David Pinsof writes: We love to be interesting. It captures people’s attention. It makes us feel smart and important. Psychologists compete to generate the most surprising, gee-whiz findings—which are the ones most likely to be false—so they can appear "interesting" to their peers. The stranger the finding, the less likely other plebeians are to believe it, which helps psychologists distinguish themselves from the plebeians.
Then there are the positive psychologists, who study how to be happy, even though nobody wants to be happy. These scholars aren’t so much interested in dunking on people or showing off how interesting they are; instead, they want to signal how nice they are. Happy people are friendly and easy to get along with, and we’ve picked up on this association. So people study happiness as a way of saying, “Hey look at me, I’m such a nice person.”
Then there are the political psychologists, who are mostly liberal, who study all the ways in which liberals are morally and intellectually superior to conservatives, despite the fact that liberals and conservatives have the same human nature, which includes the tendency to view outgroup competitors as morally and intellectually inferior.
None of this should surprise us. Like all humans, psychologists’ motives are more unflattering than they let on. They’re not noble seekers of wisdom and virtue, but normal, flawed humans, just like the rest of us.
If we want to improve social science, we must come to terms with this fact. The people studying humans are also humans, and that’s a problem. Zebras don’t study other zebras, and if they did, they would be very biased. For the same reason, humans are pretty bad candidates for studying humans. What to do?
Part of the solution is having more rigorous theories—ideally ones that leverage insights from evolutionary biology—that give psychologists less wiggle room to bullshit in their theorizing. Part of the solution is having better incentives for uncovering true information, rather than “interesting” information, like prediction markets, adversarial collaborations, pre-registration of hypotheses, and greater funding and support for replications. And part of the solution, of course, is psychologizing psychologists, so we know what they’re up to.
Which reminds me: what about me? Shouldn’t I psychologize the person who’s psychologizing the psychologists? I should, and I will. My motives are just as unflattering. I’m human too. Making other psychologists look bad makes me look good by comparison. It would be surprising if that fact did not tickle my dopaminergic neurons, vainglorious primate that I am.
