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Dr. Sven van de Wetering has just stepped down as head of psychology at the University of the Fraser Valley and is a now an associate professor in the same department. He is on the Advisory Board of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. Dr. van de Wetering earned his BSc in Biology at The University of British Columbia, and Bachelors of Arts in Psychology at Concordia University, Master of Arts, and Ph.D. in Psychology from Simon Fraser University. His research interest lies in “conservation psychology, lay conceptions of evil, relationships between personality variables and political attitudes.” Here we discuss his background and views, part 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you consider the conventional epistemological framework in psychology?
Dr. Sven van de Wetering: This is of course hard to summarize in a few words, since we teach whole courses on epistemology to our undergraduates (though we call them “research methods” and “statistics”), and then make our graduate students study more epistemology. So it’s a complicated topic.
Despite this complexity, I may be able to point to a few basic assumptions. First, we tend to assume that there is no great mystery about what people do, only about why they do it. Hence, relatively little energy goes into purely descriptive work, whereas a tremendous amount goes into elucidating the causes of those simple, taken-for-granted behaviours. Thus, we may say that the goal of psychology is to attempt to explain human behaviour in terms of chains, or more likely webs, of cause and effect linkages.
A second mainstream assumption, one not shared by many environmental psychologists, is that these causes have the potential to be isolated from each other. That is, although all competent psychologists (and many incompetent ones as well) are aware that in many everyday situations a large number of causes may be operating at the same time, that it is nevertheless a viable analytical strategy to assume that this complex causal web can be usefully broken up into a number of simple, measurable causes, each of which can be experimented upon or otherwise examined individually.
A third mainstream assumption is that psychological propensities are relatively stable entities that do not change from time to time and place to place. You can see this if you look at the verb tenses in an APA-style article. The description of what was done in the experiment is written in the past tense, indicating (very properly) that the experiment was conducted in the past. The interpretation of the results, however, is written in the simple present indicating that the particular results obtained in the past was a particular manifestation of a broad, general, enduring core of human propensities. Please note that I endorsed the idea of an enduring human nature a few paragraphs back, so I don’t necessarily think this assumption is wrong (though I do think many psychologists’ lists of enduring human propensities are too long, and that a lot of psychological findings are the product of ephemeral culturally and historically situated propensities).
Jacobsen: If you could restructure the epistemological foundation of psychology, how would you do it? Furthermore, how would you reframe the approach to that foundation?
van de Wetering: I think the approach described above has some huge successes to its credit, so I certainly don’t want to see it scrapped or seriously revamped. What I would like to see is greater pluralism in epistemology, a recognition that we don’t really know what that psychological knowledge is, and that we should therefore be tolerant of a fairly wide range of epistemological approaches.
There’s a great section near the end of Kurt Danziger’s Constructing the Subject where Danziger points out that two basic classes of factors go into any psychological finding. One, of course, is the “real” world telling us how it works. The other is social factors (what some people might call artifacts) derived from the way the investigative situation has been set up and interpreted. Looking at any given psychological investigation or even any given psychological research program, it’s not clear how much, if any, of the core finding is “true” rather than a product of the investigative situation. However, if a bunch of people with very different epistemologies that have led them to set up very different investigative situations and interpret them using very different concepts and processes of reasoning nevertheless investigate the same approximate issue and come to the same basic conclusions, then it seems likely that the social factors largely cancel each other out and that that agreed-upon finding is derived from some fairly fundamental feature of the way the world works.
I always thought that this was a cool idea, but it only works if psychology comprises a wide variety of vibrant research programs based on a variety of very different epistemological foundations. A second prerequisite for this to work is that there have to be psychologists willing to look at work from all these different paradigms without to much prejudice to the effect that psychologists working in such-and-such a tradition are not “real” psychologists.
Jacobsen: If you had unlimited funding, what would you research?
van de Wetering: I’m not sure unlimited funding would change the general topics of my research all that much, but it would make the scope of the research projects much greater, and if the funding included course releases, I might also do more than one project a year.
My number one area of interest is summarized by the title of a paper I presented 11 years ago, “If everyone’s an environmentalist, why are SUVs selling so well?” There is a big disconnect between people’s stated concern for environmental issues and what they actually do, and I would love to explore that a little more. The question of discrepancies between attitudes and behaviours has been around since at least the 1930s and LaPiere, but in this applied context, there’s a lot more still to learn.
The other area I would love to research a little more is the study of trust, cynicism, and political participation. One of the most frightening trends I’ve seen lately is for young people to disengage from politics more or less completely, to the point where many people (not just the young) know nothing about what the politicians are up to in their name, and then either don’t vote or vote from a position of near total ignorance. The more widespread this becomes, the less politicians are held to account, with the result that the lying, corrupt scumbag politicians who turn people off politics in the first place find it easier to rise to the top without even having to pretend to be decent human beings. A better understanding of why this is happening would be a great thing.
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Original publication on www.in-sightjournal.com.
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