After his lecture in the morning, Thomas joined our lab for an informal meeting. It started with introductions, each person briefly describing their latest project. Thomas listened attentively, always following up with questions about the experimental design, associated literature, or personal insights. When my turn came, I too shared my PIRE project, both excited and nervous to hear feedback from a leading expert in the field.
In the second half of the meeting, the real fun started. We talked about research and science much more generally, discussing prevailing issues and limitations. Sometimes the conversation was quite difficult for me to follow, given my limited experience in the field, but I found it all fascinating and thought-provoking. Below are some themes that came up:
- Publication bias. The problem that haunts not only bilingualism, and not only psychology, but all scientific fields. Only a small fraction of research that is conducted is actually officially published. This is due to a number of factors: no support found for the original hypothesis, the findings aren’t considered interesting enough, the findings contradict respected theories and scientists, and so on and so on… Because of this, reading scientific literature cannot give you a complete view of all the variety of current and past research.
- Scientific theories go through a kind of cycle of interest/controversiality. When a new theory is introduced, it is difficult to get it published, but there’s a lot of excitement because of its novelty. Then, it slowly gains more popularity and research-based support. With enough support, it becomes boring, it becomes the norm—the results are to be expected. At this point, a new and/or contradictory theory is introduced, drawing attention and excitement, and the cycle starts again.
- There is a fine balance between a theory or field of research being contradictory, controversial, prime for debate vs. too messy, confusing, complicated, and better be left alone altogether.
- Science is ideologically and politically influenced. The most obvious example: federal research grants determine which fields and questions are explored and which ones fall by the wayside.
- The subjects used for most of research are WEIRD, meaning Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. This sample is convenient, but hardly representative of the human experience; on the contrary, it’s a very small segment of the human population. Can the findings then truly be considered universal?
These were some of the topics that stood out to me, and I kept returning to them in my thoughts in the following days. Certainly, it is troubling to think of all the limitations of science, which is often idealized as fair, objective, and unbiased. But, in the words of Thomas: “Scientists are also people and are therefore subject to the laws of psychology.”
As daunting as it seems, talking about these problems is important—it’s the only way we could even begin to address them. I really appreciated having this honest discussion about the challenges still ahead, both for psychology and for science as a whole. But I am hopeful that we must persevere, as best as we can, in trying to make sense of this world.
To conclude this post I have another quote by Thomas Bak. The way he speaks is absolutely amazing, spewing words of wisdom all around. This particular quote I thought was deserving of a poster, and I do not regret a single minute I spent designing this thing.
