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Psychology as a Science within Comte's Hypothesized Hierarchy: Empirical Investigations and Conceptual Implications
Abstract
Auguste Comte suggested that the main sciences could be grouped into a hierarchical ordering that reflected their objective characteristics (viz., generality, dependence, and complexity). In particular, the empirical sciences could be placed in the following order: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology. Although his idea was initially discredited in the sociology of science, subsequent research indicates that the conjecture has considerable empirical merit. Significantly, that research inserts psychology between biology and sociology, with significantly more proximity with biology. After replicating the earlier findings using new measures, the metatheoretical basis for the hierarchical arrangement is then examined. The article closes with suggestions for further empirical and theoretical research on psychology's placement in the hierarchical arrangement.
... Because the sciences were not defined in the same way in Comte's time, the social and behavioral sciences being largely absent, his scheme has undergone some modifications to make it more consistent with modern disciplinary categories (Cole, 1983). This transformation then supported empirical research on whether Comte's hierarchy of the sciences could claim any validity (Benjafield, 2020;Fanelli, 2010;Fanelli & Glänzel, 2013;Simonton, 2004Simonton, , 2015Smith, Best, Stubbs, Johnston, & Archibald, 2000). The hierarchy has been validated using multiple indicators, almost entirely objective but also including subjective ratings of the relative "hardness" of disciplines. ...
... The hierarchy has been validated using multiple indicators, almost entirely objective but also including subjective ratings of the relative "hardness" of disciplines. The following results are representative (Simonton, 2015): ...
... It is noteworthy that this hierarchy strongly corresponds with disciplinary consensus about what constitute the key findings in the field (Simonton, 2015), the very problem that Almaatouq et al. were trying to solve with their integrative experiment design. Yet it is evident that the hierarchy also aligns inversely with the relative prominence of experimental versus correlational methods, with psychology appropriately placed near the middle. ...
The target article ignores the crucial role of correlational methods in the behavioral and social sciences. Yet such methods are often mandated by the greater complexity of the phenomena investigated. This necessity is especially conspicuous in psychological research where its position in the hierarchy of the sciences implies the need for both experimental and correlational investigations, each featuring distinct assets.
... Even so, S. Cole did not actually implement the most appropriate statistical analyses, instead relying exclusively on scanning the raw data. In contrast, subsequent research provided firm evidence for a hierarchy, especially when augmenting S. Cole's measures (Simonton, 2004(Simonton, , 2015. The two inorganic sciences, physics and chemistry, are clustered at the top; the two organic sciences, biology and psychology, appear in the middle; and sociology shows up at the bottom as the single representative of the social sciences. ...
... Significantly, the sciences at the top exhibit the most consensus, such as agreement in peer and expert evaluations regarding the relative contributions of various scientists to the discipline, including earlier peer recognition of the work of younger scientists (S. Cole, 1983;Simonton, 2015). Moreover, higher placement positively aligns with higher conceptual precision (Schachter, Christenfeld, Ravina, & Bilous, 1991) and certainty (Suls & Fletcher, 1983) as well as a higher ratio of laws to theories (Roeckelein, 1997) and greater prominence of graphs (Smith et al., 2002): associations that probably, like consensus, correspond to Comte's (1839Comte's ( -1842Comte's ( /1855) criteria of complexity and generality. ...
... A discipline's placement in the hierarchy shown in Figure 8.1 positively correlates with a yet unmentioned contrast: differences in paradigm development (Ashar & Shapiro, 1990;Simonton, 2015). Measurement of paradigm development comprised three measures: (a) "the average length in words of dissertation abstracts in each field," (b) "the average length in pages of dissertations in each field," and (c) the "length of [the] chain of prerequisite courses in each field" (Ashar & Shapiro, 1990, p. 130), as described in a typical university catalog. ...
Science, Technology, and Society - edited by Todd L. Pittinsky November 2019
... Creativity research can be easily considered a lowconsensus domain, perhaps even lower than psychology as a whole (see Simonton, 2015a). One particularly potent piece of evidence for this low placement is the fact that researchers do not display a strong agreement on creativity's very definition (Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow, 2004). ...
... For instance, researchers are not always clear about who is assessing originality and effectiveness, just the creators themselves or is some consensual endorsement required? The two assessment sources are too often conflated, as if the difference doesn't matter, which is extremely unlikely in low-consensus domains, especially in the arts (Brandt, 2021;Simonton, 2015a). Physicists might have a reasonable idea of how colleagues would evaluate their ideas, but that's less likely for psychologists, and even more improbable for poets. ...
... Previously it was noted that creative domains vary greatly in their magnitude of consensus (Simonton, 2015a). In fact, creative domains exhibit a clear hierarchy running in the following order: physical sciences, biological sciences, behavioral sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the arts (Fanelli & Glänzel, 2013;Simonton, 2009b). ...
This article provides an update on the blind-variation and selective-retention theory of creativity (BVSR), beginning with an overview of its historical development. That brief narrative is then followed by a more extensive summary of recent enhancements in BVSR’s conceptual foundations, including formal definitions of creative, sighted, and blind variations. These enhancements show that BVSR follows as a direct corollary of the three-criterion definition of personal creativity (i.e., the multiplicative function of originality, utility, and surprise). After treating the various types of BVSR as well as the diverse processes and procedures that can generate blind variations, discussion turns to a concise treatment of BVSR’s research implications, which entail both theoretical extensions and empirical investigations. The article closes with an evaluation of the theory’s current status. Whatever BVSR’s limitations, it still captures an essential feature of creativity that is not sufficiently treated by any theoretical alternatives.
... Another key moderating factor concerns the diversity of distinct subdisciplines within the domain of academic psychology. As mentioned earlier, psychological science can be placed between the biological and social sciences in a hierarchy that has the physical sciences of physics and chemistry at the top and a discipline like sociology toward the bottom (Simonton, 2015). At the hard end of the spectrum, the scientific field exhibits a considerable consensus on the central theories, methods, and findings that define the domain, whereas at the soft end that consensus is largely lacking-theoretical, methodological, and empirical controversies emerge as far more conspicuous. ...
... A parallel hierarchy also emerges within psychological science (Simonton, 2015). For example, Cronbach (1957) distinguished between experimental and correlational psychologists (see also Tracy, Robins, & Sherman, 2009). ...
... A closely parallel distinction is that between psychologists who favor a natural science orientation and those who prefer a human science orientation toward theory and method (Simonton, 2000; see also Suedfeld, 1985). Clearly, the experimental and natural science-oriented psychologists are closer to the hard sciences, whereas the correlational and human scienceoriented psychologists are closer to the soft sciences (Simonton, 2015). It should surprise nobody, then, that the former psychologists are far more likely to get elected to the National Academy of Sciences (Haggbloom et al., 2002;Over, 1981). ...
... Experimental psychologists enjoy much more success getting elected to the National Academy of Sciences (Over, 1981; see also Table 4 in Haggbloom et al., 2002). Not all high-impact psychologists are equal in scientific acclaim because not all are considered equally "scientific" in the sense of following a pure natural-science paradigm (Simonton, 2015). ...
... What renders this problem especially irksome for evaluating contributions to psychological science is the empirical evidence showing that the consensus is especially weak relative to the natural sciences (Simonton, 2015; see also Feist, 2016). Compared to physical and biological scientists, psychologists exhibit lower agreement in evaluating the scientific contributions of their fellows. ...
... For good reasons, then, psychologists might have to wait longer and work harder before their contributions can achieve the consensual validation they may deserve. Psychologists certainly must endure a longer wait than do scientists in the natural sciences (Simonton, 2015). ...
More than a century of scientific research has shed considerable light on how a scientist’s contributions to psychological science might be best assessed and duly recognized. This brief overview of that empirical evidence concentrates on recognition for lifetime career achievements in psychological science. After discussing both productivity and citation indicators, the treatment turns to critical precautions in the application of these indicators to psychologists. These issues concern both predictive validity and interjudge reliability. In the former case, not only are the predictive validities for standard indicators relatively small, but the indicators can exhibit important non-merit-based biases that undermine validity. In the latter case, peer consensus in the evaluation of scientific contributions is appreciably lower in psychology than in the natural sciences, a fact that has consequences for citation measures as well. Psychologists must therefore exercise considerable care in judging achievements in psychological science—both their own and those of others.
... This is important as it allows one to disentangle whether particular methodological or conceptual criticisms are uniquely appropriate to evolutionary psychology, as opposed to being limitations inherent to psychology or evolutionary science more generally. In addition, this is important because we perceive evolutionary psychology in between psychology and biology in terms of its "scientific rigor" (Simonton 2015) but may suffer a unique profile of criticism. As an example, the apparent criticism of an overreliance of college student samples might be leveled in evolutionary psychology just as it is leveled against general psychology research, yet evidence might suggest that the criticism is more appropriately aimed at general psychology compared to evolutionary psychology (Kurzban 2013). ...
... Fields like sociology may fail to understand and accept an evolutionary perspective on human behaviors, which may reflect ignorance, ideological bias (i.e., religious or epistemological), and both and may be characterized by anthropocentricism (i.e., the idea that humans are special), resistance to self-understanding, and limited capacity to accept the fundamental canons of scientific theory construction, including reductionism (i.e., the approach to science of breaking things down into constituent parts), individualism (i.e., focused on the person not the group), materialism (i.e., the focus on things that are naturally occurring), and parsimony (i.e., seeking the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions; van den Berghe 1990). Such fields of research may even be "less scientific" than psychology and biology (Simonton 2015). Unfortunately, many researchers have treated the social sciences as a monolithic field, failing to peer deeper into the potential reasons why people who are a part of that field might be opposed to evolutionary psychological models. ...
... For instance, it was general psychology that was most criticized for its reliance on student samples. However, evolutionary psychology may benefit from its interdisciplinary focus with anthropologists, biologists, and, of course, psychologists being part of the bigger picture of evolutionary psychology (Kurzban 2013;Simonton 2015). In addition, the larger field of psychology, with its skepticism about evolutionary psychology, may have required a greater burden of proof in evolutionary psychology, necessitating improved sampling techniques (Panksepp and Panksepp 2000). ...
In a sample of academics (N = 111), we quantified the dimensions underlying criticisms of evolutionary psychology in relation to criticisms of its parent fields (i.e., general psychology and evolutionary biology) and examined how various demographic and sociopolitical individual differences were related to these criticism dimensions. The five primary criticisms of evolutionary psychology reflected conceptual concerns, concerns over political implications, concerns over sampling, concerns about the validity of findings, and religious concerns. Evolutionary psychology suffered the worst selective skepticism relative to its parent fields. In a general sense, political liberalism was associated with more intense criticisms toward evolutionary psychology, but these associations were weak and differed across three measures of political personality (i.e., Right-Wing Authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and religiousness). Homosexuals and qualitative researchers were especially critical of evolutionary psychology. We offer these limited findings as insights into the motivated resistance to the theory of evolution as a unifying meta-theory in psychology, and we hope to provide a future framework for reducing unmerited and selective resistance to an evolutionary-informed psychological science.
