Three Scandals in Psychology: the Need for a New Approach

Three Scandals in Psychology: The Need for a New Approach

Review of General Psychology, June 19, 2015

(Running head: Scandals in Psychology)

Thomas Scheff, Dept of Sociology, UCSB

(2307 words)

Abstract: This note proposes that social/behavioral studies and the humanities develop a closer relationship. Perhaps system and intuition are equally needed if our knowledge of the human world is to advance, as Pascal suggested three hundred years ago. Since modern psychology, particularly, is dominated by a rigid adherence to system, in my view it has come to a virtual standstill in finding new knowledge. Three areas of little or no advance are described: "aggression catharsis," stigma, and self-esteem. Brief suggestions are made as to how intuitive and/or new systematic paths might be added to the three areas of study.

Human beings live to a great extent in what has been called an assumptive world. Many of the things we take for granted may be untrue or only partially true. One example is the belief that the earth was flat, which thrived for thousands of years. The philosopher William Quine (1979, pp. 199-204) called such assumptions “tropes.”

There seems to be two assumptive worlds for academics, not only the general one but also the special beliefs and dogmas of particular societies, disciplines, locations, and persons. The history of science and scholarship reveals many examples of obstructive tropes. Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer, spent his life trying to determine the orbit of Venus. He made extraordinarily accurate observations of the position of the planet during his lifetime, but he assumed, like everyone else at the time, that planets revolve around the earth, a trope.

Johannes Kepler, Brahe’s assistant, inherited the data after Brahe died. For years he made no progress. In his exasperation, Kepler built what might be called a case study, a physical model of the orbits. In his play he unthinkingly put the sun, rather than the earth, at the center. Although Kepler’s scientific skills were far inferior to Brahe’s, Kepler’s case study accidentally solved the problem for him.

Scientific and other methods, no matter how scrupulously applied, are helpless in the face of misleading tropes. Social/behavioral and humanities studies are often based on tropes and dogmas, rather than precise definitions. My own field, emotions, is particularly trope ridden. The experts use vernacular words like anger, grief, fear, shame, pride, love and so on as if they have clear meanings, so we are getting nowhere fast. But most fields have similar, if somewhat less confusion.

In this chaos, our journals have become punctilious about quickly reviewing submissions in terms of form rather than content. Is the submission the right size? In the scientistic journals, is it quantitative and systematic? In the qualitative journals and the humanities, is it sufficiently devoid of these same qualities? Since my work has been largely interdisciplinary and qualitative, journal editors have often rejected my submissions without review, telling me that "it doesn't fit" their journal.

Journals that would even send a Keplerian submission out to review are scarce. In my recent experience, only a few have taken a chance. Psychology is the worse discipline, other social/behavioral studies, humanities, medicine and general science almost as bad.

Blaise Pascal was an early (1660) scientist who also wrote about scientific method. He had several important inventions to his credit, the best known of which is the barometer. In his writing he seems to have foretold what may be the central difficulty in modern psychology and the quantitative parts of the other social/behavioral studies, the complete focus on systematic methods. He proposed that a second method that he called “finesse,” (intuition) was equally necessary. This latter is idolized in the humanities, immobilizing it to a large degree in the opposite way.

As dictionaries propose, intuition is knowledge that does not require "rational" thought. Of course intuited guesses are often erroneous. However, in regard to tropes, they have an advantage over rational thought, since they may not include taken for granted assumptions.

Intuition is usually needed to evade assumptions that have been always taken for granted. System is needed to test the validity of new hypotheses and refine them if they are valid. If this is true, academic psychology and other quantitative approaches need to make a fundamental change in their approaches.

Areas of Failed Research: "Aggression Catharsis," Stigma, and Self-esteem.

1. For many years generations of psychologists have been conducting experiments that show that venting anger doesn’t work. This is an advance in knowledge, an extremely important finding because the public thinks that venting is a good idea, that it gets anger “off your chest.” However, the researchers have made what seems to be an error in evaluating the meaning of what they found: they think that they have refuted the idea of catharsis. Being scientistic allows them to ignore the large literature in the humanities that has developed a more complex model of catharsis. According to this model, venting is not a form of catharsis. Arousing anger in a theatre audience is meant to let them feel suppressed emotions safely, not cause a riot. The poet Wordsworth's phrase "strong emotions recollected in tranquility" points toward the central idea of catharsis.

The drama theory of catharsis proposes that it occurs at "aesthetic" distance, between overdistanced (no emotional reaction) and underdistanced, a mere reliving, rather than a resolution of a backlog of emotional experiences. In this view, venting anger is usually underdistanced, and therefore not a form of catharsis. One of the aspects of catharsis that needs to be demonstrated is what has been called "pendulation," the way in which persons at aesthetic distance both feel hitherto hidden emotions and at virtually the same time, watch themselves feeling them. This back and forth motion apparently gives one a feeling of safety: if the pain is too great, the observing self can stop the process.

Studies will be somewhat difficult, since pendulation probably is extremely rapid. For that reason, most people become so proficient as children that they quickly forget they are doing it. As the sociologist Charles H. Cooley noted over a hundred years ago, "We live in the minds of others without knowing it" (1902). Studies are needed of second by second role-playing inside the self. Literature provides many extraordinary examples, such as in the novels of Virginia Woolf, but no one has examined such activities systematically.

2. Stigma, Social Pain and Suffering: The Taboo on Shame

Stigma has become the center of a huge body of research, but has not been defined in a way that is accepted by most researchers (Scheff 2014). In the enormous number of stigma studies, very few even mention shame, much less define stigma as a type of shame. This difficulty seems to be part of a much wider taboo on shame in modern societies: they act as if shame is too shameful even to mention.

