Shaping Psychology: Perspectives on Legacy, Controversy and the Future of the Field

by Tomasz Witkowski

Shaping Psychology is a unique collection of in-depth conversations with a selection of the most influential psychologists working today, conducted at the end of a decade that shook psychological science. They provide insights into the controversies at the heart of contemporary psychology, revealing a clash of visions of what psychological science is all about and what its future holds. They are candid on the crisis in psychology and explore its causes, consequences and how to overcome it. They also discuss challenges in the field, their careers, and the experiences that shaped their worldview.
Those interviewed include pioneers who have shaped psychology as we know it today and who represent a wide range of specializations, from research to mental health practice, mainstream psychology to critical psychology and neuroscience to the Open Science movement.
Elizabeth F. Loftus, Stanford University, USAJerome Kagan, Harvard University, USAMichael I. Posner, University of Oregon, USAScott O. Lilienfeld, Emory University, USARobert J. Sternberg, Cornell University, USARobert Plomin, King’s College London, UK Susan J. Blackmore, freelancer, UKJoseph E. LeDoux, New York University, USANoam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USARoy F. Baumeister, University of Queensland, AustraliaErica Burman, University of Manchester, UKBrian A. Nosek, University of Virginia, USAVikram H. Patel, Harvard Medical School, USADaniel Kahneman, Princeton University, USACarol A. Tavris, freelancer, USA

Genres: Psychology

340 pages, Paperback

Published November 3, 2020

About the author

Dr Tomasz Witkowski is a psychologist and science writer. He is the founder of the Polish Skeptics Club and specializes in debunking pseudoscience, particularly in the field of psychology, psychotherapy, and diagnosis. He is the author of numerous books dozens of scientific papers and over 100 popular articles (some of them are published in Skeptical Inquirer). As an expert in science-pseudoscience issues, he is frequently called by the media to comment on frauds and abuses witnessed in psychology, psychotherapy and other areas of scientific activity. In 2010 awarded as a Rationalist of the Year in Poland.

Reviews

[Matt Berkowitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good idea, not very good execution.

The concept of this book is great: assembling some of the leading psychologists of all-time to gather their thoughts on the history of psychology, its most important contributions, its greatest challenges, and controversies in the field. For the most part, Witkowski gives a well-rounded view of the field. The chapters with Robert Plomin, Daniel Kahneman, and Carol Tavris were my favourites, full of refreshing perspectives and humility. Common themes crept up in most interviews, including the replication crisis, psychology’s greatest achievements, each psychologist’s greatest achievements, the most interesting unanswered questions in psychology, and advice for young researchers.

Some interviewees struck me as pointless inclusions—for example, Jerome Kagan, who often gave way-too-brief answers with no depth, or offered criticisms of seminal contributions without much push back or providing necessary counter views; or Erica Burman, whose answers were full of impenetrable, jargon-heavy word salads, not making it easy on readers who are unfamiliar with “critical psychology” or “feminist psychology”.

Moreover, many of the questions were poorly conceived. The author seems to assume that the reader will be familiar with everything he is talking about, often giving no background on what it is he is asking about. For example, in the chapter with Erica Burman, Witkowski refers to a study by Susanna Cahalan without providing any explanation about what it is. Likewise, in the chapter with Daniel Kahneman, the author asks Kahneman what his views are on Robyn Dawes, without identifying which views are being referred to. This is just poor writing.

Notwithstanding all these issues, that was at times a fun, illuminating read. I just can’t recommend it due to the aforementioned issues.

[Aleksander Kalazny · Rating 5 out of 5]

A series of thought-provoking interviews with leading psychologists. Not all of them are equally inspiring, but I especially recommend the following chapters: Elizabeth F. Loftus, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Roy F. Baumeister, Brian A. Nosek. But most of the Vikram H. Patel.

[Sandeep Gautam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Detailed review on my blog: https://the-mouse-trap.com/2021/04/12...

[Totochelamouche · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is the scientific community open to people who want to work independently?
Yes and no. Yes, if the scholar writes and publishes an important, persuasive, well-researched book - such as Judith Rich Harris's (1998) brilliant The Nurture Assumption. No, because scientists can all too readily dismiss the ideas of someone who doesn't have the degrees and prestige that they do. Many of Harris's academic critics dismissed her arguments solely because she was an academic outsider - never mind that being an outsider was precisely what gave her the insights and perspective they lacked.