... Weisberg, 2015; who argued partly on this basis that value is useless). One of the prime assets of the so-called "hard" or "exact" sciences is that they contain precisely defined terms (Simonton, 2015b). Even when a term originated in everyday language it will be refined with a precision well beyond what is found the dictionary. ...
... In addition, for high consensus domains, such as the hard sciences, the difference between personal and consensual evaluations will minimize (Simonton, 2013c). Accordingly, the creator's own self-assessment of the creativity criteria will depart very little from the assessments of others in the same field (see also Simonton, 2015b). After all, the creator is necessarily a domain-specific expert rather than a mere novice (cf. ...
... One anonymous referee argued that the F = ma example sets up a strawman because psychology is not like physics (cf.Kimble, 1990). Although substantial contrasts certainly exist (seeSimonton, 2015b, for numerous differences), it must be remembered that at the time when the scientific revolution began, physics and psychology were more similar than different (viz. Aristotelian). ...
I argue that any attempt to define creative ideas cannot fully succeed without also defining uncreative ideas. This argument begins by defining three parameters that characterize a potentially creative thought: the idea's initial probability (p), the final utility (u), and the creator's prior knowledge of that utility (v). The three parameters then lead to a three-criterion multiplicative definition of personal creativity, namely, c = (1 − p)u(1 − v), where the first factor indicates originality and the third factor surprise. Although creativity can only maximize as originality, utility, and surprise all approach unity, the same definition indicates that there are seven different ways that creativity can minimize. These alternatives were identified as (a) routine, reproductive, or habitual ideas, (b) fortuitous response bias, (c) irrational perseveration, (d) problem finding, (e) rational suppression, (f) irrational suppression, and (g) blissful ignorance. If the third parameter v is omitted, then the number of creative and noncreative outcomes reduces to just four, making creativity indistinguishable from irrational suppression. The alternative outcomes are then illustrated using the classic two-string problem. Besides providing a more finely differentiated conception of creativity failures, the definition has critical implications regarding the processes and procedures required to generate highly creative ideas.
... Creativity research can be easily considered a lowconsensus domain, perhaps even lower than psychology as a whole (see Simonton, 2015a). One particularly potent piece of evidence for this low placement is the fact that researchers do not display a strong agreement on creativity's very definition (Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow, 2004). ...
... For instance, researchers are not always clear about who is assessing originality and effectiveness, just the creators themselves or is some consensual endorsement required? The two assessment sources are too often conflated, as if the difference doesn't matter, which is extremely unlikely in low-consensus domains, especially in the arts (Brandt, 2021;Simonton, 2015a). Physicists might have a reasonable idea of how colleagues would evaluate their ideas, but that's less likely for psychologists, and even more improbable for poets. ...
... Previously it was noted that creative domains vary greatly in their magnitude of consensus (Simonton, 2015a). In fact, creative domains exhibit a clear hierarchy running in the following order: physical sciences, biological sciences, behavioral sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the arts (Fanelli & Glänzel, 2013;Simonton, 2009b). ...
Donald Campbell proposed that scientific creativity and discovery could be best understood as entailing blind variation and selective retention (BVSR). This proposal is developed by defining blindness in terms of the magnitude of decoupling between variant probabilities and their corresponding utilities. The selection part of BVSR is then defined according to whether variant selection is simultaneous or sequential and external or internal. These definitions provide the basis for identification criteria that can be applied to determine where ideational variation falls on the blind-sighted continuum. Explicit blindness can be obtained by systematic or stochastic combinatorial procedures, whereas implicit blindness becomes apparent when variations have certain properties of blindness or are generated by processes that should yield blindness. The chapter discusses the most common criticisms of BVSR, some that arise from misunderstandings and others that are rooted in misconceptions. The chapter concludes by discussing BVSR in terms of a three-criteria definition of creative ideas.
... Consequently, they play a very limited role in guiding research (e.g., Cole, 1994;Waggoner & Roark, 2014;Whitehouse, 2009). Reviews of disciplinary differences in research consensus have confirmed that the social and behavioral sciences are less driven by shared theories and approaches than the natural sciences (Braxton & Hargens, 1996;Simonton, 2004Simonton, , 2015. Paralleling this, Kuhn (1970) and later scholars (e.g., Biglan, 1973;Sanbonmatsu & Sanbonmatsu, 2017) have observed that psychology and other social and behavioral disciplines are less "paradigmatic" than the natural sciences. ...
... Research using a variety of indices (e.g., Simonton, 2004Simonton, , 2015 has verified what most scientists acknowledge-that the phenomena studied in the social and behavioral sciences are generally more complex than the phenomena studied in other scientific disciplines. As we shall discuss, the complexity of the topics studied by social and behavioral researchers precludes the development of the elegant reductionist theories that were generated by classic work in the physical sciences. ...
Numerous scholars believe that there is a crisis in psychology because of the “poor quality” of our theories. However, we believe that it is misleading to suggest that psychology is going through a “theory crisis” because the major shortcomings of theories in the field have been recognized for decades. More fundamentally, there is nothing temporary about the current state theory in the field. Theories in psychology and other social and behavioral sciences will always fall short of traditional scientific benchmarks because of the complexity of the topics that are studied and the problem of generality. In our view, the most recent recommendations for improving theory in psychology are limited in feasibleness. Following many scholars, we suggest that psychology should turn more to formal modeling to increase rigor and improve prediction. However, while models are potentially of great value to the field, they are not theories. Researchers need to accept the limitations inherent to the study of the complexity of social and behavioral phenomena and stop the unhelpful criticism of our field. They also need to recognize the cumulativeness of psychological theory and the enormous body of knowledge of psychological processes, structures, and effects that have been generated by research. Although theories in our field are often sketchy, they are indispensable in providing explanations for important phenomena, suggesting interventions and treatments for critical social and behavioral problems and facilitating the development of predictive models.
... In what seems a contradiction with respect to theory, regardless of increased perceived uncertainty, all over the world there are calls for more creative and innovative scientific, social and technological solutions. According to Simonton's Darwinian explanation of creativity, scientific creativity requires an even more stable and less repressive sociocultural settings than artistic creativity (Simonton, , 2015. ...
... Another study by (Kaufman, Baer, Cropley, Reiter-Palmon, and Sinnet, 2013) focuses on the relation of product characteristics and individual differences of judges. They found that the amount of expertise of judges is related to their evaluations, but it depends on the domain (Simonton 2015). Also, in a second study, the authors show that expertise of judges is related to two of four characteristics of creative products : 'elegance' and 'genesis'. ...
... However, to be more precise, it is necessary to recognize that the degree of consensus varies within the sciences as well (Fanelli and Glänzel, 2013;Simonton, 2015). For example, with respect to such consensual assessments, physics > chemistry > biology > psychology > sociology (Simonton, 2004(Simonton, , 2015. ...
... However, to be more precise, it is necessary to recognize that the degree of consensus varies within the sciences as well (Fanelli and Glänzel, 2013;Simonton, 2015). For example, with respect to such consensual assessments, physics > chemistry > biology > psychology > sociology (Simonton, 2004(Simonton, , 2015. In short, the "hard" sciences exhibit stronger consensus than the "soft" sciences. ...
Although scientific creativity has often been described as combinatorial, the description is usually insufficiently formulated to count as a precise scientific explanation. Therefore, the current article is devoted to elaborating a formalization defined by three combinatorial parameters: the initial probability p, the final utility u, and the scientist’s prior knowledge of that utility v. These parameters then lead logically to an 8-fold typology involving two forms of expertise, two irrational combinations, and four “blind” combinations. One of the latter provides the basis for the definition of personal creativity as c=(1−p)u(1−v), that is, the multiplicative product of originality, utility, and surprise. This three-criterion definition then has six critical implications. Those implications lead to a discussion of various combinatorial processes and procedures that include a treatment of the No Free Lunch Theorems regarding optimization algorithms as well as the creativity-maximizing phenomena of mind wandering and serendipity. The article closes with a discussion of how scientific creativity differs from artistic creativity. Besides the obvious contrasts in the ideas entering the combinatorial processes and procedures, scientific combinations, products, and communities strikingly differ from those typical of the arts. These differences also imply contrasts in developmental experiences and personality characteristics. In sum, the formal combinatorial analysis enhances our understanding of scientific creativity.
... From subatomic particles to human societies there is an overall increase in the possible number of elements, combinations, interactions, etc." Viewed from this perspective, a hierarchy of sciences makes sense. Consequently, after languishing for some time, the concept of a hierarchy of sciences has been revived, thanks to the work of Simonton (2004Simonton ( , 2006Simonton ( , 2015Simonton ( , 2018 as well as Fanelli (2010) and Fanelli and Glänzel (2013). ...
... Psychology is included in our study of the HoS because its vocabulary has continued to survive as that of an independent subject. Moreover, other studies (e.g., Simonton 2015) have provided evidence for psychology's position between biology and sociology. Whether or not psychology will continue to survive as an independent subject or be assimilated by other subjects is a question that will be considered below. ...
To what extent do the vocabularies of mathematics, computing, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, and linguistics overlap? To explore this question, samples of the anglophone vocabularies of these subjects were created using the Oxford English Dictionary (Benjafield in Scientometrics 118:1051–1064, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03021-2). The first part of this study compared the vocabularies of the five empirical members of Comte’s hierarchy of the sciences (HoS) plus psychology (i.e., astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology). The results were generally consistent with the existence of an empirical HoS. For example, each subject shared its vocabulary the most with another subject adjacent to it in the hierarchy (i.e., astronomy with physics, physics with chemistry, biology with chemistry, psychology with biology, sociology with psychology). The second part of this study examined patterns of sharing between mathematics, computing, economics, political science, philosophy, linguistics and the six members of the empirical HoS. Among the most interesting results was the high degree of vocabulary sharing between mathematics, philosophy, and linguistics. Indeed, it turns out that all subjects share their vocabularies with all other subjects, to varying degrees. It was suggested that, in addition to comparing subjects in terms of a linear HoS, similarities between subjects should be examined independently of their position on the HoS.
... I close with speculations about where future researchers might go in understanding creativity within the domain of psychology. measures are used (Simonton, 2004(Simonton, , 2015cf. Fanelli, 2010;Fanelli & Glänzel, 2013). ...
... Second, additional research should be devoted to filling out the details regarding psychology's placement in the hierarchy of the sciences depicted in Figure 14.1. This placement concerns more than just contrasts in consensus between the natural and social sciences (Simonton, 2015). We already have sufficient empirical evidence that scientists creating at different locations on this hierarchy will also tend to differ with respect to both dispositional traits and developmental experiences (Simonton, 2009(Simonton, , 2014a). ...
