Love this analogy reframe. Thought provoking article. It seems to me given how flexibility and cultural adaptation are core tenets of the human experience (and even existence) that anything in the social science realm ought to lean toward the garden interpretation!
Thanks Colin. I appreciate it, and I agree. At the very least it seems like it should be the default hypothesis. There should probably be a pretty high barrier if you want to propose some latent construct that causes humans to act in a consistent way.
I was born an optimist but I am a trained pessimist. I find it annoying when I read the questions used for some type of research and immediately sense the research guiding the participant to an answer. This occurs a lot in psychological research mostly because there is no other way to obtain data from a human who has consented to the research. However, it also occurs in a lot of applied research in the more physical sciences. Since one of the objectives is an outcome worth some monetary gain, it is very human to allow some pre-conceptions to creep into the framing of the research. This leads to trivial answers or falsified results.
I completely see your point, and my take on it is that the only psychological characteristics that approach "law" are those deep seated, dare I say instinctual things, like the drive to survive. Very few people in the first world, in the recent past, have actually experienced their survival drive first hand. Therefore, loss aversion seems like a law in their frame of reference, because they have never experience a real law like survival. My guess is that is why veterans with PTSD find it so hard to relate to folks who are worried about how many "likes" they didn't get. In other words the the folks whose sense of loss is over things so trivial that the veteran can't stand to be around them.
Looking at studies with this viewpoint in mind goes a long way towards explaining the gap in repeatability.
Glad you find this framing useful. And yes, completely agree. I suspect there are some law-like things about the human brain. But I suspect that such laws would be so obvious to us that an experiment will not even be needed because it sounds like such common sense. Whereas all the subtle effects and tendencies in psychology textbooks are context sensitive framings of a situation and will have much larger issues with repeatability/replication
The most useful framing of this I read once was this: if it seems like a shocking or illogical result, it will probably be contradicted by further study; if it seems like it fits with normal experience (I really don't like the phrase common sense), it will probably stick.
I think that is somewhat true. I remember some forecasters on socialscienceprediction.org saying that they basically used a common sense heuristic. And Nassim Taleb says that asking your grandma is better than any academic theory.
But I think grandmas (and everyone else) can have very different beliefs about psychology, partly because our modern "common sense" is a product of a century of psychology studies. So its a little circular, and also, sometimes that common sense is overturned.
The "common sense" framing I use here is not perfect. Maybe one day I'll write an article on the different ways common sense can be helpful and meaningful, and ways in which it can lead astray.
I know you didn't ask, but here's my take on "common sense." We have instincts and reflexes, but we don't have any common knowledge that doesn't come from someone sharing with us some specific knowledge.
I see it most often used to describe something everyone reasonable should know. But there is nothing that everyone reasonable knows because none of us have the same experiences. Common sense would say "don't touch a hot stove" but this is the example I use to prove that none of us automatically knew this. We don't touch a hot stove because we learned, through pain, that we need to be careful of a hot stove. Or common sense says that if I drop something it will fall. I guess this is considered common sense since we assume everyone knows gravity exists. But every toddler learns about gravity through trial and error. "If I drop something, it will fall" is not common sense. We learned it.
I think what people mean when they say someone has common sense is that they think someone should have learned this by this point in their lives. So I would call that common knowledge. Or they mean: "this is an obvious logical conclusion that a reasonable person would make." This framing, however, leaves too many things based on experience and perspective and bias. Even in your essay, I think you use "common sense" when you mean a logical or reasonable conclusion.
My hesitation comes from working on teams on which the experienced members too often get frustrated with a new learner for not having "common sense" rather than recognizing that there was a point in which they once didn't know the thing that seems so obvious now. Ironic to the conversation about psychological research, there are several named cognitive biases that would describe why the existence of "common sense" is such a common belief and how often we are wrong about it.
All of this is pedantry and most people will (and maybe should) continue using common sense when they mean something else, which is ok. I have my own obsessions.
All that's fair, and I agree with it. I like the term common sense because it implies a level of obviousness that "logical" or "reasonable" conclusion don't. A conclusion is something you have to reason to. But common sense is something that is immediately apparent without having to think it through. But you're right to point out that "common sense" does imply a level of universality that I don't want to imply
As an analytical person (over-thinker), I am often shocked at how influential the cultivating (to use your garden analogy) of the environment for psychological tests is on the results. I am not an expert, just an interested reader, and am glad to find someone who talks about the biases that go into psychological studies.
I loved this, I have thought about it before but could never quite put it into words. The garden analogy is incredibly precise. Than you for writing this out.
Thanks for the comment. I tried and failed writing this post many times before I finally landed on the metaphor which made it all snap into place. I'm glad you found it precise.
My November post is going to apply the same metaphor to emotion, so stay tuned for that :)
Hey Jared, thx for sharing. Mixed feelings here. What is your point? That LinkedIn Gurus don’t read and accurately represent studies and papers? That hardly needs saying. Or that no real laws can be found in human nature and everything is always context dependent? I’m with you on context. But who are you targeting? Felt a bit like a way overstated and overcomplicated piece against oversimplified LinkedIn posts. Maybe I didn’t get it. Maybe it was the voice dictation you mentioned.