Likewise the final death knell to the nature-nurture debate: we are products of both, and of our environments. And of our peer groups. And of chance events.

A society that forces its members into desperate solutions is a non-viable society that needs replacing.

As a critical psychologist, I see psychology as having been very successful in getting itself allied with practices of power of all kinds. The project of critical psychology must be to expose and oppose this.

The question of what the proper domain of psychology is or could be outside the colonial, liberal bourgeois, heterosexist conditions that gave rise to it remains open.

Fortunately, there are some notable exceptions; Michelle Craske et al.'s (2014) recent work on applying basic clinical science research on inhibitory learning to the treatment of anxiety disorders comes to mind as an exemplary example.

Preregister your hypotheses and analysis plans, and be clear up front about which of your analyses are planned (confirmatory) and which are unplanned (exploratory). It's the best antidote available against confirmation bias and intellectual hubris, and it can be a humbling experience as an investigator.

Third, people are willing to keep doing the same thing.

How to be culturally and globally relevant and positively impactful at a time that science is more concerned with the degrees of freedom in your F test and whether you preregistered your hypotheses.

If you do what you believe is meaningful, you will get a lot of criticism. Learn to live with it.

The defense she has practiced for decades is Zen meditation - the cleansing of thoughts and concentration on the "here and now", a life without the false feeling of self.

Later, after ten years of an actual university job, I gave it up to return to being freelance. This time, when I gave up my job, it was to some extent about academia and the increasing workload, the growing number of less-able students, and the pointlessness of red tape and meetings.

Of course, I got a lot of flak from believers. Interestingly, when I was a believer I never experienced any nastiness from the skeptics, but when I became a skeptic I got lots of nastiness from the believers. It's the believers in the paranormal and life after death who are really vicious in the hate mail and everything.

If your subject requires a lab, you've got to be somewhere that has a lab, whether that's a university or a private institution or a corporation. You need the equipment and you need the money to do that. If you're a philosopher, or a psychologist like myself not in the lab, just thinking and reading and so on, then you just need a house to live in and you can get on with yourself.

It's evidence that has changed my mind about consciousness so many times, and that's what I would say about therapy. We need evidence that it works. What do you want from this therapy? Can we measure that change at the end? And if it doesn't help, that's an awful lot of money people are throwing at it.

For several years, nobody exerted pressure on him, forced him to publish or perform other boring academic duties. This freedom and ability to deal with the most unusual issues led to the creation and publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957, a book that revolutionized linguistics.

In 1996, Baumeister co-authored a review of the literature that concluded that it was "threatened egotism" that in fact led to aggression.

Many of my interviewees admit that they would never receive grants for doing research on what they are really interested in, because the preferences of the institutions responsible for making decisions about funding were completely different.

To go against established views and even to switch to new topics, which I've tried to do - that is difficult to get funding for.

Now, in the psychology of people there is the issue that people may change. How much people can change is an open question but, for example, people today are much more tolerant and less agressive than in the past.

It is a fundamental misunderstanding to see being critical as negative. Critique is vital for renewing and changing ideas and practices. - Erica Burman

I see these as historical documents that testify to the cultural and political preoccupations of their times (think of how "homosexuality" was only removed as a "pathology" in 1973, and by postal vote).

Personally, I do not find the psychiatric labels helpful or convincing (even if some people so labeled find some comfort in those labels, as we discuss elsewhere in this interview), and the medical model can disempower people and be used to deny their human rights, while the so-called treatments can disable people from being able to deal with their difficulties.

The rise (and rise) of ADHD under conditions of intensification of schooling and knowledge-based economies seems to support this. On the other hand, there is also no question but that these labels also produce the forms of experience they identify. Ian Hacking (drawing on Foucault) calls this the "looping effect," and describes this very well in terms of how we (children and adults) become invested in such descriptions (Hacking 1995).

Claims of irrelevance don't bother me much - I'd rather be understood to do nothing much, than do loads of damage.