... Nevertheless, intelligence still uniquely predicted later age at first child and having fewer children for both men and women, which are arguably our most valid indicators of delayed reproduction and, ultimately, low fertility. These findings also reflect decreasing levels of predictability as we move up the hierarchy of the sciences from more fundamental explanations (e.g., biology, physiology) to more complex ones (e.g., psychology, behavior; Simonton, 2015). ...
Purpose
Research using system integrity theory (SIT) has shown that more intelligent men have higher-quality semen, which is puzzling because although reproductive capability should predict fertility, more intelligent men have fewer children. The current research addresses this puzzle by highlighting the distinct obligate and facultative outcomes that emerge when SIT is integrated with life history theory (LHT) and evolutionary novelty theory (ENT). Specifically, we propose that SIT accounts for more rigidly obligate physiological traits whereas LHT encompasses both obligate traits and flexibly facultative behaviors and, thus, permits the ENT-driven expectation that brighter individuals would act in evolutionarily novel ways—e.g., slower reproduction despite possessing capacities for faster reproduction.
Methods
We examined this logic using another obligate reproductive trait: the timing of puberty. Based on our proposed synthesis of SIT, LHT, and ENT, we tested the prediction that more intelligent people would experience puberty earlier and yet have sex later, engage in less sexual activity, and have fewer children using two nationally representative and generationally distinct samples from the NCDS and Add Health.
Results
Data across both samples confirmed that higher intelligence predicted earlier puberty and indicators of slower reproduction over and above several potential confounds, thus constituting a robust validation of our propositions.
Conclusions
Findings are discussed with regards to the importance of considering the interplay between obligate and facultative traits, particularly when opposing directions might occur due to evolutionarily novel preferences associated with intelligence, as well as in the context of evolutionary mismatch in modern settings. Future directions inspired by this novel synthesis are offered.
... The lack of certainty in results is of course related to the degree of predictability and manipulability (Weaver, 1948;Sanbonmatsu et al., 2021) in the subject (e.g., psychology and culture are typically less predictable than inert matter), so this is in no way meant to be a criticism of the representatives of a particular discipline. This conjecture has been stated elsewhere more eloquently, such as in discussions on the hypothesized "hierarchy of the sciences" (Comte, 1855;Fanelli & Glänzel, 2013;Simonton, 2015). On one end of the extreme is mathematics, where once certain axioms have been assumed, there is a correct answer that can be unambiguously arrived at. ...
The theory of Jesse Berezovsky (2019) is a rare foray of a physicist into the territory of music science. In their follow-up article in Empirical Musicology Review, Ryan Buechele, Alex Cooke, and Jesse Berezovsky (2024) show how the evolution of Western tuning systems and compositions can be rationalized by a theoretical model that describes a trade-off between minimizing sensory dissonance and maximizing compositional variety. From the Renaissance period onwards there was a trend towards more dissonance, and more compositional variety in both tuning systems and compositions. While this historical progression has perhaps been described qualitatively elsewhere, this model provides a more precise quantitative description of the phenomenon. The validity and scope of this model ought to be tested further by comparing its predictions with empirical measurements of tuning systems in both Western and non-Western cultures, alongside predictions of other theories of scale evolution. In the hope of encouraging and facilitating more of these interdisciplinary endeavors, I discuss some of my anecdotal experiences as a physical scientist embedded in the music science community, and offer advice on how to achieve better understanding and communication across disciplines.
... Constraints are even more apparent in scientific creativity, particularly in those disciplines that are highly paradigmatic, like the natural sciences ( Simonton, 2015). Any physicist, chemist, or biologist who wanted to incorporate an axiom that violated the Laws of Thermodynamics would find themselves with a nonstarter. ...
... Behavioral or cognitive sciences invariably fall between social and biological sciences. This ordering is evident across a wide variety of bibliometric and other indices, from the prominence of graphs in scholarly work (Smith et al., 2000), to the level of consensus in peer evaluations of research and the ratio of theories to laws (Simonton, 2004(Simonton, , 2015, to a diverse collection of bibliometric indices (Fanelli & Glänzel, 2013). For example, Simonton demonstrated a robust ordering of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology across a diverse set of indices. ...
Research metrics are known to predict many markers of scientific eminence, but fellowship in learned academies has not been examined in this context. The present research used Scopus-based citation indices, including a composite index developed by Ioannidis et al., (PLoS Biol 14:e1002501, 2016, https:// doi. org/ 10. 1371/ journ al. pbio. 10025 01) that improves cross-field comparison, to predict fellowship in the Australian Academy of Sciences (AAS). Based on ideas of a hierarchy of the sciences, the study also examined whether researchers from natural science fields were advantaged in achieving AAS fellowship relative to researchers from fields toward the social science end of the hierarchy. In a comprehensive sample of top global researchers, the composite index and its components all strongly differentiated Australian researchers who were elected as AAS fellows from those who were not. As predicted, when composite index scores were statistically controlled, researchers in physical and mathematical sciences were more likely to achieve fellow status than biological scientists, who were much more likely to achieve it than psychological , cognitive, and social scientists. Researchers in basic science fields also had an election advantage over those in more applied and technological fields. These findings suggest that recognition by learned academies may be predicted by citation indices, but may also be influenced by the perceived hardness, prestige, and purity of research fields.
... It might seem that contemporary empirical investigations on Comte's hierarchy of the sciences confirm the correctness of those who placed psychology between biology and sociology. Based on seven discipline characteristics as primary indicators, Simonton (2004Simonton ( , 2015 arrayed sciences in the following order: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology. He called this series of the sciences "a Comtean hierarchy," but is this a suitable description? ...
This article discusses the consonance of some propositions of Comte’s positivism and the theory of Vygotsky. Their common features are indicated. They include sociologism (but not vulgar sociologization), holism, historicism, antireductionism, recognition of the active role of the mind, and denial of pure empiricism. They consider psychology as a discipline that combines sociological and biological points of view but at the same time irreducible to either sociology or biology. The article also discusses the views of Comte on the nature of language, which, in his opinion, should be interpreted as a social phenomenon that has a biological foundation. Comte, as well as Vygotsky, separated thinking and language, considering them as different, but closely related intellectual functions connected with different part of the brain. For both Comte and Vygotsky, social lies at the beginning—and not at the end—of the development of mental functions. It is suggested that Comte’s influence on Vygotsky was primarily of an indirect nature and was exerted through the French sociological school, philosophy of Feuerbach, Marxism, and through the positivistic spirit of the time. Comte’s project of morals can be viewed as a presage of the so-called “affective turn” in psychology and social sciences. The hidden commonalities between Comte and Vygotsky create a new reference point for reassessing Comte’s ideas for scientific psychology.
... 47-68;Jarvis y Okami, 2020, pp. 25-29;Rakover, 2018;Simonton, 2015). Tales debates son fútiles en tanto la búsqueda de un criterio inequívoco válido fructífero de demarcación entre lo científico y lo pseudocientífico es igualmente fútil. ...
... 47-68;Jarvis y Okami, 2020, pp. 25-29;Rakover, 2018;Simonton, 2015). Tales debates son fútiles en tanto la búsqueda de un criterio inequívoco válido fructífero de demarcación entre lo científico y lo pseudocientífico es igualmente fútil. ...
El artículo target de Roca ejemplifica claramente el melodrama sobre la búsqueda obsesiva del objeto propio de la psicología, criticado en mi artículo target, en estrecha relación con otros dos, a saber: 1. ¿Es la psicología una ciencia? 2. Si lo es, ¿es natural? En su artículo de él, Roca realiza tal búsqueda bajo el bastión kantoriano, mostrando muchos de los excesos y vicios que señalé en mi artículo, así como otros que aprovecho para comentar en este comentario. El melodrama sobre el carácter científico de la psicología surge de una escasa cultura filosófica elemental que subestima en gran medida la complejidad del problema de la demarcación entre ciencia y pseudociencia, ignorando que ha sido ampliamente abandonado en la filosofía de la ciencia como insoluble. Igualmente simplistas son sus disquisiciones sobre la naturalidad de la psicología como ciencia, que ignoran por completo importantes desarrollos en el naturalismo. Como parte de sus invocaciones conceptuales, el autor persiste en afirmar falsamente que la psicología cognitiva es dualista, m cuando esto es lógicamente imposible ya que concibe los particulares mentales como internos y causales, ambas características ausentes de la mente según cualquier forma de dualismo de sustancias, por totalmente carente de espacialidad. Además, el acuerdo general entre los mentalistas es que la categoría ontológica de los particulares mentales es ocurrencia, no sustancia, otra fuerte razón para declarar al mentalismo inocente de cualquier forma de dualismo de sustancia, razón que permite, precisamente, concepciones más inteligibles de la causalidad mental.
... First, creative domains do not represent homogeneous cultures that can support a consistent set of explicit and specific norms for judging what is original, useful, and surprising (Simonton, , 2015a. This deficiency is betrayed in the conspicuous lack of consensus regarding the relative merits of contributions to the discipline. ...
This chapter examines the notion of the ‘prepared mind’, popular in serendipity and creativity studies, in ways that defend and advance the ontological position that mind and context are co-constitutive or interdependent. From this standpoint, it makes little sense to ask what is ‘inside’ the mind but, rather, what happens in-between mind and world in moments of creative serendipity. Three forms of relating to the world are proposed as essential for serendipity and, more broadly, for creativity: surprise, curiosity and wonder. The ways in which surprise, curiosity and wonder shape our experience of serendipity are discussed with a view towards expanding the prepared mind into a system of open and dynamic relations between self and other, mind and culture, person and world.
... We furthered our analysis with bibliometric measures (Fanelli, 2010(Fanelli, , 2020Fanelli & Glänzel, 2013;Simonton, 2004). These measures have been recently replicated (Fanelli, 2020;Simonton, 2015). 3 Another critique about our epistemological assessment has been the post-modernist-constructivist instance byPinheiro (2020), Smedlund (2021), Jensen (2020) and Chaudhary and Sriram (2020). ...
Does evolutionary psychology (EP) properly account for the sociocultural context? Does it underestimate both the developmental and the relational aspects of the human psyche? Is it instantiated in a mechanistic epistemology? Does it imply determinism or reductionism? The commentaries on our previous target article raised similar questions and we try to tackle them in the current response. Our “epistemological assessment” of Psychology and our consequent unification claim under the banner of the evolutionary approach (Zagaria et al., Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 54(3), 521–562, 2020 ) was deeply examined and discussed. The objections to our target article can be grouped into four main categories. We sum them up and argue why: 1) the pre-paradigmatic status of psychology is a problem rather than a richness of perspectives; 2) EP's criticisms stem from common misconceptions—furthermore, developmental and relational aspects of human psyche might find their natural explanation in EP; 3) EP does not wipe out the emergence of the sociocultural context as something qualitatively different; 4) evolutionary meta-theory is not incompatible with subjectivity. Evolutionary psychology might be approached with caution and curiosity, rather than with prejudicial concepts. Incorporating some legitimate cultural criticisms, it may aspire to become a “cultural evolutionary psychology”, hence an integrative psychological meta-theory that tries to connect the biological “plane of existence” (Henriques, Review of General Psychology, 7(2), 150–182, 2003) to the cultural “plane of existence”. However, a basic philosophical concern has yet to be answered, i.e. what ultimately constitutes mind and thus the “psycho-logical” science. We argue that when trying to find the answer we know where to look at.