In his frequently cited book on stigma, Goffman (1963) was less dainty: he used the word continuously throughout. Here are four of his many sentences that contain the s-word. (I have bolded the shame terms. However, in the last quote, the word shameful was already bolded in the text). Notice that in the second quote, three shame terms occur in a single sentence:

Shame becomes a central possibility, arising from the individual's perception of one of his own attributes as being a defiling thing to possess, and one he can readily see himself as not possessing. (P. 7, first chapter.)

Most important of all, the very notion of shameful differences assumes a similarity in regard to crucial beliefs, those regarding identity. (P. 13)

(The stigmatized person’s) identification with (other) offenders like himself (e.g. mentally ill) holds him to what repels him, transforming repulsion into shame, and then transforming ashamedness itself into something of which he is ashamed. (P.108)

Once the dynamics of shameful differentness are seen as a general feature of social life, one can go on to look at the relation of their study to the study of neighboring matters associated with the term “deviance”…(P. 140, last chapter).

Goffman does not define stigma as shame directly (as most dictionaries do), but his frequent and emphatic usage in these and other passages imply it.

Goffman's frequent usage suggests that stigma is a certain kind of shame, the kind caused by labeling. Many of the later books and articles on stigma cite Goffman's book, but seem to try to avoid the shame word. One edited book (Heatherton et al, 2000) cites him 9 times, but without noting his insistent use of the S-word. The word itself is used 5 times in this book, but never alone; as frequently happens when the word appears, the taboo is softened because it is mixed in with other, less offensive or more abstract emotion names, such as guilt, anxiety, etc.

The idea of "the looking-glass self" (Cooley, 1902, 184-186) is cited in three of the Heatherton et al book's chapters. Indeed, it is used in the title of one of the chapters: "The Looking-glass Self Revisited." But none of the citations mention that Cooley proposed that the process of seeing one's self in the eyes of others always ends in pride or shame. The widely quoted review of the stigma literature by Major and O'Brien (2005) cites Goffman's book three times but doesn't cite Cooley nor mention shame at all.

The idea of social suffering and pain is much broader than that caused by labeling alone: it involves all pain caused by any kind of rejection ( Kleinman, et al, 1997; MacDonald and Jensen-Campbell, 2011). Like the edited books on stigma, these two volumes hardly mention shame, the emotion that is caused by real or imagined rejection (Scheff, 1987, 110-111; 2015, 9-22). Shame does not appear in the index of any of either volume. It is used 9 times in the MacDonald and Jensen-Campbell book, but only in passing or in the company of other unrelated emotions.

Ignoring the whole shame literature surely doesn't help the attempts to understand stigma, social pain and suffering. Unfortunately, this practice does help the public continue to ignore the shame in their lives and in their societies. It would appear that social/behavioral and neurological scientists are just as loath to use the S-word as the general public, if not more so. My wife, Suzanne Retzinger, a counselor, told me that the S-word is occasionally brought up in sessions by clients without her prompting. Perhaps we scientists need some counseling on this topic. What needs to be done: study and discuss shame directly instead of hiding it behind various covers. This undertaking would require making some fundamental definitions since the vernacular words for shame and its opposite, pride, are confused and confusing.

3. The lack of results in the study of self-esteem is the most shocking. Over the last 50years there have been more than 20,000 studies using two hundred different self-esteem scales. As a sizeable number of critics have pointed out, these scales refuse to predict behavior: the variance has always been under 5%, practically zero. Despite the failure and the critics, researchers have continued to research with self-esteem scales, as if they want to repeat the Brahe error forever. One of the problems with the some 200 different scales that have been used may concern their validity, rather than their reliability (Scheff and Fearon 2004): the scales all seem to confound thoughts (such as egotism) with emotions (such as authentic pride.) One direction for future study would be dividing existing scales into two: one cognitive, that captures the egotism-self-rejecting dimension, the other an emotion scale, that captures the pride/ shame dimension.

Conclusion

As indicated, Pascal (1660) long ago implied that all research requires both system and intuition. The issue is important far beyond the universities. Unlike other species of creatures, humans have become capable of destroying other humans en masse, even ALL other humans. Ironically, this capability is a function of the huge advances of knowledge in the physical sciences. We are very near, or may have arrived at the point where only a small group is capable of mass destruction.

In these dangerous times, perhaps one theme would be to find out what leads to the kind of autism-like syndrome that severs all empathy for other humans. Empathic connectedness with other members of the species is hardwired into humans just as it is in other mammals (Icaboni 2008, pp. 264–265). What are the social, psychological, emotional, economic and political mechanisms that lead to disconnection and complete alienation from others both at the interpersonal and intergroup levels? We need to know this kind of knowledge now, much more than self-esteem and many other well-traveled roads.

References

Cooley, Charles H. 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Schocken (1964).

Goffman, Erving. 1983. Stigma. Englewood Cliffs: New Jersey.

Heatherton, Todd and three others, Editors. 2000. The Social Psychology of Stigma. New York: Guilford.

Icaboni, Marco. 2008. Mirroring People. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Kleinman , Arthur, V. Das, and M. Lock (Editors). 1997. Social Suffering. Berkeley: U. of California Press.

MacDonald, Geoff and L.. Jensen-Campbell. 2011. Social Pain: Neuropsychological and Health Implications of Loss and Exclusion. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Major, Brenda., & O'Brien, L. T. (2005). The social psychology of stigma. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 393-421.

Pascal, Blaise. (1660). Pensees. (Thoughts). Paris: Editions du Cerf. (1982).