Celebrating ‘the buzzing complexity of humanity’

'Nothing beats getting out of the laboratory'

Richard Wiseman is the Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. He has written several best-selling books and his podcast, Richard Wiseman's On Your Mind, explores all aspects of the human psyche.

The study covered was Wiseman, R., Greening, E., Smith, M. (2003). Belief in the paranormal and suggestion in the séance room. British Journal of Psychology, 94, 285-297.

How would you 'digest' your own study, looking back on it now?

The description was very good. If I were able to re-write it now, I would appear to have the gift of prophecy by including a surprisingly accurate prediction about future work. Maybe something like; 'Perhaps the team could now explore how some psychics use suggestion to allegedly bend metal with their mind' (we published that paper two years later).

Were you aware at the time that your study had been included in the Research Digest? 

Oh yes. There were a huge number of psychology papers being published and so being selected felt very exciting. Research into alleged paranormal phenomena is often side-lined within mainstream psychology, and so it was great that our study had received some attention and would now reach more people.

How did that line of research progress, if at all?

We looked at other ways in which psychics used suggestion. However, the main progression involved engagement and outreach work. Over the next 20 years we regularly staged fake séances at science festivals and used them to demonstrate the unreliable nature of eyewitness testimony. Most recently we have performed a show in which the audience gets to see a live infrared feed of a darkroom séance and so see how the sitters are fooled.

Has the way you approach research in Psychology changed over the last 20 years?

Not really. I am always trying to research phenomena that I find interesting and unusual. I like to look at areas that have tended to be neglected within mainstream psychology and over the years I have investigated luck, magic, humour and the paranormal. I find people endlessly fascinating and try to carry out research that reflects and celebrates the wonderful, strange, and curious aspects of life.

What's the main change you've seen in your field, or Psychology more broadly?

I would say that there has been a shift away from research being conducted in the real world and an increase in online studies. I can see why online studies are appealing to researchers, and I have carried out several myself. However, nothing beats getting out of the laboratory and seeing how people think and behave in the world. The séance study was a good example of that.

There is no way you could run that study online or ask people how they would behave in a séance. You just have to get out there and see what happens. In my experience, that kind of work is hugely challenging but immensely rewarding. Many of the classic studies that are regularly cited in textbooks involved face-to-face research, and I suspect that most online studies won't have that sense of longevity.

What are your views on the Research Digest and on other ways psychological research is communicated to wider audiences?

I am a big fan. There are a huge number of papers being published and so it's immensely helpful to see which ones you have chosen to review. 

When it comes to communication in general, I think that psychology is in a pretty good place. The public are fascinated by how people think, feel and behave and so journalists are eager to report our findings. Sometimes the quality of the reporting might leave something to be desired, but at least the interest is there in the first place. There has also been an increase in academics communicating directly with the public via social media, YouTube and podcasts, and that seems like a growth area.

What's missing, or what is there to be celebrated, about how we as Psychologists 'digest' our own research and that of others?

Two things. First, I recently wrote a book on why psychology matters and concluded that much of it doesn't! I think it would be helpful for academics and students to think about why they are doing what they are doing. There is considerable pressure to produce publications and to attract grants, and there is a risk that that becomes our sole motivation. I think there is real value in finding a few moments to look at the bigger picture and to think about whether our research is meaningful. Does it help people? 

Or reveal something surprising about the mind? Or help to resolve a controversy? Or dispel a commonly held myth? Connected to that is our current thinking about hypotheses. We tend to teach students how to test them but not how to come up with interesting ones in the first place. I recently wrote a piece about that for your website.

What do you think the next 20 years might hold for Psychology?

Not sure. My fear is that we learn more and more about less and less, gradually move to online studies and end up exploring topics that are only of interest to psychologists. My hope is that we find a way of encouraging meaningful, creative, inclusive, and real-world research that fascinates the public and celebrates the buzzing complexity of humanity.

'The main change has been the sheer increase in interest in psychology'

Dr Emma Palmer is a Reader in Forensic Psychology at the University of Leicester.

The study covered was Palmer, E.J. & Hollin, C.R. (2003). Using the psychological inventory of criminal thinking styles with English prisoners. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 8, 175-188.

Were you aware at the time that your study had been included in the Research Digest?

I had no idea – until I got the email asking me to write about it for the anniversary!

How did that line of research progress?

The research was part of a Prison Service-funded piece of work, looking at assessment of prisoners. As well as the paper referred to, we published a further paper looking at how scores on the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) predicted reconviction in adult prisoners. Using data from a related, although separately funded piece of work, we also published an article on the use of the PICTS with young offenders.

After that the Prison Service have used it, although I'm not sure if it is still used. However, my research moved on to different topics, mostly evaluations of offending behaviour programmes in the criminal justice system.