... Comte postulated that the sciences could be ordered in a hierarchy of increasing complexity and dependency and decreasing generality beginning with astronomy followed by physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology. Simonton (2004Simonton ( , 2015, Fanelli and Glänzel (2013), and other scholars have drawn from numerous sources, including publishing trends, surveys, and citations, to show that fields vary in generality, dependency, and complexity in a manner consistent with the rankings postulated by Comte. While the research on Comte's (1855) hierarchy has revealed many important disciplinary differences in scientific practice, we believe that the complexity of a research topic has much greater impact than has been previously recognized. ...
The study of human behavior is severely hampered by logistical problems, ethical and legal constraints, and funding shortfalls. However, the biggest difficulty of conducting social and behavioral research is the extraordinary complexity of the study phenomena. In this article, we review the impact of complexity on research design, hypothesis testing, measurement, data analyses, reproducibility, and the communication of findings in psychological science. The systematic investigation of the world often requires different approaches because of the variability in complexity. Confirmatory testing, multi-factorial designs, survey methods, large samples, and modeling are frequently needed to study complex social and behavioral topics. Complexity impedes the measurement of general constructs, the reproducibility of results and scientific reporting, and the general rigor of research. Many of the benchmarks established by classic work in physical science are not attainable in studies of more complex phenomena. Consequently, the standards used to evaluate scientific research should be tethered to the complexity of the study topic.
... Psychology was therefore declared a 'soft science' that can never achieve the status of the 'hard sciences' (e.g., physics, chemistry). This categorisation implies the belief that some sciences have only minor capacities to accumulate secured knowledge and lower abilities to reach theoretical and methodological consensus (Fanelli and Glänzel 2013;Simonton 2015). In particular, soft sciences would have only limited abilities to apply 'the scientific method', the general set of principles involving systematic observation, experimentation and measurement as well as deduction and testing of hypotheses that guide scientific practice (Gauch 2015). ...
Psychology holds an exceptional position among the sciences. Yet even after 140 years as an independent discipline, psychology is still struggling with its most basic foundations. Its key phenomena, mind and behaviour, are poorly defined (and their definition instead often delegated to neuroscience or philosophy) while specific terms and constructs proliferate. A unified theoretical framework has not been developed and its categorisation as a ‘soft science’ ascribes to psychology a lower level of scientificity. The article traces these problems to the peculiarities of psychology’s study phenomena, their interrelations with and centrality to everyday knowledge and language (which may explain the proliferation and unclarity of terms and concepts), as well as to their complex relations with other study phenomena. It shows that adequate explorations of such diverse kinds of phenomena and their interrelations with the most elusive of all—immediate experience—inherently require a plurality of epistemologies, paradigms, theories, methodologies and methods that complement those developed for the natural sciences. Their systematic integration within just one discipline, made necessary by these phenomena’s joint emergence in the single individual as the basic unit of analysis, makes psychology in fact the hardest science of all. But Galtonian nomothetic methodology has turned much of today’s psychology into a science of populations rather than individuals, showing that blind adherence to natural-science principles has not advanced but impeded the development of psychology as a science. Finally, the article introduces paradigmatic frameworks that can provide solid foundations for conceptual integration and new developments.
... fiction versus nonfiction literature [23]) as well as among different scientific disciplines (e.g. 'hard' versus 'soft' sciences [24]). Yet there exists no a priori reason for believing that the relation between psychopathology and creativity would prove invariant across creative domains. ...
The mad-genius controversy concerning the relation between creativity and psychopathology is one of the oldest and most contentious in the behavioral sciences. Although the prevailing consensus is that the debate is not specious, it is also evident that its scientific resolution is far more complicated than a mere yes–no decision. To illustrate this complexity, this article examines seven central issues that must be addressed in future research: target persons, mental disorders, creative domains, specific hypotheses, quantitative assessments, data analyses, and theoretical explanations. It thus becomes apparent that the subject should continue to attract empirical and theoretical work well into the future.
... Yet it should come as no surprise that in psychology, books tend to have higher impact than journal articles (Heyduk & Fenigstein, 1984;Simonton, 1992). Explanations for complicated phenomena often require extended logical and empirical development, where psychological phenomena are unquestionably more complex than biological phenomena (Simonton, 2015). James did not provide that requisite development for his thesis, great or not. ...
Near the onset of his illustrious career, the psychologist William James proposed a theory of how individual genius can exert a unique and enduring causal impact on the history of civilization. After first attacking the prevailing view that sociocultural determinism rendered individual creators and leaders mere epiphenomena, James argued that the causal effect of the genius paralleled that of the spontaneous variation or mutation in the theory of evolution by natural selection. Although his specific arguments suffer severe problems even from the standpoint of his own theory, current psychological research on creativity and genius indicate how his basic thesis can be revised and updated with respect to creative genius. This revision and updating concentrates specifically on what is known about the behavioral productivity, thinking processes and procedures, personality characteristics, and early developmental experiences in highly creative individuals. These modern enhancements then lead to the integrated discussion of Jamesian free will and the causal agency of the creative genius. The net result is a revitalized theory of how it even becomes possible for single individuals to make creative choices that not only may cause changes in their own lives, but also alter the course of world history.
... fiction versus nonfiction literature [23]) as well as among different scientific disciplines (e.g. 'hard' versus 'soft' sciences [24]). Yet there exists no a priori reason for believing that the relation between psychopathology and creativity would prove invariant across creative domains. ...
As individual subjects, creativity and personality have been the focus of much research and many publications. This Cambridge Handbook is the first to bring together these two topics and explores how personality and behavior affects creativity. Contributors from around the globe present cutting-edge research about how personality traits and motives make creative behavior more likely. Many aspects of personality and behavior are examined in the chapters, including genius, emotions, psychopathology, entrepreneurship, and multiculturalism, to analyse the impact of these on creativity. The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research will be the definitive resource for researchers, students and academics who study psychology, personality, and creativity.
... Instead, quasi-experimental designs, mediation tests, correlational studies, as well as qualitative and ethnographic methods are frequently used to answer pertinent research questions (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007). This methodological characteristic may cause cultural research to be viewed as less "scientific" when compared with experimental psychology and that can, in turn, make it less accessible for cultural psychologists to achieve scientific acclaim (Simonton, 2015). ...
I discuss the critical importance of putting culture in the middle in judging scholarly merit in psychological science. I describe the challenges in evaluating cultural research, pointing out the various ways that ethnocentric judgments undermine the scientific merit of cultural research and the consequences of the marginalization of culture in psychological science and practice. In spite of the obstacles, cultural psychologists have made major scientific contributions and achieved scientific eminence. I further suggest that we raise the bar by including a broad, cultural approach to research as one basis for judging scientific contributions. I propose that to put culture in the middle, the evaluation of scholarly merit in psychological science should (a) consider the integration of cultural perspectives in research as a critical indicator, (b) take into consideration the international visibility of scholarship, (c) benefit from a general consensus among cultural researchers, (d) document real-life impact in different populations, and (e) be mindful of the beliefs and practices of scientific communities in other cultures.
... Some paradigms are of such scope and influence that most studies in a field are ultimately grounded in its tenets. Moreover, some disciplines are more paradigmatic than others (Simonton, 2015) in that they are more "mature" and more heavily guided by a core set of laws and theories. For example, the basic principles of chemistry uncovered by Lavoisier (Yount, 2008) and his contemporaries provided the very foundations of the discipline. ...
Over 50 years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, many of Thomas Kuhn’s (1970a) conceptions of normal science continue to influence thinking about how science progresses. Research in a field is often assumed to be driven by a predominant paradigm. The paradigm is thought to guide the problems that are addressed by studies and the solutions that are generated. Science is often likened to a process of puzzle solving. However, we argue that Kuhn greatly overestimated the role of the paradigm in research and greatly underestimated the theoretical developments that take place in normal science. In our view, his position appeared reasonable only because he changed the definition of “paradigm” from the innovations to the entire constellation of beliefs and practices in a field. He also exaggerated scientists’ commitment to a paradigm and the degree to which they are biased toward confirmation. Kuhn’s misconceptions stem, in part, from psychological misassumptions about the thinking and motivations of scientists. We close by suggesting that the simple numbers indicate that most important discoveries are made during normal science and that the revolutions conceived by Kuhn are not central to the advancement of science.
... One example of this is when new scholars, in an attempt to "make a name for them- selves," slap new labels on older, more established ideas and become famous, but the field as a whole might suffer from disjointed themes and ideas being promoted, and the theoretical and empirical progress of the discipline may be hampered. As Simonton (2015) has in fact shown, the social sciences have lower rates of peer consensus on what the important findings are than do the biological or physical sciences, and I would argue one reason for the lack of cumulative and consensual progress in social sci- ence is the desire to make a name for oneself to the detri- ment of the consensual accumulated progress of the field as a whole. ...
In this article, I argue that scientific fame and impact exists on a continuum from the mundane to the transformative/revolutionary. Ideally, one achieves fame and impact in science by synthesizing two extreme career prototypes: intrinsic and extrinsic research. The former is guided by interest, curiosity, passion, gut, and intuition for important untapped topics. The latter is guided by money, grants, and/or what is being published in top-tier journals. Assessment of fame and impact in science ultimately rests on productivity (publication) and some variation of its impact (citations). In addition to those traditional measures of impact, there are some relatively new metrics (e.g., the h index and altmetrics). If psychology is to achieve consensual cumulative progress and better rates of replication, I propose that upcoming psychologists would do well to understand that success is not equal to fame and that individual career success is not necessarily the same as disciplinary success. Finally, if one is to have a successful and perhaps even famous career in psychological science, a good strategy would be to synthesize intrinsic and extrinsic motives for one’s research.
... Last but not least, different domains of creative achievement differ in the tightness of any disciplinary consensus (Simonton, 2015a). For example, scientists working in the hard sciences, in comparison to those working in the soft sciences, display a much stronger agreement on who among their colleagues is doing the best work. ...
Two empirical investigations showed that achieved eminence as a creator can sometimes be a curvilinear, inverted-U function of the level of formal education attained by the individual. Typically, the peak falls approximately in the last year of undergraduate education. Because these findings suggest that formal education might not always be conducive to creative development, I examined the possibility that a complex and sometimes conflicting relation might ensue from the very definition of what it means to be creative. From there I introduced two formal definitions, one for personal (little-c) creativity and the other for consensual (Big-C) creativity. The implications of these definitions indeed supported the conclusion that formal education cannot have a simple positive linear association with creativity, and under certain circumstances that association can become negative.
