In the spotlight, fact and fiction in psychology

We are psychologically biased to love a good story, but what about the facts?

We are psychologically biased to love a good story, but it’s always worth a fact check.

Thomas Eddison is famous for inventing lightbulbs, he invented the incandescent lightbulb with the filament, that’s an important detail because lightbulbs (albeit rubbish lightbulbs) did exist before incandescent.

Today’s blog is a delve into the glow, flow and facts of storytelling in psychology. Apologies in advance for the croaky voice, I am recovering from covid.

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

Eddison is celebrated for not giving up on his bright ideas, he persevered, which makes him the perfect poster boy for entrepreneurialism. True, he held lots of patents, but it was an inventor named Lewis Latimer who got those patents production ready for manufacture. Latimer found a way to extend the lifespan of the filament bit of the bulb.  

Why am I talking about lightbulbs and fact checking on a psychology blog? I was recently asked about the books I'd recommend to somebody who wanted to get started with psychology.  I hesitated because it depends on your appetite for the truth. If you want a story that makes science easy to digest you need to understand a few things, some voices are amplified because of privilege, some science is bad, and good storytelling (whether accurate or not) is profitable.

Experiments conducted in labs are written up in a format that requires some scientific skill to decipher, it’s a shorthand that you must learn when you become a psychologist, it takes lots of practice to write in this way, and to do it well, something I’m still on a learning journey with.

Scientific findings should be valid, it should be easy to understand the methods used so studies can be replicated – When I read a paper I want to know if this is the result of one study, or multiple studies, what’s the real world application? Or is the paper theoretical?  the test might only apply to a specific group of people too.

We also have to be aware of positive results bias, scientists, historically at least, are more likely to submit, or editors accept, positive than null (negative or inconclusive) results.

There are a lot of mouse studies that get into the news, and we should always be cautious of comparing what happens to a mouse as being representative of the human population.

And so on, Science will always evolve faster than the ability to get things published, but just like journalism and booking writing, some scientists voices are amplified more than others, and it’s not always obvious where the source of the information is derived.

I have a great example sitting on my desk. A book that I dip in and out of regularly is called Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Mihayl was a Hungarian psychologist who initially wrote a book in 1975 called ‘beyond boredom and anxiety’, it’s a dense read, I haven’t bothered myself. But I do know that in this book he introduced the term flow, to describe the experiences of pleasure seekers and professionals who were engaged in challenging activities that appeared to have low external rewards. For example, he spoke to mountain climbers, chess players and doctors.

Mihayl wasn’t the first psychologist to be interested in flow experiences. Maslow in 1964 talked about ‘peak experiences and Laski in 1961 referred to ecstatic experiences. Mihayl tool a more systematic approach to unpack what this meant, he interviewed different groups of people to understand what their subjective experiences were. You can draw your own conclusions about the social class of the groups he spoke to about mountain climbing and chess playing though.

Flow, the book I have on my desk is a culmination of studies in this area from his work and other scientists. I picked it up because I wanted to understand what it was about human experience that affords us periods of easy creative flow. It's still a dense book, not as dense as beyond Boredom and Anxiety though! it’s packed with references to scientific studies. It feels super credible.

Let’s look at the context though, the book was originally published in 1990, that’s before the worldwide web became public, before we knew what mobile phone were, and the same year I started secondary school. I had no idea this book existed until I was in my 20’s, and it was already a decade old by then. The copy on my desk is from 2002, I picked it up because I had become a bit disillusioned with goal setting theory which assumes that people like goals and like to achieve goals and work well when they have clear and distinct goals. My own experience of the world of work is that people are not always motivated by goals, they make choices that aren’t always linked to specific goals. I liked Mihayl’s thinking, he and many other psychologists in the 1990’s were starting to explore unconscious choices. And I was really interested in that unconscious slip into a state of flow.

