Päivi Seppälä
Affiliation: University of Helsinki
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: Implicit bias, History of social psychology, External validity
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 18:00
Location: GSSR Plenary Hall (268)
View the full session: Methodology
I argue that the assumption of direct applicability of psychological research results is problematic because it can result in overhyping research results as well as accusations of bad science when the hype turns out to be based on empirically ill-supported theories. I claim that the hype and failures of implicit bias theories as well as implicit bias trainings can be fruitfully analyzed as a case of the problematic consequences of the assumption of direct applicability.
Historians and sociologists of psychology (Danzinger, 1990; Faye, 2012; Rose 1996) have claimed that, since 1920s, there has existed a societal market for the psychological “knowledge products” in Anglo-American countries. This means that psychological theories, especially the research results of experimental studies, have been assumed to be applicable to, as well as to describe and explain phenomena in everyday contexts. Because of this psychology has been considered to contribute practical solutions to various social contexts such as organizational management, advertisement and education. Rose (1996, p. 87) has described psychology as a “generous discipline” that has a “capacity to lend itself ‘freely’ to others who will ‘borrow’ it because it offers to them in a way of justification and guide to action.”
In this presentation I will formulate the dynamics between psychological knowledge and society from the point of view of philosophy of social sciences. I view the dynamics via the concept of direct applicability. I use the concept of “direct applicability” to refer to the assumption that psychological laboratory-based experiments capture universal psychological phenomena and causal dependencies which exist also in every-day contexts outside the experimental situations. Therefore, it is possible that the research results concerning the phenomena and causal dependencies can be applied also by non-psychologists to these every-day contexts for the purposes of intervening in the phenomena. Psychological knowledge is assumed to be applicable without the need to explicitly asking under what conditions the phenomena and causal dependencies occur and whether the every-day context is sufficiently similar to these conditions.
From philosophy of social sciences perspective, the simultaneous triumph of experimentalism combined with the idea that psychology’s laboratory-based experimental research results provide practical solutions to everyday problems, seems paradoxical. The laboratory conditions and real-world contexts seem to differ substantially in the causal factors that are present (or absent). Therefore, it is reasonable to argue that one needs other kinds of evidence besides the individual lab studies to infer that the lab study results are applicable to the real-world contexts where the factors absent from the original lab study are present (Guala, 2012; Jiménez-Buedo & Russo, 2021).
Psychologist and social psychologists have not been unaware of this problem. For instance, in the 60’s and early 70’s, several social psychologists questioned the practical relevance of research results that the laboratory and statistics based experimental method produces (Faye, 2012). Despite that psychologist have occasionally acknowledged the epistemological problem underlying the assumption of direct applicability, the assumption seems to have persisted these moments of disciplinary crises to re-emerge in times of a new crisis. For instance, as recently as 2021, Tal Yarkoni argued that there is “a generalizability crisis” in psychology because psychologists tend to overgeneralize the results of their studies beyond what the original experimental set-up and statistical results allow to infer.
In this presentation, I will show that the assumption of generalizability is a fruitful analytical tool to view the hype and backlashes of implicit bias research. I will argue that in implicit bias research the assumption of direct applicability has been an epistemically troublesome assumption. I will analyze in detail how the assumption is visible in the research articles of the first advocates of “implicit social cognition” (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). I also analyze how the concept of implicit bias was welcomed in the context of management science and how it was adopted in business consultancy selling implicit bias trainings. The shifts from implicit bias research into management science and business consultancy depended on the assumption of direct applicability.
I will also discuss the criticisms of implicit bias research that have focused on the lack of external validity of implicit bias (e.g. Tetlock & Mitchell, 2009). I argue that the criticisms can be interpreted as attempts to epistemically question the assumption of direct applicability that has informed not only implicit bias research but has been the core assumption in development of psychology and social psychology. Hence, implicit bias research can be analyzed in a wider historical disciplinary context than the critics of implicit bias have previously done (e.g. Tetlock & Mitchell, 2009; Machery 2022). The wider historical context also makes it clear that the dynamics of the hype and the subsequent backlashes of implicit bias research do not entirely represent an individual case of failed science communication, as for instance Gawronski, Brownstein and Madva (2022) have argued. The backlash is better explained as a case in which the assumption of direct applicability becomes visible as an assumption that forms the epistemic grounds for psychology’s and social psychology’s status as reliable providers of “psychological knowledge products”.
This presentation presents a novel approach in analyzing the debate of implicit bias research. I place the debate into a wider historical context and show that the debate is as an example of a more general epistemic problem in the relationship between psychological knowledge and its users. By placing the debate into a wider historical context, I argue that the “assumption of direct applicability” is a not merely a useful analytical tool for philosophers and historians of science, but it can also help psychologists to reflect the epistemic assumptions under which their research is transferred into society as research-based practices and insights.