... The extensive controversy suggested that BVSR's opponents and proponents were not using the key concepts in the same way, a definitional problem that often arises in "soft" psychology (cf. Benjafield, 2014;Simonton, 2015c). When terminology largely originates in everyday language, the terms bandied about will naturally feature either multiple meanings or diffuse shades of meaning. ...
A 4-decade long research program that had started out focusing on creative genius unexpectedly produced a general response typology potentially applicable to the average person on the street. In particular, attempts to define both creativity and noncreativity resulted in an eightfold typology of everyday human thought and behavior. Given any situation that may evoke a response, the alternative outcomes can be distinguished according to their initial probability, actual utility, and the person’s prior knowledge of that utility. These 3 parameters then yield 8 major types of outcomes: (a) routine, reproductive, or habitual responses (based on acquired life and work expertise); (b) fortuitous responses (such as uninformed response biases); (c) irrational perseveration (or failing to learn from past mistakes); (d) problem finding (such as violations of expert expectations); (e) irrational suppression (refusing to do what’s good for you); (f) creative or productive thoughts and behaviors (original, useful, and surprising responses); (g) rational suppression (such as those due to previous response extinction); and (h) mind wandering and behavioral exploration (such as fantasy, tinkering, and play). These distinct responses exhibit important interrelationships. For example, although habitual responses are antithetical to creative thought and behavior, creativity is fostered by problem finding, rational suppression, and mind wandering or behavioral exploration. Moreover, because the 3 parameters can assume continuous values between 0 and 1 inclusively, the typology allows for more finely differentiated thoughts and behaviors, including “satisficing” decisions that fall short of utility optimization as well as tentative hunches residing between absolute ignorance and certain knowledge.
... In addition, for high consensus domains, such as the hard sciences, the difference between personal and consensual evaluations will minimize (Simonton, 2013c). Accordingly, the creator's own self-assessment of the creativity criteria will depart very little from the assessments of others in the same field (see also Simonton, 2015b). After all, the creator is necessarily a domain-specific expert rather than a mere novice (cf. ...
... fiction versus nonfiction literature [23]) as well as among different scientific disciplines (e.g. 'hard' versus 'soft' sciences [24]). Yet there exists no a priori reason for believing that the relation between psychopathology and creativity would prove invariant across creative domains. ...
Please allow me to begin this chapter with an autobiographical observation: I have been conducting scientific research on creativity and genius – and especially creative genius – since the early 1970s. During the first quarter century of my career, I was often hard pressed to justify my research program (Simonton, 2002). Although the subject had once attracted the attention of such great psychologists as Francis Galton, James McKeen Cattell, Lewis M. Terman, and Edward L. Thorndike, the topic had become marginalized relative to mainstream research in psychology. Toward the end of the twentieth century, though, an unexpected event altered the status of my endeavors: the positive psychology movement. Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and others argued that it was time for psychologists to study human strengths and virtues rather than human weaknesses and vices (for instance, Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Besides suggesting new topics for psychological inquiry, the proponents of positive psychology also decided to co-opt already ongoing investigations as representative of the movement. Somewhat to my surprise, creativity, genius, and creative genius were added to the growing inventory of representative subjects for positive psychological studies. As a result, I began to receive invitations to give talks at positive psychology conferences and to write chapters for handbooks and anthologies devoted to the emerging field (for instance, Cassandro & Simonton, 2002). Now I probably should not complain about seeing my life’s work get enhanced attention. And I certainly relished the free trips to conferences and the additional publications in my curriculum vitae.
... In addition, for high consensus domains, such as the hard sciences, the difference between personal and consensual evaluations will minimize (Simonton, 2013c). Accordingly, the creator's own self-assessment of the creativity criteria will depart very little from the assessments of others in the same field (see also Simonton, 2015b). After all, the creator is necessarily a domain-specific expert rather than a mere novice (cf. ...
Albert Einstein is often considered one of the greatest creators of the 20th century. Indeed, he is frequently viewed as a prototypical example of creative genius. Yet what was the psychological basis of his creativity? In particular, consider the following three issues: Samuel Johnson (1781, p. 5), the author of the first English dictionary, claimed that “the true Genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.” In other words, creativity may consist of a generalized information processing capacity that may be channeled to almost any endeavor. Does this statement hold for Einstein? Could he have become a Picasso or a Stravinsky had his childhood experiences only directed him toward art or music rather than toward science? Or did Einstein possess a more specialized ability that would not have served him well had he ventured outside of theoretical physics? Whether Einstein's creative powers were general or specific, where did his capacity originate? Was Einstein's creativity an innate ability, as expressed by John Dryden's (1693/1885, p. 60) famous remark that “genius must be born, and never can be taught”? Or was the capacity slowly and arduously acquired through education, practice, and training? Was Einstein merely the most expert and competent theoretical physicist of his day? […]
To what extent are emotion words used in anglophone disciplines? The data used to explore this question were the relative frequencies with which each of 20 emotion words occurred in each of 11 disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The subjects examined included astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, mathematics, economics, political science, psychology, history, and philosophy. Each discipline was compared with every other discipline in terms of the relative frequencies of their usage of emotion words in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Every emotion word was used by every discipline in both centuries. Overall, there were more positive than negative emotion words used, although it was suggested that the negative emotion words may be more salient. The use of the words pleasure and amusement declined in frequency in the twentieth century in every discipline. By contrast, the word hate increased in frequency in every discipline in the twentieth century. Over the last few decades an increasing number of disciplines have taken an active interest in emotion as a research topic, and the characteristics of a multidisciplinary approach to emotion are discussed.
This paper critically analyzes the distinction between the so-called ?hard? and ?soft? sciences, with a particular emphasis on the teaching quality in these academic fields. Firstly, it presents the origin and characteristics of this popular dichotomy, as well the idea of a hierarchy of sciences in philosophy and sociology. It then points out the relative inadequacy of this hierarchy, but also its heuristic value, based on relevant and contemporary research on scientific knowledge and university teaching. In this regard, it thoroughly analyzes the concepts of academic tribes, territories, and epistemic cultures at the university environments. We argue that the anthropological concept of culture can offer valuable insights into the inner workings of physical, life, and social sciences, and claim that different academic cultures significantly influence the character of university teaching. Finally, this paper emphasizes the possibility of building a common academic culture in terms of teaching quality, i.e. a shared quality culture.
WARNING: GENETIC ENGINEERING IS DANGEROUS. Also, ANTI-racism is a moral imperative.
Critical Rationalist Biology. Biology under critical rationalist epistemology contains information theory. Critical rationalism is self-critical rationalist epistemology. Thereby self-critically asserting reason as the foundation of knowledge. Information theory successfully acknowledges both evolution and possible creationism. Information theory notes constructivism's dominance, while privilege is heritable. No gene is 100% known to be a certain trait. Critical rationalist biology sets the stage for critical theory such as CRT. Evolution may have happened yet no acquired mutation can turn other animals human. Without at least partial free will(the fundamental choice to focus on life) human reason would be impossible. So, free will is compatible with determinism. Parts of life are choices while others are not. Previously, the author has charted other sciences with critical rationalism. For context, the essay covers the epistemology itself then those two disciplines. Comte's Hierarchy of sciences contrasts with falsifiability ranking "astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology" from simplest to complex(Simonton 2015). Heuristically, more falsifiable science is less complex. Astronomy is the most falsifiable. Physics is the second most falsifiable. Biology is the second most complex. Sociology is the most complex. Humans are complex thus, social sciences rely on heuristics.
The current paper aimed to analyze quantitatively the trends of four major schools of thought in scientific Psychology (neuroscience, cognitivism, behaviorism, psychoanalysis) and their intersections, covering the period from 1979 to 2020. We utilized a rigorous methodology across three distinct sources: Mainstream Psychology(MP), Highly Influential Journals (HIJ), and non-English papers (NEP). Our findings align with previous research in two aspects: psychoanalysis and behaviorism have significantly declined, cognitivism remains a prominent trend. However, we deviate from prior studies by recognizing that neuroscience may be considered the most influential trend and that trends exhibit less linearity than previously assumed. We also acknowledge the significance of NEP, which manifest an independent pattern as compared to the other sources and that may reveal what happens in the “periphery” of Psychology. It is noteworthy that NEP demonstrated a still lively contribution from psychoanalysis. Our study also highlights the insularity and lack of cross-fertilization among psychological subdisciplines, despite the widespread claims to the contrary. It eventually supports the inference that scientific Psychology is a non-paradigmatic or pre-paradigmatic discipline, pointing out the dominance of applied psychology and confuting the notion of overarching "grand theories".
In the Italian context, the psychology profession is regulated by a particular legal framework, which establishes that (a) a set of expert functions (e.g., psychological diagnosis, rehabilitation) are exclusively reserved to the psychology profession (b) psychotherapy is defined a second-order function reserved to psychologists (and practitioners) having a 4-year specialization after the master degree in psychology. This specific institutional framework raises the necessity of a threefold differentiation. First, the need to set clear scientific boundaries between professional psychology and other non-psychological forms of professional/expert practice (e.g., counselor, mental coach). Second, the need to clarify the specificity of the psychology practices operating in the clinical field with respect to those operating in other fields of intervention (e.g., school, community). Third, the need to model the articulation between the clinical psychologist and the psychotherapist. The paper provides a model to operate such a differentiation. Though motivated by and focused on the peculiarity of the Italian context, the current paper offers considerations that may transcend that context and be of general interest
The current paper aimed to analyze the trends and prominence of four major schools of thought in scientific Psychology (neuroscience, cognitivism, behaviorism, psychoanalysis) and their intersections, covering the period from 1979 to 2020. We utilized an improved methodology across three distinct sources: mainstream psychology, highly influential journals, and non-English papers. Our findings align with previous research in several aspects: a) psychoanalysis and behaviorism have significantly declined, b) cognitivism remains a prominent trend. However, we deviate from prior studies in the following ways: c) neuroscience may be considered the most influential trend, d) trends exhibit more stability and dispersion than previously assumed, and e) relative stability is observed in psychological studies over the past four decades. We also acknowledge the significance of non-English papers (NEP), which manifest an independent pattern as compared to the other sources and that may reveal what happens in the “periphery” of Psychology. It is noteworthy NEP demonstrated a still lively contribution from psychoanalysis. Overall, our study supports the inference that scientific Psychology is a non-paradigmatic or pre-paradigmatic discipline. It also supports the dominance of applied psychology, confuting the notion of overarching "grand theories." It eventually highlights the insularity and lack of cross-fertilization among psychological subdisciplines, despite the widespread claims to the contrary.
