Insight
The phenomenon of insight has long been an object of psychological study though its conceptualization has varied when examined through different theories and in in different situations. Our project attends to clinical insight broadly understood as a person’s self-awareness, a subjective experience of the so-diagnosed about which clinicians seek to know. Although modest in its inception, the idea of studying insight and experience evolved into a multi-part, heterodox project whose investigators include a clinical psychologist, Sarah Kamens; historian of science, Scott Phelps; Matt and myself, and 5 intrepid undergraduates who collectively represent 5 majors, Alexandra Riedel, Ruth Chartoff, Jules Chabot, Mary McAllister, and Melissa Dzierlatka. The historical portion of our project has located of shifts in the entity’s conception, including a recent diminishing of defining insight in terms of self-understanding and increasing focus on defining insight as one’s awareness that he has a psychological problem. This shift corresponds with increased use of standardized measures of clinical insight and the rise of psychopharmacological treatments. Our current exploration focusses on the differences in expert-centered and person-centered accounts of insight and planning empirical studies with diagnosed individuals. This multi-disciplinary project is not intended to determine what exactly “insight” really is. Instead it traces the ways it is taken up by the various actors and in different situations — and, ultimately, considers what enactments of insight might better serve the care and recovery of those people so diagnosed.
Replication
The reproducibility of an experimental finding is held to be a cornerstone of science. Yet over the last decade researchers have been unable to replicate a considerable number of experiments, including classic studies. While some researchers find these failed replications to be an unavoidable result of the context sensitivity of psychological phenomena, other researchers believe that many of the failures are due to technical and procedural inadequacies of the original experiment. Whatever the causes of these replication failures, the very possibility that psychology’s experimental findings are unreliable is a matter of serious concern and has engendered considerable debate, media attention, and numerous ventures to improve experimental practices. Warranting greater attention are the underlying assumptions about the nature of the objects being examined (psychological phenomena) and of the observers (experimental psychologists). A working paper (Derksen and Morawski) explores the assumptions about the objects, finding that there is no consensus about psychology’s objects and proposing the possibility that different research programs are generating different phenomena. Common to much of the ‘replication crisis’ literature are assumptions about the observer’s objectivity, and several studies (Morawski) indicate historical and current variations in notions of the experimenter’s psychology and, thus, her capacity to be objective.
Debriefing
Debriefing is a core ethics code in psychology research: as stated in the American Psychological Association’s (APA) 1973 Ethical Principles, it “requires the investigator to provide the participant with a full clarification of the nature of the study and to remove any misconceptions that may have arisen” (Principle 8). Yet since the 1945 invention of the word to describe wartime exchange of information, the understanding of the meaning, functions, and importance of debriefing have varied. Our project entails an excavation of the ways research psychologists have understood and used debriefing over the last half century. The study includes examination of the implicit psychologies that researchers have employed to explain what occurs during the debriefing process.
Research Subjects
Human participants serve as primary data producers in psychological research yet what we know about these persons and their laboratory experiences is largely limited to numeric representations given in scientific reports. Little is known about their thoughts, unscripted actions, and transactions with experimenters. Our project begins with the premise that experiments entail lively and complex (sometimes intimate or stressful) interactions between experimenter and subject. We are examining both archival materials containing evidence of subjects’ experimental engagements and also published experimental reports that offer clues to lively experimental relations.
Obedience and Resistance
Stanley Milgram’s experimental demonstration of individual’s susceptibility to obedience serve as a parable of postwar civility, and their pedagogic, reformist message continues to be repeated in textbooks and the media. While the studies and later recounting provide a clear and robust definition of obedience, far less attention is paid to disobedience, dissent and resistance. Our study involves a re-analysis of Milgram’s experimental data and laboratory notes, examining the various ways that subjects resisted the scripted experimental call to obey authority.
“Bogus Pipeline Paradigm”
In 1971 researchers E.E. Jones and H. Sigall surmised, “many psychologists for many years … must have had fantasies about discovering a direct pipeline to the soul (or some nearby location)” They undertook invention of a pipeline, albeit fake, to the soul. The invention, the “bogus pipeline,” entailed assemblage of machine parts and informing subjects that the machine accurately detected a person’s inner thoughts and feelings. Our study traces the machine’s changing functions from detection of hidden thoughts to surveillance of undesirable behaviors; we also examine experimenters’ assumptions that subjects feign, ingratiate and conceal.