It's now 2023 and I have a critical view of Flow, for starters the definition of flow still feels a bit woolly, it’s entirely possible that different researchers interpret people’s experiences in different ways. Mihaly’s book also encourages the mental act of reframing to experience flow, and achieve happiness, but you have to wonder if reframing is a privileged activity that some people can achieve more easily than others. One way to think about this is the idea of manifestation, which when you bring it down to pure economics is easier for people with generational wealth to lean into than others.  Finally, there is a question for me about understanding the difference and intersections of hyperfocus and flow that this book doesn’t explain that.

However, Flow is packed with evidence from multiple sources, and the 2002 version is cited as a classic work on how to achieve happiness. It is so classic that other psychologists are endorsing the book, for example Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner and Psychologists is quoted on the front of the 2002 Version of flow, he says ‘ Mihayl Csikszentmihalyi has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending’.

Kahneman brought out his own book called Thinking Fast and Slow in 2011. This is another book I have on my desk. Kahneman puts forward an idea around two systems of thinking, System One and System Two. According to Kahneman, System One operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System Two allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, for example working out the price difference between two brands in a supermarket without resorting to a calculator. Kahneman talks about these systems as being an overriding force of how we make decisions.

The date this book was published is important, not because science has moved on so quickly, but between 2011 to the current day there's been a crisis in psychology. Remember I said that scientific findings should be valid and methods easy to understand so another scientist can replicate them? Turns out that this hasn’t been going so great for psychology.

It’s thought that lots of social science studies were falsified, or the sample size of some studies has been too small for the results to be presented or generalised to populations in the way they have.

 Without getting into a statistical storm, quantitative psychology research tries to answer the question, what is the difference, what are the odds of this effect not being to chance? so for example how do men compared to women experience imposter phenomenon? And to narrow this down, perhaps we look at a specific profession like nursing or teaching. Within that profession, are there associations between different variables, for example age or educational background.  And if I were using a questionnaire, I would be calculating what are the odds of the effects of this phenomenon not being to chance?

The effect is related to the variance within that nursing population, or the strength of the associations with nurses who are under the age of 40 and experience imposter phenomenon.

Kahneman’s book is unintentionally, but deeply impacted by the replication crisis. A key area of concern is the chapter that talks about priming, the idea that subtle cues can exert large, unconscious influences on human behaviour there is strong evidence that the studies provide an overly optimistic image of the robustness of social priming effects.

Kahneman to his credit, has acknowledged this issue in open letters and correspondence with Ulrich Shimmack a Psychology Professor who created the Incredibility Index, a doping test for psychology if you like. His blog has highlighted in a systematic way the problems with published psychology papers.

Should we trust psychology? There’s a growing movement to be more open with psychology research, one way to do this is by asking psychologists to pre-register their experiments which should make psychology more transparent.  There are groups of scientists dedicating their time trying to replicate the results of existing research, there’s an interesting National Geographic article that demonstrates the challenges in trying to do this though the ego’s involved.

Open science has some unanswered questions too, because where does the burden of ethical and open science sit? Someone must do the hard work in making data available. It also changes the conversations we have with participants about how long raw data is held for, and who can see it, who pays for the hosting. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, it is the subject of a pre-print journal article called the Invisible Workload.

I drafted this blog post a while back and held off posting it, wondering if it was a little critical and pessimistic about the state of fact, fiction and a good story in science, then news broke about a Harvard scientist who is accused of fabricating results including a study on dishonesty. Yes, you read that right! It has far reaching consequences for ethical research because the person involved is a prolific collaborator with other scientists.

This is why I find it hard to recommend psychology books, I enjoy keeping up to date with new papers in the fields I’m interested in, not just the results, but the methods and the shifts in the way we think about concepts and definitions such as flow. My advice is to read what takes your fancy, and the books that make science come alive for you. Psychologically speaking, curiosity is a basic element of human nature, so lean into it, delve a little deeper and be as curious as Eddision in your pursuit of knowledge. Psychology should always go hand in hand with criticality.