The research field of nonprofits and philanthropy has grown exponentially. To what extent do nonprofit scholars share a common language? Answering this question is crucial to assessing the field’s intellectual cohesiveness. We studied how coauthor networks, scholarly reputation, and the prevalence of female authors influence consensus formation. We found that the degree of consensus for all major research topics in the field has increased over time—For every 10% growth in the volume of literature, shared language increased by 1.4%. A cohesive research community on nonprofits and philanthropy has been forming since the early 2000s. Female scholars are fewer in number and less cited than males; their presence did not exceed 40% for most topics. The citation counts of scholars and small-world property of networks are positively associated with consensus, suggesting that star researchers and knowledge brokers bridging different intellectual communities are key to sharing research interests and language.
The compartmentalization of psychological science and of the profession prevents the progress of the discipline. Compartmentalization is a collateral effect of the impressive scientific, methodological, and technical development of psychology, which has led to the emergence of specialized segments of knowledge and practice that unavoidably tend to progress separately from each other and weaken their reciprocal linkage. The work highlights the limits of compartmentalization and discusses motives that call for the unity of psychology. Three approaches to unification are outlined: I) the identification of the ultimate causal explanation; II) the progressive extension of the explicative capacity of specific theories; III) the building of a metatheoretical framework. Finally, the paper proposes the intervention as the criterion to compare the capacity of the three approaches to unity. According to this criterion, approaches can be validated by reason of their ability to enable professional psychology to address the current challenges that people and society have to face.
The phenomenon of serendipity is integrated with the broader conception of creativity as combinatorial, where a large number of processes and procedures are potentially responsible for the generation of such combinations. To define what it means to identify any given combination as creative, the standard two-criterion definition is replaced with a three-criterion definition where creativity becomes the multiplicative function of originality, utility, and surprise. This definition is then applied to serendipity, showing that such discoveries inadvertently maximise originality and surprise, without necessarily ensuring the highest utility. This formal treatment is then applied to the following three contrasts: true serendipity versus pseudo-serendipity, internal versus external serendipity, and serendipity in the sciences versus serendipity in the arts.
Real-life outcomes for men and women suggest the existence of cognitive sex differences, but the evidence for a sex difference in general intelligence is equivocal. Here, we examine the role of spatial ability for IQ test performance, in light of the developmental hypothesis that male performance increases more than female across adolescence. Using longitudinal data from Block and Block data set on the Wechsler scales and the rod-and-frame test (RFT) for ages 4 (N = 108), 11 (N = 101), and 18 years (N = 100), we find that males' performance becomes greater than females' with age, both on IQ and the RFT. At 18 years of age, males' mean IQ and RFT score was 116.4 and 4.05 (lower scores representing less error), as compared to111.5 and 7.85 for females. Importantly, we found that the RFT mediates the sex difference in IQ, and that the factor loadings of the RFT on the g factor increases with age, from −0.06 at age 4 to −0.52 at 11 and −0.67 at age 18. In conclusion, g becomes more integrative of spatial ability across time and this finding may explain sex differences in g after puberty and potentially has interesting implications for the understanding of the development of intelligence. One important direction for future research is to incorporate biologically based pubertal neural changes into our understanding of developmental sex differences in intelligence.
Disciplinary differences in the development of scientific generalizations and explanations are reviewed in this article. The social and behavioral sciences have identified fewer laws, established fewer “paradigms,” and developed “worse” theories than the physical sciences. We argue that the variability in the theoretical attainments of disciplines is due primarily to differences in the complexity of the topics studied. Accounts suggesting that differences in the maturity of disciplines are responsible for the variability are dismissed. In the study of complex phenomena, there is an extreme trade-off between generality and precision in which basic theories do not make the precise predictions needed for the development of applications and in which applied models are lacking in generality. The examination of proximal determinants and the generation of context-specific mathematical models are essential for prediction and application in complex disciplines. The impossibility of developing exacting theories of complex phenomena suggests that we need to redefine our conceptions of “good” and “bad” theories and “real” and “fake” science.
In discussing how merit is commonly judged in academia, my focus in this paper is not on dimensions that are currently considered, but on those that warrant more attention. Grounded in suggestions offered by Sternberg (2016), I argue here for increased recognition of faculty’s commitment to intrinsic values – focused on community and relationships – and not just extrinsic ones that connote personal fame or status. I first summarize evidence of disillusionment among today’s promising young scholars, and then provide exemplars of role models who have, in fact, maintained high standards in both intrinsic and extrinsic domains. I illustrate how commitment to intrinsic goals in everyday professional responsibilities (such as peer reviews or teaching) can come at cost to personal success, and suggest ways of providing appropriate recognition in faculty evaluations. At the macro-level, I describe how positive work communities can enhance productivity, foster resilience and mitigate burnout in the competitive world of contemporary academe. Finally, I underscore the critical role of psychologists in spurring greater dialogue about the messages conveyed by higher education, to the next generation, about what truly matters in making "a life well lived”.
The digital humanities are being applied with increasing frequency to the analysis of historically important texts. In this study, the methods of G. K. Zipf are used to explore the digital history of the vocabulary of psychology. Zipf studied a great many phenomena, from word frequencies to city sizes, showing that they tend to have a characteristic distribution in which there are a few cases that occur very frequently and many more cases that occur very infrequently. We find that the number of new words and word senses that writers contribute to the vocabulary of psychology have such a Zipfian distribution. Moreover, those who make the most contributions, such as William James, tend also to invent new metaphorical senses of words rather than new words. By contrast, those who make the fewest contributions tend to invent entirely new words. The use of metaphor makes a text easier for a reader to understand. While the use of new words requires more effort on the part of the reader, it may lead to more precise understanding than does metaphor. On average, new words and word senses become a part of psychology's vocabulary in the time leading up to World War I, suggesting that psychology was "finding its language" (Danziger, 1997) during this period. (PsycINFO Database Record
This reply responds to comments and criticisms of Liane Gabora (2015) and Robert W. Weisberg (2015) concerning my empirical study of Thomas Edison's creative career (D. K. Simonton, 2014d). With respect to Gabora, I discuss backtracking and superfluity, the evaluation of ideas as good or bad, the quantification of responses, the network of enterprises, and other minor issues. Regarding Weisberg, I focus on domain-specific expertise, ordinary thought processes, and personality differences. I then close my response with a brief discussion of why a blind variation and selective retention theory of creativity is urgently needed in this research area.
It is a central assumption in creativity theory that the creativity of an idea is defined by its novelty and usefulness. The present study examined this notion by investigating how the perceived novelty and usefulness actually contribute to the overall evaluation of creativity. We collected responses to a verbal and a figural divergent thinking task in a sample of 1,500 participants. All ideas were evaluated for novelty, usefulness, or creativity by a total of 18 independent judges. Results generally indicate a greater importance of novelty than usefulness in the prediction of creativity scores. Novelty and usefulness interacted significantly in the prediction of creativity both as a linear and as a nonlinear term. An examination of the interaction between novelty and usefulness suggests that usefulness is predictive of creativity only within highly novel ideas. In conclusion, novelty can be regarded as a first-order criterion and usefulness as a second-order criterion of creativity: If an idea is not novel its usefulness does not matter much, but if an idea is novel its usefulness will additionally determine its actual creativity.
Thomas Edison is widely considered to be one of the greatest inventive geniuses who ever lived. Therefore, his total output of 1,093 patents was used to study the trajectory of his creative career, including both failures and triumphs. The study specifically examined 2 hypotheses about how the creative process operates across the career course. First, creativity will incorporate some form of blind-variation and selective-retention. Second, creative productivity will be enhanced by engagement in a "network of enterprises." To test these 2 hypotheses, the 1,093 patents were first assigned to 8 separate subject areas: (a) miscellany, (b) telegraphy and telephony, (c) phonographs and sound recording, (d) electric light and power, (e) mining and ore milling, (f) batteries, (g) motion pictures, and (h) cement. The patents were then tabulated into both 1- and 5-year age periods according to Edison's chronological age at the time each was executed. Quantitative analyses were then applied to determine the age-wise trends and clustering of the patents across the course of his 64-year career. In addition, direct comparisons were made to a nomothetic baseline predicted by a mathematical model of creative productivity. The quantitative analyses were complemented by qualitative treatments of Edison's creative career. All told, the 2 hypotheses received considerable empirical support. Tellingly, the inventor's phenomenal triumphs notwithstanding, he could not avoid even catastrophic failures.
