Open or Closed? The Ethics, Pragmatics, and Logics of Competing Evidential Cultures in Social Psychology

• In Event: 067 - Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Paradigms and People

Abstract

A spate of scandals in social psychology has prompted deep anxieties in some quarters of the field. Recent years have seen a number of bold strategies for reforming social psychology. These proposals tend to be framed as uncontroversial improvements in rigor. However, using a variety of methods- including 18 months of ethnographic observations from three communities of social psychologists, 23 interviews, and a review of over 1,000 emails written by psychologists while forming an organization designed to improve psychological science- I argue that these reforms represent a dramatic departure from previous norms of scientific behavior in social psychology. Beyond mere rigor, the ethics of psychological research, the pragmatics of professional careers, and the logic of cumulative science are all implicated. Extending Collins’ (1998) distinction between “open” and “closed” evidential cultures, I demonstrate how the tension between carefully verifying science and the circulation of interesting ideas becomes complicated by issues of research practice inherent to the human sciences.

Author

• David Peterson, Northwestern University