However, it is the fate - under existing conditions of power relations - that such interventions become amenable to recuperation. Hence, having won the argument that people can "recover" from such experiences, we now have paradigms of recovery that are normalized that demand that people return to work and be compliant, economically active neoliberal citizens.

What the dimensional approach to mental health tells us is that, as with physical health, a huge amount of that spectrum can be managed with appropriate changes that one individual can make to their own lives, through adequate information, hope and informal approaches of support and care and, as we have shown in our work, through community health workers who are able to deliver brief psychological and social interventions.

Similarly, you also see other kinds of cultural factors operating in non-Western societies, which lead to mental health problems - for example, in India, there is a psychosomatic syndrome affecting young men characterized by severe anxiety about semen loss related to cultural attitudes about virility.

I got to know the problem of possession quite well in my country in the middle of Europe. Poland is one of the leaders in exorcisms in the world.

Adversarial collaboration depends on attempting to resolve differences of opinion through jointly conducted research. In this method the adversaries together develop a research procedure which they think will resolve the dispute. Kahneman has often expressed the hope that this method will become part of his legacy (Kahneman 2007).

You yourself wrote about it in your autobiography: as early as the 1960s, in order not to pollute the literature, you wanted to report only findings that you had replicated in detail at least once.

Tavris's first major trade book, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, was published in 1984, and brought good psychological science to bear on many popular but unvalidated ideas - such as the notion that expressing anger reduces it, or that suppressing anger causes ulcers.

Scientists used to think it was unseemly to profit from their research; the great Jonas Salk, on being asked if he would patent his polio vaccine, said, "Can you patent the sun?"

In fact, long ago at Psychology Today we reported a similar prank that had been played on leading psychology journals, which accepted a nonsensical article in jargon rather than the very same article written in clear English.

However, many researchers have worked in this contemporary paradigm of positive psychology, or at least they are perceived to be its representatives. As a result of their work, a number of interesting and noteworthy concepts were created, for example, the concepts of flow by Csikszentmihalyi (1990) or Kobasa's hardiness (Kobasa 1979). Do you treat all these achievements like the work of Seligman?
Of course not! Positive psychology has had much to contribute. I object only to the oversimplification and commodifying of many of its ideas. Flow is good, grit is good, hardiness is good - but they have exceptions and limitations; and efforts to market them to, say, improve student performance in school often turn out to be less successful than hoped. In April 2019, thanks to the efforts of psychologist James Coyne, PLOS ONE retracted an article about mindfulness (Gotink et al. 2015) after concluding that the authors had failed to acknowledge their commercial interests in the research, made errors of analysis, and, in Coyne's words, had written an "experimercial" pushing their institute's own products and services.

The result of these interests was the development, along with David Schkade, of the concept of "focusing illusion" (Schkade and Kahneman 1998) which explains the mistakes people make when estimating the effects of different scenarios on their future happiness. The illusion occurs when people consider the impact of one specific factor on their overall happiness, they tend to greatly exaggerate the importance of that factor, while overlooking the numerous other factors that would in most cases have a greater impact. Life satisfaction, in Kahneman's opinion, is to a significant degree the result of how far we fulfill our expectations and achieve our life goals, and not, as we might mistakenly believe, due to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

One of the very important issues in contemporary clinical psychology is the gap between science and psychotherapy. By that, I don't mean pseudo-therapy, which has nothing to do with science, but those modalities that are commonly considered evidence-based. In one study (Jonsson et al. 2014), it was found that only 3% of all studies on the effectiveness of psychotherapy included monitoring of negative side effects. In another, it turned out that most of the research is conducted by researchers who do not declare a conflict of interest (Lieb et al. 2016). Yet another meta-analysis showed that only 7% of all studies contain convincing evidence confirming the effectiveness of psychotherapy (Dragioti et al. 2017).

To some extent, your activities undermine traditional beliefs about the effectiveness of professional treatment, as through your research and practice you have proven that with the help of simple tips read in a book or given to them during a short online course, people without any qualifications can contribute to a significant improvement in the mental health of people suffering from serious disorders. Such results are also consistent with what Raj Persaud (1998) wrote in his book Staying Sane, showing that unskilled or novice healthcare professionals are often more effective than professionals.