Campbell (1960) proposed the theory that creativity required blind variation and selective retention (BVSR). More than a half century has transpired without any resolution of the controversy over the theory’s validity. This inability to reach consensus may reflect a fundamental failure on both sides to define the critical terms of the debate, namely, creativity and blindness. Hence, to help resolve the issue, the ideas making up a variant set are first described via three parameters: (a) the idea’s initial probability of generation, (b) its final utility, and (c) any prior knowledge of its utility value. These three subjective parameters are then used to derive a creativity index applicable to each idea in the set. The same parameters are also deployed to produce a sightedness metric that describes the sightedness of the variant set as well as each idea in that set. It is then logically demonstrated, first, that an idea’s creativity is inversely related to its sightedness, and, second, that an idea’s creativity is inversely related to the sightedness of the variant set that contains that idea. Furthermore, the same general conclusions hold when the third parameter is omitted from the two definitions or when the two definitions are not functions of identical parameters (e.g., novelty in one but originality in the other). Because blindness is just the inverse of sightedness, it automatically follows that creativity has an essential positive connection with blind variation. The article closes with a discussion of BVSR implications regarding the joint distribution of creativity and sightedness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
The psychological qualities of the creative person in general are gradually becoming more and more clear, and yet the psychological qualities of the creative scientists remain less clear. The current investigation examined the personality characteristics of the creative scientist in a sample of 145 academic physical, biological, and social scientists (33% women) from major research universities throughout the United States. Personality data were collected online through completion of the Big Five Inventory (John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) and the Psychoticism subscale of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (Francis, Brown, & Philipchalk, 1992). Creativity was assessed using various publication and citation-based metrics from Web of Science, Science Citation Index, and Social Science Citation Index, including the h-index and the creativity index (Soler, 2007). An overall creativity index was created by log-transforming, standardizing, and summing the multiple productivity and impact measures. Results mostly confirmed the prediction that openness to experience and psychoticism would explain variance in scientific creativity once career age, gender, and area of science were statistically controlled for in a stepwise hierarchical regression model. These patterns of results confirm and extend previous research in the psychology of science and suggest that personality traits function to lower behavioral thresholds and make creative behavior in science more likely. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)
Comments on the original article by Matthew Makel (see record 2014-06823-002) which provides an excellent overview of some critical problems and offers many useful solutions to replication. As the author pointed out, many of these problems have been around for decades, with attempted but failed reforms scattered along the way. Fortunately, the current authors research program was influenced early on by various critiques, most notably those of Paul Meehl (1967, 1978), who is mentioned in the article. The author admits that not every scientific hypothesis is amenable to the study of significant samples. Very often, our theories of creativity and aesthetics can be quite reasonably scrutinized using college students or survey respondents (albeit such usage immediately raises the difficulties treated in Makel, 2014). Even so, at other times these convenient samples, at best, provide extremely remote proxies for what really attracts our curiosity, such as the relation between creative genius and psychopathology (Simonton, 2014, pp. 53–61). Can that age-old question receive a scientifically valid answer using samples that include not a single universally recognized creative genius? In general, whenever we seek a science that directly contributes to our understanding of the creative genius we should include those very cases in significant samples to generate literally replicable results. In doing so, we not only get rid of the replication problem but also should render utterly irrelevant all those nasty probability levels, confidence intervals, asterisks, and tests for statistical power. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)
Researchers examine implicit beliefs about creativity to understand what laypeople think. Past work has looked at cultural differences, characteristics associated with creativity, and the positive or negative valence that people feel toward creativity. In this study, we focused on the Four C Model of Creativity (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2007; Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009) to discover if laypeople perceive nuances in different levels of accomplishment. We found that although Pro-c and little-c merged into one factor, Big-C, mini-c, and Not-c (not creative) were distinguishable. Personality (particularly agreeableness and openness) predicted how participants rated different levels of creativity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
The vocabulary of Anglophone psychology is shared with many other subjects. Previous research using the Oxford English Dictionary has shown that the subjects having the most words in common with psychology are biology, chemistry, computing, electricity, law, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, music, pathology, philosophy, and physics. The present study presents a database of the vocabularies of these 12 subjects that is similar to one previously constructed for psychology, enabling the histories of the vocabularies of these subjects to be compared with each other as well as with psychology. All subjects have a majority of word senses that are metaphorical. However, psychology is not among the most metaphorical of subjects, a distinction belonging to computing, linguistics, and mathematics. Indeed, the history of other subjects shows an increasing tendency to recycle old words and give them new, metaphorical meanings. The history of psychology shows an increasing tendency to invent new words rather than metaphorical senses of existing words. These results were discussed in terms of the degree to which psychology's vocabulary remains unsettled in comparison with other subjects. The possibility was raised that the vocabulary of psychology is in a state similar to that of chemistry prior to Lavoisier. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
What is the role of expertise in evaluating creative products? Novices and experts do not assess creativity similarly, indicating domain-specific knowledge’s role in judging creativity. We describe two studies that examined how “quasi-experts” (people who have more experience in a domain than novices but also lack recognized standing as experts) compared with novices and experts in rating creative work. In Study 1, we compared different types of quasi-experts with novices and experts in rating short stories. In Study 2, we compared experts, quasi-experts, and novices in evaluating an engineering product (a mousetrap design). Quasi-experts (regardless of type) seemed to be appropriate raters for short stories, yet results were mixed for the engineer quasi-experts. Some domains may require more expertise than others to properly evaluate creative work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
Over the last four decades arguments for and against the claim that creative hypothesis formation is based on Darwinian ‘blind’ variation have been put forward. This paper offers a new and systematic route through this long-lasting debate. It distinguishes between undirected, random, and unjustified variation, to prevent widespread confusions regarding the meaning of undirected variation. These misunderstandings concern Lamarckism, equiprobability, developmental constraints, and creative hypothesis formation. The paper then introduces and develops the standard critique that creative hypothesis formation is guided rather than blind, integrating developments from contemporary research on creativity. On that basis, I discuss three compatibility arguments that have been used to answer the critique. These arguments do not deny guided variation but insist that an important analogy exists nonetheless. These compatibility arguments all fail, even though they do so for different reasons: trivialisation, conceptual confusion, and lack of evidence respectively. Revisiting the debate in this manner not only allows us to see where exactly a ‘Darwinian’ account of creative hypothesis formation goes wrong, but also to see that the debate is not about factual issues, but about the interpretation of these factual issues in Darwinian terms.
Studies comparing the cognitive status of the sciences have long sought to identify the distinguishing features of 'hard' and 'soft' science. Attempts by philosophers of science to ground such distinctions in abstract principles and by sociologists of science to detect relevant differences (for example, in consensus levels) have met with limited success. However, recent investigations of scientists' concrete practices of data representation provide new leads on this problem. In particular, Bruno Latour has argued that graphs are essential to science due to their ability to render phenomena into compact, transportable and persuasive form. Applying Latour's notion of 'graphism' to the hierarchy of sciences, we found that the use of graphs across seven scientific disciplines correlated almost perfectly with their hardness, and that the same pattern held up across ten specialty fields in psychology.
The hypothesis of a Hierarchy of the Sciences, first formulated in the 19(th) century, predicts that, moving from simple and general phenomena (e.g. particle dynamics) to complex and particular (e.g. human behaviour), researchers lose ability to reach theoretical and methodological consensus. This hypothesis places each field of research along a continuum of complexity and "softness", with profound implications for our understanding of scientific knowledge. Today, however, the idea is still unproven and philosophically overlooked, too often confused with simplistic dichotomies that contrast natural and social sciences, or science and the humanities. Empirical tests of the hypothesis have usually compared few fields and this, combined with other limitations, makes their results contradictory and inconclusive. We verified whether discipline characteristics reflect a hierarchy, a dichotomy or neither, by sampling nearly 29,000 papers published contemporaneously in 12 disciplines and measuring a set of parameters hypothesised to reflect theoretical and methodological consensus. The biological sciences had in most cases intermediate values between the physical and the social, with bio-molecular disciplines appearing harder than zoology, botany or ecology. In multivariable analyses, most of these parameters were independent predictors of the hierarchy, even when mathematics and the humanities were included. These results support a "gradualist" view of scientific knowledge, suggesting that the Hierarchy of the Sciences provides the best rational framework to understand disciplines' diversity. A deeper grasp of the relationship between subject matter's complexity and consensus could have profound implications for how we interpret, publish, popularize and administer scientific research.
The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte is a condensed English version of the French philosopher's controversial work, freely translated by Harriet Martineau and published in two volumes in 1853. Martineau's abridged and more easily digestible version of Comte's work was intended to be readily accessible to a wide general readership, particularly those she felt to be morally and intellectually adrift, and Comte's philosophy indeed attracted a significant following in Britain in the later nineteenth century. Comte's 'doctrine' promoted personal and public ethics and social cohesion based no longer on metaphysics but on strict scientific method, and anticipated twentieth-century logical positivism and secular humanism. The first volume of this translation contains Parts 1 to 5 and sets out the nature and importance of positivism, leading on to an overview of the 'positive sciences': mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology.
Are you awed by the exquisite fit between organism and environment, and find in this fit a puzzle needing explanation?
Arthur Cropley (2006) emphasized the critical place that convergent thinking has in creativity. Although he briefly refers to the blind variation and selective retention (BVSR) theory of creativity, his discussion could not reflect the most recent theoretical and empirical developments in BVSR, especially the resulting combinatorial models. Therefore, in this article I first provide an overview of contemporary BVSR theory, including both a general combinatorial model and its specific manifestations (internal vs. external selection, simultaneous vs. sequential selection, exploration vs. elimination, and open vs. closed preselection). This overview then permits theoretical treatment of the connections between convergent thinking and BVSR. These connections entail the direct involvement of convergent thinking in BVSR, as well as the occasions in which sequential BVSR operates in a manner resembling convergent thinking. The article closes with a discussion of some misunderstandings regarding the function of domain-specific knowledge in BVSR creativity. This discussion includes the argument that hindsight bias often makes creativity appear far more knowledge based than it was at the time the creative ideas first emerged. This bias can make researchers overlook how BVSR mediates between expertise and creativity. Hence, care must be taken not to bypass BVSR in granting all due credit to convergent thinking.
Research results in the social and behavioral sciences are often conceded to be less replicable than research results in the physical sciences. However, direct empirical comparisons of the cumulativeness of research in the social and physical sciences have not been made to date. This article notes the parallels between methods used in the quantitative synthesis of research in the social and in the physical sciences. Essentially identical methods are used to test the consistency of research results in physics and in psychology. These methods can be used to compare the consistency of replicated research results in physics and in the social sciences. The methodology is illustrated with 13 exemplary reviews from each domain. The exemplary comparison suggests that the results of physical experiments may not be strikingly more consistent than those of social or behavioral experiments. The data suggest that even the results of physical experiments may not be cumulative in the absolute sense by statistical criteria. It is argued that the study of the actual cumulativeness found in physical data could inform social scientists about what to expect from replicated experiments under good conditions.
Current definitions of creativity almost universally include value or a close cognate as one of the criteria. This article discusses two problems that arise as the result of the inclusion of value in those definitions. First, there is a conflict between the researchers’ definition of the relevant phenomena and that used in the ordinary language, as well as a conflict between the ordinary understanding of the relevant concepts and the way they are used by researchers. Such conflicts may result in research being ignored or rejected by other researchers and policy makers. Second, the value attributed to some product is the result of a subjective judgment, which is subject to change over generations. Such changes have the consequence of making it impossible to develop a cumulative knowledge base in the study of creativity. In response to those problems, an alternative definition of creative, based on the criteria of intentional novelty, and not including value in any form, is discussed. In addition, positive reasons for adopting that definition are presented.
After 4 decades of severe criticism, the ritual of null hypothesis significance testing - mechanical dichotomous decisions around a sacred .05 criterion - still persists. This article reviews the problems with this practice, including its near-universal misinterpretation of p as the probability that H0s false, the misinterpretation that its complement is the probability of successful replication, and the mistaken assumption that if one rejects H0 one thereby affirms the theory that led to the test. Exploratory data analysis and the use of graphic methods, a steady improvement in and a movement toward standardization in measurement, an emphasis on estimating effect sizes using confidence intervals, and the informed use of available statistical methods is suggested. For generalization, psychologists must finally rely, as has been done in all the older sciences, on replication.
For 200 years it has been assumed that the sciences are arranged in a hierarchy, with developed natural sciences like physics at the top and social sciences like sociology at the bottom. Sciences at the top of the hierarchy presumably display higher levels of consensus and more rapid rates of advancement than those at the bottom. A distinction is made between two classes of knowledge: the core, or fully evaluated and universally accepted ideas which serve as the starting points for graduate education, and the research frontier, or all research currently being conducted. Data are presented from a set of empirical studies which show that, at the top and at the bottom of the hierarchy in either cognitive consensus or the rate at which new ideas are incorporated. It is concluded that in all sciences knowledge at the research frontier is a loosely woven web characterized by substantial levels of disagreement and difficulty in determining which contributions will turn out to be significant. Even at the research...