Sorry to hear it was confusing! Part of the reason for that might be that I was still developing the idea. I've since made more progress and hopefully can make it more clear by relating it to some others who have made similar points.
The central argument is against the idea that the brain consist of a series of input/output modules. Instead, behavior is the result of how a brain makes meaning out of a situation. (In Fodorian terms, the brain is a central system)
One major implication of this view is human agency. It's non-sensical to say that a bias/effect/tendency *caused* someone to do something. Instead, you have to understand behavior in terms of the *meaning* the person assigned to the situation. (Kevin Mitchell has a book on agency that makes this point)
A third major implication is methodological in that the current lab paradigm with its careful controls and replications is fundamentally on the wrong track. Two different labs doing the same experiment are not independently verifying a law of human nature, but independently prompting the same behavior. Fodor actually thought science would be impossible on a "Central System" because there was nothing to be falsified (too much agency for Popperian science). However, Barry Schwartz has noted that Learned Automaticity can still be studied. Similarly, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Jordan Theriault have laid out a philosophy of science they call Relational Realism which shows how science can be possible when generalizable laws are nowhere to be found.
Hopefully what I've described shows that I'm wrestling with ideas much deeper than what is spouted by LinkedIn gurus. This essay is really a challenge to the entire mainstream psychology paradigm. A challenge that others have also pointed out, but which I was not aware of when I wrote this.
Thx for the explanation. Funny, I didn’t realize this post was almost one year old when I read it this morning. I don’t actually remember how it got in my feed.
But sounds a lot more interesting now. I assume you mean Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are as the book on agency?
Glad I could clarify. Maybe it's time for an updated version
It's Mitchel's second book called Free Agents which he wrote because some assumed his first book (Inate) was arguing for some kind of strict biological determinism
Love this analogy reframe. Thought provoking article. It seems to me given how flexibility and cultural adaptation are core tenets of the human experience (and even existence) that anything in the social science realm ought to lean toward the garden interpretation!
Thanks Colin. I appreciate it, and I agree. At the very least it seems like it should be the default hypothesis. There should probably be a pretty high barrier if you want to propose some latent construct that causes humans to act in a consistent way.
I was born an optimist but I am a trained pessimist. I find it annoying when I read the questions used for some type of research and immediately sense the research guiding the participant to an answer. This occurs a lot in psychological research mostly because there is no other way to obtain data from a human who has consented to the research. However, it also occurs in a lot of applied research in the more physical sciences. Since one of the objectives is an outcome worth some monetary gain, it is very human to allow some pre-conceptions to creep into the framing of the research. This leads to trivial answers or falsified results.
I completely see your point, and my take on it is that the only psychological characteristics that approach "law" are those deep seated, dare I say instinctual things, like the drive to survive. Very few people in the first world, in the recent past, have actually experienced their survival drive first hand. Therefore, loss aversion seems like a law in their frame of reference, because they have never experience a real law like survival. My guess is that is why veterans with PTSD find it so hard to relate to folks who are worried about how many "likes" they didn't get. In other words the the folks whose sense of loss is over things so trivial that the veteran can't stand to be around them.
Looking at studies with this viewpoint in mind goes a long way towards explaining the gap in repeatability.
Glad you find this framing useful. And yes, completely agree. I suspect there are some law-like things about the human brain. But I suspect that such laws would be so obvious to us that an experiment will not even be needed because it sounds like such common sense. Whereas all the subtle effects and tendencies in psychology textbooks are context sensitive framings of a situation and will have much larger issues with repeatability/replication
The most useful framing of this I read once was this: if it seems like a shocking or illogical result, it will probably be contradicted by further study; if it seems like it fits with normal experience (I really don't like the phrase common sense), it will probably stick.
I think that is somewhat true. I remember some forecasters on socialscienceprediction.org saying that they basically used a common sense heuristic. And Nassim Taleb says that asking your grandma is better than any academic theory.
But I think grandmas (and everyone else) can have very different beliefs about psychology, partly because our modern "common sense" is a product of a century of psychology studies. So its a little circular, and also, sometimes that common sense is overturned.
The "common sense" framing I use here is not perfect. Maybe one day I'll write an article on the different ways common sense can be helpful and meaningful, and ways in which it can lead astray.
I know you didn't ask, but here's my take on "common sense." We have instincts and reflexes, but we don't have any common knowledge that doesn't come from someone sharing with us some specific knowledge.
I see it most often used to describe something everyone reasonable should know. But there is nothing that everyone reasonable knows because none of us have the same experiences. Common sense would say "don't touch a hot stove" but this is the example I use to prove that none of us automatically knew this. We don't touch a hot stove because we learned, through pain, that we need to be careful of a hot stove. Or common sense says that if I drop something it will fall. I guess this is considered common sense since we assume everyone knows gravity exists. But every toddler learns about gravity through trial and error. "If I drop something, it will fall" is not common sense. We learned it.
