Abstract
In the target article, Doliński (2018, this issue) showed that empirical studies of “real” behaviour are an almost extinct species of research, judged from articles published in the most recent volume of JPSP (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). This finding continues a trend identified by Baumeister and colleagues ten years ago. The reliance on self-reports and rating scales can hardly be explained as an aftermath of the cognitive revolution in psychology, or a preoccupation with measurements and advanced statistical analyses, as Doliński suggests, but is more compatible with the ease of collecting questionnaire data, combined with the pressure to publish large multi-study papers and to obtain approval from ethical review boards. This development is further strengthened by the accessibility of online participant pools. An informal count showed that students participating for course credit were in 2006 involved more than 90% of empirical JPSP studies, as against 22.5% in 2017. In contrast, Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, non-existent in 2006, participated in 55.3% of the empirical studies published in the most recent volume. Parallel to this development the number of participants per study and the number of studies per article have vastly increased.
Highlights
The reliance on self-reports and rating scales can hardly be explained as an aftermath of the cognitive revolution in psychology, or a preoccupation with measurements and advanced statistical analyses, as Doliński suggests, but is more compatible with the ease of collecting questionnaire data, combined with the pressure to publish large multi-study papers and to obtain approval from ethical review boards
An informal count showed that students participating for course credit were in 2006 involved more than 90% of empirical JPSP studies, as against 22.5% in 2017
Thoughts about opinions, values and feelings, and thoughts about the participants’ own and others’ behaviours, rather than observations of how they behaved. Such thoughts were collected during brief episodes of sedentary behaviour involving nothing more physical than “finger movements” on a keyboard
Summary
Dariusz Doliński’s target article is intriguing and alarming. Social psychologists profess to study people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours in social settings, but examining all empirical studies presented in the most recent volume of JPSP (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), Doliński found only 6% reporting observations of “real behaviour”. Doliński intimates that social psychologists are so busy investigating presumable causes of behaviour that they forget to examine the actual behaviour that was to be explained This may in itself reflect a widespread human bias, reminiscent of a concern expressed four hundred years ago by Montaigne: “They leave things and runne for causes [...] They commonly beginne : How is such a thing done? The classical studies of “real” human behaviour in social psychological experiments (like the seminal studies by Festinger, Asch, Milgram and Schachter) were rather an outgrowth of the Gestalt tradition and the impact of Kurt Lewin and his disciples on the American scene (Patnoe, 1988) This tradition could be regarded as allied to, rather than opposed to a general shift away from stimulus-response models to cognitions (e.g., Korman, Voiklis, & Malle, 2015). Experiments of the Zimbardo, Milgram, or Darley and Latané type can nowadays only be staged by the entertainment industry in TV and film productions, not by researchers
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