Our mental health is like our physical health. If I were to ask the question, how many people have ever had a physical health problem in their lives, would you be surprised if you heard the number 100%? Of course not, because everybody has a physical health problem, especially if you consider that physical health problems extend from, for example, a common cold all the way to lung cancer. In the same way, if you think of mental health problems as a spectrum, ranging from acute distress, for example because your wife has died after 30 years of marriage, all the way through to actually being depressed in a sustained way for months and months after she died, then almost everybody has had a mental health problem in their lives.

However, some of them cannot be omitted. These certainly include writing and publishing in 2003 the book Where There Is No Psychiatrist, a mental health care manual primarily used in developing countries by non-specialist health workers and volunteers (Patel 2003).
On his request, the publisher entrusted the translation rights of his book on one condition - that they could use it as long as it was distributed free of charge. This book has since been translated into fifteen languages and helps spread the simple yet profound idea of mental health in over 70 countries of the world for all. A second, much-revised, edition was published in 2018 and, this time, the digital version of the book can be downloaded at no charge.

Let's say you've got to learn multiple methods, lab procedures and statistical approaches, that work for you while you are still in graduate school, so that when you get a job as a professor, you can just capitalize on those things. The first few years while you earn tenure you need to produce, so that's not a time to be exploring new methods. You explore new methods when you're earning a Ph.D., and then after you get tenure, you can explore new methods and try other things - that's what tenure's for. But to earn tenure you have to play the game by the rules, the way other people do it, and you have to have something already that works for you that you can reliably produce interesting results on.

My thought moving forward is to write big literature reviews and books, as I'm getting older now and I don't have that much time left. I want to tackle the big questions, so I'm also cutting back on working with Ph.D. students. You need to take care of them and have them do narrowly focused studies, then try to publish them so they can get jobs. You end up working with small questions and writing things up. Some papers are just "good" but there's pressure to publish, even if things didn't work out so well you want to salvage something from it.

Baumeister has authored a volume on self-regulation, Losing Control, has edited three editions of Handbook of Self-Regulation (Baumeister and Vohs 2004) and has devoted numerous experiments and journal papers to the issue. He also describes this research in a book, Willpower, authored with former New York Times journalist John Tierney.

Apart from self-esteem, Baumeister inquired about the reasons for self-defeating behavior. He concluded that there is no self-defeating urge (as some have thought). Rather, self-defeating behavior is either a result of trade-offs (enjoying drugs now at the expense of the future), backfiring strategies (eating a snack to reduce stress only to feel more stressed), or a psychological strategy to escape the self - where various self-defeating strategies are rather directed to relieve the burden of selfhood.

Every child who's not doing well in school is sent to see a pediatrician, and the pediatrician says: 'It's ADHD; here's Ritalin' (Kagan 2012b). In fact, 90% of these 5.4 million kids don't have an abnormal dopamine metabolism.

Is there any particular type of criticism aimed at your work that you feel is particularly serious and justified?

Their study, published in May 2003, came as a shock to many researchers and practitioners. It concluded that efforts to boost self-esteem failed to improve school performance. Nor did self-esteem help in the successful performance of various tasks. It didn't make people more likeable in the long term, nor increase the quality or duration of their relationships. It didn't prevent children from smoking, taking drugs, or engaging in "early sex." Self-esteem did, however, enhance mood and seem to support initiative (Baumeister et al. 2003).

In 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions About Human Behavior, written with Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry Beyerstein, Lilienfeld (2010) examines 50 common myths about psychology and provides readers with a "myth busting kit" to help learn critical thinking skills and understand sources of psychological myths, such as word of mouth, inferring causation from correlation, and misleading film and media portrayals. [...]
No less famous is his work Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience written along with his colleague Sally Satel (2013). It focuses in its entirety on demasking the misleading falsehoods and simplifications of neuroscience. The authors target such practices as functional magnetic resonance imaging (or neuroimaging) to "detect" moral and spiritual centers of the brain, which they call "oversimplified neurononsense."

[Martina Štammová · Rating 5 out of 5]

He promised controversy and he delivered.

As a psychology student, this book brought me to contemporary issues and possibly solutions to methodological problems of psychology. Other than that, a bunch of new interesting information and opinions of big names in psychology.

I recommend this book to all people with skeptic tendencies and interest in drama.