I think what people mean when they say someone has common sense is that they think someone should have learned this by this point in their lives. So I would call that common knowledge. Or they mean: "this is an obvious logical conclusion that a reasonable person would make." This framing, however, leaves too many things based on experience and perspective and bias. Even in your essay, I think you use "common sense" when you mean a logical or reasonable conclusion.
My hesitation comes from working on teams on which the experienced members too often get frustrated with a new learner for not having "common sense" rather than recognizing that there was a point in which they once didn't know the thing that seems so obvious now. Ironic to the conversation about psychological research, there are several named cognitive biases that would describe why the existence of "common sense" is such a common belief and how often we are wrong about it.
All of this is pedantry and most people will (and maybe should) continue using common sense when they mean something else, which is ok. I have my own obsessions.
All that's fair, and I agree with it. I like the term common sense because it implies a level of obviousness that "logical" or "reasonable" conclusion don't. A conclusion is something you have to reason to. But common sense is something that is immediately apparent without having to think it through. But you're right to point out that "common sense" does imply a level of universality that I don't want to imply
As an analytical person (over-thinker), I am often shocked at how influential the cultivating (to use your garden analogy) of the environment for psychological tests is on the results. I am not an expert, just an interested reader, and am glad to find someone who talks about the biases that go into psychological studies.
Dear Jared, can we translate part of this article into Spanish with links to you and a description of your newsletter?
Por supuesto! Sería un honor. My Spanish is pretty rusty, but I'd be happy to look over the translation when its done.
Many thanks, Jared.
I loved this, I have thought about it before but could never quite put it into words. The garden analogy is incredibly precise. Than you for writing this out.
Thanks for the comment. I tried and failed writing this post many times before I finally landed on the metaphor which made it all snap into place. I'm glad you found it precise.
My November post is going to apply the same metaphor to emotion, so stay tuned for that :)
Hey Jared, thx for sharing. Mixed feelings here. What is your point? That LinkedIn Gurus don’t read and accurately represent studies and papers? That hardly needs saying. Or that no real laws can be found in human nature and everything is always context dependent? I’m with you on context. But who are you targeting? Felt a bit like a way overstated and overcomplicated piece against oversimplified LinkedIn posts. Maybe I didn’t get it. Maybe it was the voice dictation you mentioned.
Sorry to hear it was confusing! Part of the reason for that might be that I was still developing the idea. I've since made more progress and hopefully can make it more clear by relating it to some others who have made similar points.
The central argument is against the idea that the brain consist of a series of input/output modules. Instead, behavior is the result of how a brain makes meaning out of a situation. (In Fodorian terms, the brain is a central system)
One major implication of this view is human agency. It's non-sensical to say that a bias/effect/tendency *caused* someone to do something. Instead, you have to understand behavior in terms of the *meaning* the person assigned to the situation. (Kevin Mitchell has a book on agency that makes this point)
A second major implication is that all the effects we collect in social psychology and behavioral science textbooks are largely culturally specific framing effects (Kenneth Gergen makes a similar point in "Social psychology as history"). This means generalization of Behavioral Science findings is a completely different endeavor than many think, and that efforts such as "nudge cartography" are based on a flawed ontology of behavior and context. (see my argument here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jaredtpeterson_i-am-sure-i-will-write-this-up-at-some-point-activity-7427015570681761792-eOv5?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=android_app&rcm=ACoAABK6FRABcPH-5LSwx90k9ZEEMRUA9LkqoHs&utm_campaign=copy_link)
A third major implication is methodological in that the current lab paradigm with its careful controls and replications is fundamentally on the wrong track. Two different labs doing the same experiment are not independently verifying a law of human nature, but independently prompting the same behavior. Fodor actually thought science would be impossible on a "Central System" because there was nothing to be falsified (too much agency for Popperian science). However, Barry Schwartz has noted that Learned Automaticity can still be studied. Similarly, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Jordan Theriault have laid out a philosophy of science they call Relational Realism which shows how science can be possible when generalizable laws are nowhere to be found.
Hopefully what I've described shows that I'm wrestling with ideas much deeper than what is spouted by LinkedIn gurus. This essay is really a challenge to the entire mainstream psychology paradigm. A challenge that others have also pointed out, but which I was not aware of when I wrote this.
Thx for the explanation. Funny, I didn’t realize this post was almost one year old when I read it this morning. I don’t actually remember how it got in my feed.
But sounds a lot more interesting now. I assume you mean Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are as the book on agency?
Glad I could clarify. Maybe it's time for an updated version
It's Mitchel's second book called Free Agents which he wrote because some assumed his first book (Inate) was arguing for some kind of strict biological determinism
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691226231/free-agents?srsltid=AfmBOoqmXXwyKJk8abTjyzf_2mnQ6Z10OyrwkKCN-nFDgGKI_5EbYNGr