Experimental History
There’s a thought that’s haunted me for years: we’re doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers and…then what? The stack of papers just gets taller?
This worries me because I want to contribute to the grand project of understanding the mind, but I’m not sure how to do that. What’s the point of tossing another paper on the pile when it’s not clear that the last 100 papers added anything? Running studies can be a pain in the butt, so I’d like to do work that matters, not just work that gets a gold star goes up on the fridge (“Good job, lil buddy! You did so much psychology today!”).
That’s why I’ve returned to these questions again and again and again. But I’ve never come up with satisfying answers, and now I finally understand why.
I’ve got this picture in my head: we’re all on a bus that’s supposedly going to Cincinnati. But there are no road signs and we don’t have a GPS, so we have no idea if we’re going in the right direction. We can’t measure our progress by how much gas we’re burning, or whether we’ve upgraded from a manual transmission to an automatic, or whether the government bought us a new bus. And you can’t just look out the window and go, “I dunno, kinda feels like we’re headed toward Arkansas,” which, I realize now, is what I’ve been doing so far.
