one can, in fact, test adaptationist hypotheses. But not, however, about behavior, saying that the disagreement “is really about the value of evolutionary theory in explaining social behavior.” (I find this somewhat interesting. Wilson does not give a reason that one can apply the logic Pinker articulates to forms rather than behavior.)
Further, in his reply, Wilson has a new issue. He challenges Pinker’s suggestion (drawing on Buss, 2003) that evolutionary psychology has produced novel predictions. He says that these predictions fail the novelty test. Why? He writes (regarding sex differences in opposite-sex friendships): “Does Steve mean to imply that it wasn’t until evolutionary psychology took hold in the in 1970s and 1980s that we discovered that there was such a phenomenon? For many of the items it is not the phenomenon that is novel but the explanation of it.” (His emphasis.)
He seems to be suggesting – and maybe I’m misunderstanding – that there is limited value in novel explanations for previously known phenomena. (Things would have gone hard for Newton had Wilson been around, what with apples no doubt frequently already been seen falling from trees. All Newton did was provide a novel explanation. And it seems likely people noticed that the sun arced across the sky before Copernicus ever mulled why this might be.)
I might add that I find this new charge particularly interesting in the context of the one of the examples he holds up in his initial remarks, Jon Haidt’s “moral foundations theory,” which he (Wilson) glosses as the idea that “liberals may have somewhat different moral foundations than conservatives.” Does Wilson mean to imply that it wasn’t until his colleague at the University of Virginia began working in this area that we discovered that there was such a difference?
And this brings me back to where I began. The two theories that Wilson features in his initial post are Haidt’s along with “self-affirmation theory,” one of the large body of “self-“ theories in social psychology. Here is Pinker’s view of this idea, narrowly, and theorizing in social psychology more broadly:
But the field has been self-handicapped with a relentless insistence on theoretical shallowness: on endless demonstrations that People are Really Bad at X, which are then “explained” by an ever-lengthening list of Biases, Fallacies, Illusions, Neglects, Blindnesses, and Fundamental Errors, each of which restates the finding that people are really bad at X. Wilson, for example, defines “self-affirmation theory” as “the idea that when we feel a threat to our self-esteem that’s difficult to deal with, sometimes the best thing we can do is to affirm ourselves in some completely different domain.” Most scientists would not call this a “theory.” It’s a redescription of a phenomenon, which needs a theory to explain it.
Wilson is very fond of his field, which, he says “is full of empirically-grounded insights that allow us to explain and predict human behavior.” He compares this to evolutionary psychology, which he seems to take to be nothing more than the claim that “natural selection made people that way.” Indeed, he is so proud of social psychology that he is confident that his discipline is better able to solve today’s problems than either evolutionary psychology or economics and, further, that a competition among the three fields is, really, “no contest.”
Well, there is a sense, I suppose, in which I might actually agree with him on that…
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