The ideas presented in this book have been incubating for over 25 years. I was in the first grade, I believe, when the ideas that eventually developed into this social psychology of creativity first began to germinate. The occasion was art class, a weekly Friday afternoon event during which we were given small reproductions of the great masterworks and asked to copy them on notepaper using the standard set of eight Crayola® crayons. I had left kindergarten the year before with encour agement from the teacher about developing my potential for artistic creativity. During these Friday afternoon exercises, however, I developed nothing but frus tration. Somehow, Da Vinci's "Adoration of the Magi" looked wrong after I'd fin ished with it. I wondered where that promised creativity had gone. I began to believe then that the restrictions placed on my artistic endeavors contributed to my loss of interest and spontaneity in art. When, as a social psy chologist, I began to study intrinsic motivation, it seemed to me that this moti vation to do something for its own sake was the ingredient that had been missing in those strictly regimented art classes. It seemed that intrinsic motivation, as defined by social psychologists, might be essential to creativity. My research pro gram since then has given considerable support to that notion. As a result, the social psychology of creativity presented in this book gives prominence to social variables that affect motivational orientation.
Data from probability samples of U.S. formal, physical, and biological scientists show that more than sixty per cent have been anticipated by another scientist in the publication of a discovery at least once in their careers, and about one-third were concerned about being anticipated in their current work. Disciplinary differences in rates of being anticipated and concern about being anticipated are discussed and to some extent explained. Individuals are likely to be anticipated if they publish much and have their publications cited often, and they are likely to be concerned about being anticipated if they are young and if they have been anticipated previously. Being in competitive situations induces scientists to shift specialties and to be secretive about their research, although those working with collaborators are less secretive. Correlates of competitiveness are presented for both 1,718 individuals and thirty-five scientific specialties as units of analysis. The paper concludes by discussing the functions, dysfunctions, and future of competition in science.
This study sought to determine the degree to which retrenchment decisions at a large, urban university could be explained by a rational decision model. The analysis focused on the relationship between performance data and the increase or decrease in faculty size of forty departments in the College of Arts and Sciences during the time of financial stress.
Scitation is the online home of leading journals and conference proceedings from AIP Publishing and AIP Member Societies
Data concerning citation of laws (n=157) and theories (n = 699) were collected from psychology textbooks across 112 years (1885-1996) of psychology. Three hypotheses concerning the comparative "citation strength" of the terms law and theory in psychology were set up to be tested: (1) the number of laws cited in psychology textbooks has increased over 112 years; (2) the number of theories cited in psychology textbooks has increased over 112 years; and (3) the ratio of laws-to-theories cited in psychology textbooks has remained relatively balanced over 112 years. Results showed that Hypotheses 1 and 3 were not confirmed, and Hypothesis 2 was confirmed. It was suggested that psychology has a need for a more balanced relationship between number of laws and theories cited in textbooks. Supplemental analyses tracked citation counts of specific laws and theories across 112 years to detect strength of citation and change in those concepts over time. Research was suggested concerning the semantic issues associated with use of the terms law and theory in psychology.
Too often, psychological debates become polarized into dichotomous positions. Such polarization may have occurred with respect to Campbell's (1960) blind variation and selective retention (BVSR) theory of creativity. To resolve this unnecessary controversy, BVSR was radically reformulated with respect to creative problem solving. The reformulation began by defining (a) potential solution sets consisting of k possible solutions each described by their respective probability and utility values, (b) a set sightedness metric that gauges the extent to which the probabilities correspond to the utilities, and (c) a solution creativity index based on the joint improbability and utility of each solution. These definitions are then applied to representative cases in which simultaneous or sequential generate-and-test procedures scrutinize solution sets of variable size and with representative patterns of probabilities and utilities. The principal features of BVSR theory were then derived, including the implications of superfluity and backtracking. Critically, it was formally demonstrated that the most creative solutions must emerge from solution sets that score extremely low in sightedness. Although this preliminary revision has ample room for further development, the demonstration proves that BVSR's explanatory value does not depend on any specious association with Darwin's theory of evolution.
There is greater unity in psychology than our internal squabbles might suggest because Mother Nature uses the same tricks in many contexts. There are fundamental principles that apply widely in psychology and have parallels in biology and physics. Behavior is a function of potentials that become manifest when the strenght of instigation to action exceeds a threshold. Thresholds result from exciting and inhibiting tendencies that are instigated along with a response of interest. Adaptive behavior is a blend of just two possibilities available to organisms, changing themselves to accommodate an unyielding environment or changing the world to meet their needs.
Prior research supports the inference that scientific disciplines can be ordered into a hierarchy ranging from the "hard" natural sciences to the "soft" social sciences. This ordering corresponds with such objective criteria as disciplinary consensus, knowledge obsolescence rate, anticipation frequency, theories-to-laws ratio, lecture disfluency, and age at recognition. It is then argued that this hierarchy can be extrapolated to encompass the humanities and arts and interpolated within specific domains to accommodate contrasts in subdomains (e.g., revolutionary versus normal science). This expanded and more finely differentiated hierarchy is then shown to have a partial psychological basis in terms of dispositional traits (e.g., psychopathology) and developmental experiences (e.g., family background). This demonstration then leads to three hypotheses about how a creator's domain-specific impact depends on his or her disposition and development: the domain-progressive, domain-typical, and domain-regressive creator hypotheses. Studies published thus far lend the most support to the domain-regressive creator hypothesis. In particular, major contributors to a domain are more likely to have dispositional traits and developmental experiences most similar to those that prevail in a domain lower in the disciplinary hierarchy. However, some complications to this generalization suggest the need for more research on the proposed hierarchical model.
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Although the theory that creativity requires blind variation and selective retention (BVSR) is now more than a half-century old, only recently has BVSR theory undergone appreciable conceptual development, including formal three-parameter definitions of both creativity and sightedness. In this article, these new developments are for the first time extended to encompass sequential BVSR, that is, when ideas are generated and tested consecutively rather than simultaneously. Formulated in terms of creative problem solving, sequential BVSR is shown to have two forms: (a) exploratory in which the person decreases total ignorance and (b) eliminatory in which the person vets informed guesses. Only in the latter case does sightedness for both single potential solutions and the set of potential solutions necessarily increase with each generation-and-test trial. Exploratory BVSR is illustrated by Edison's search for a practical incandescent filament, whereas eliminatory BVSR is exemplified by Watson's discovery of the DNA base code. Hence, although epistemologically and psychologically distinct, both represent important forms of creative problem solving.
Although creativity has recently attracted considerable theoretical and empirical research, researchers have yet to reach a consensus on how best to define the phenomenon. To help establish a consensus, a definition is proposed that is based on the three criteria used by the United States Patent Office to evaluate applications for patent protection. The modified version uses the criteria of novelty, utility, and surprise. Moreover, creativity assessments based on these three criteria are quantitative and multiplicative rather than qualitative or additive. This three-criterion definition then leads to four implications regarding (a) the limitations to domain-specific expertise, (b) the varieties of comparable creativities, (c) the contrast between subjective and objective evaluations, and (d) the place of blind variation and selective retention in the creative process. These implications prove that adding the third criterion has critical consequences for understanding the phenomenon. Creativity is not only treated with superior sophistication, but also paradoxes that appear using the most common two-criterion definition readily disappear when the third criterion is included in the analysis. Hence, the conceptual differences between two- and three-criterion definitions are not trivial.
In an exploration of the relationship among problem finding, problem solving, and cognitive controls, 80 adult male subjects were studied in four groups based on their domain of expertise (art or science) and their professional productivity (critically acclaimed professional producer or professionally competent). A MANOVA, followed by post hoc analyses of covariance, revealed that the critically acclaimed professional producers in art and in science differed from the professionally competent artists and scientists. The critically acclaimed professional producers devoted a larger proportion of their total response time to finding a problem in a decontextualized task and utilized a larger proportion of abstract functions on a sorting task. Chi‐square tests of homogeneity revealed group differences with respect to the types of constructions created on a problem‐finding task, the strategy used in a spatial‐visualization task, and the responses regarding attitude toward taking chances. Educational implications were drawn based on a model of problem situations involving problem formulation, method formulation, solution formulation, and the relationships among the differentiating variables.
Social determinists have argued that the occurrence of independent discoveries and inventions demonstrates the inevitability of techno-scientific progress. Yet the frequency of such multiples may be adequately predicted by a probabilistic model, especially the Poisson model suggested by Price. A detailed inquiry reveals that the Poisson distribution can predict almost all the observed variation in the frequency distribution of multiples collected by Merton, and by Ogburn and Thomas. This study further indicates that: (a) the number of observed multiples may be greatly underestimated, particularly those involving few independent contributors, (b) discoveries and inventions are not sufficiently probable to avoid a large proportion of total failures, and hence techno-scientific advance is to a large measure indeterminate; (c) chance or 'luck' seems to play such a major part that the 'great genius' theory is no more tenable than the social deterministic theory.
\textquotedblleft{}There could be no fairer destiny for any. . . theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on, as a limiting case.\textquotedblright ALBERT EINSTEIN..
A measure called ''theories-to-laws ratio'' (number of cited theories divided by number of cited laws in textbooks) was used to assess hypotheses concerning the concept of an ''hierarchy of sciences'' and psychology's place among the sciences. (1) The ratio will be well-balanced, i.e., show low values, for the ''natural'' sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) and be poorly balanced, i.e., show high values, for the ''social'' sciences (anthropology, sociology). (2) The theories-to-laws ratio of psychology will be closer to the mean of the ''social'' sciences than to the mean of the ''natural'' sciences. analysis showed a 67% agreement between the present data and the predicted ''hierarchy of sciences'' relative ordering of the sciences so Hypotheses 1 and 2 were confirmed. Other quantitative measures, in addition to this ratio, might be developed to evaluate further psychology's place among the sciences.
A controversy has emerged over whether Picasso's sketches for Guernica illustrate a Darwinian process of blind-variation and selectiveretention (i.e., nonmonotonic variants), rather than a more systematic, expertise-driven process (i.e., monotonic improvements). This issue is objectively addressed by having judges (1 pro-Darwinian, 2 anti-Darwinian, and 2 neutral) rank the figural components according to their perceived progress toward the final version of the painting. Besides strongly agreeing on the perceived order (composite progress score α = .85), the independent judges concurred that this order was conspicuously nonmonotonic, with minimal tendency to converge on the end result. These conclusions held not only for the sketches as a whole, but also for the sequence of sketches for the separate figural elements of the painting. Hence, Picasso's creative process is best described as producing blind nonmonotonic variants, rather than expert monotonic improvements. The general method used in this study can be extended to other documentary evidence - such as musical sketches, literary drafts, and laboratory notebooks - to determine the extent to which creativity operates in a Darwinian manner.
There are several intellectual projects embedded within the Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System and they tend to blur together at critical junctions. The aim of this commentary is to identify some of these strands of analysis and their implicit metaphysical presuppositions. It is argued that the presuppositions are not consistent across the different strands. The strands can continue to be pursued independently, insofar as they have distinct purposes. However, the incompatible presuppositions are surfacing in the effort to combine the strands into a single system of analysis.