Has the way you approach research in Psychology changed over the last 20 years?

I now use more sophisticated statistical techniques, helped by the development of statistical software packages. Twenty years ago, you were more limited in what could be done, and some tests required writing syntax, whereas these tests are now standard. This has meant that more complex questions can be answered from data.

What's the main change you've seen in your field, or Psychology more broadly?

The first thing that came to mind was the sheer increase in interest in psychology – as shown by the number of students studying psychology at undergraduate and postgraduate level. It's a very popular subject and universities have realised this, with a large expansion of provision. In forensic psychology, there is a similar picture in terms of proliferation of MSc courses and a few doctorates, matched by the increased demand for forensic psychologists in the prison service. I've also heard that the Qualification in Forensic Psychology is now the largest BPS-run qualification. In terms of research, my feeling is that qualitative research seemed to fall out of favour, for at least a time.

What's missing, or what is there to be celebrated, about how we as Psychologists 'digest' our own research and that of others?

Some of the more 'academic' research that can be just as important as the more obviously 'applied' research. So there probably needs to be some work around how this research can be communicated in a more easily understood format to the general public.

What do you think the next 20 years might hold for Psychology?

This is a difficult one! I would imagine that at some point, we might reach a saturation point for the need for professional psychologists – although the mental load of working in over-stretched public services (whether that be the NHS or prisons) is likely to mean that we will lose psychologists from services, hence maintaining the demand.

'Psychology doesn't care enough about sampling'

Avshalom Caspi, Ph.D., is the Edward M. Arnett Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University, and Professor of Personality Development at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, & Neuroscience, King's College London.

The study covered was Caspi, A., Harrington, H., Milne, B., Amell, J.W., Theodore, R.F. & Moffitt, T.E. (2003). Children's behavioural styles at age 3 are linked to their adult personality traits at age 26. Journal of Personality, 71, 495-513. 

How would you 'digest' your own study, looking back on it now?

Our work on how children's personality traits shape their adult lives began against the background of 'situationism' in psychology, the idea that behaviour is determined primarily by the situations that people find themselves in, rather than the traits that people possess. This was the dominant view in psychology going into the 1980s. It is thus of interest that one of our team's projects that has attracted the most attention from policymakers over the years is about personality, and specifically about the importance of self-control skills mastered in childhood for success in all aspects of adult life.

Societal changes have amplified the role of self-control in preparing for later-life health, financial, and social demands: more healthcare providers emphasise patient choice, more jobs are sedentary, more high-fat fast foods are available, more online advertising tempts poor money management, more individuals must manage their own retirement savings, and more adults live alone. Our team has assembled evidence that among childhood personality traits, childhood self-control is more important than socioeconomic status (SES) or IQ for adults' physical health, addiction, crime, suicidality, financial management, life satisfaction, and parenting of the next generation.

The findings have been viewed by European, Australasian, and North American governments as lending support to the movement for quality early childhood education. Private and government agencies have also developed funding programs devoted to studying and bolstering childhood self-control.

How did that line of research progress, if at all?

In the 1980s, I began doing research on how early-emerging personality traits shape life outcomes. I tried to integrate personality psychology with life-course sociology. The aim was to uncover the coherence of personality across development by studying how early personality differences shape transitions and behaviors in age-graded roles across time; e.g., when people choose to marry; how people behave in their marital roles; the likelihood of divorce. This work relied on data from the Berkeley Guidance Study. In the 1990s, I continued this research on the life-long legacy of early personality differences in the Dunedin Longitudinal Study. This line of research showed how to reliably measure personality differences between children as young as age three; provided evidence that personality rivals social class and intelligence in shaping the course of life; plus identified multiple testable hypotheses – and spawned new research programs – into the mechanisms by which personality shapes life outcomes.

It is often forgotten that when we began this work there was widespread doubt about the existence of early-emerging personality differences and skepticism about their influence on people's lives. Today this is taken as fact, and our research on personality development has entered the vernacular.

Has the way you approach research in Psychology changed over the last 20 years?

I began doing research in child development and am now focused on ageing. In part, this is the result of doing longitudinal research: the people I study have grown up and started to grow old. But another reason for this shift is a growing appreciation that ageing itself is a primary risk factor for nearly all age-related diseases. The geroscience hypothesis proposes that biological ageing, conceptualised as the gradual and progressive deterioration of biological system integrity, increases vulnerability to multiple age-related diseases. Thus, while all individuals age chronologically at the same rate, some individuals age much faster biologically. This idea makes it imperative to study ageing as an antecedent to disease, and to do so requires measuring ageing in healthy people in the first half of the life course before they develop age-related diseases.

For this new line of research, we initiated a research programme that quantifies the pace of ageing in young and middle-aged adults and that tests hypotheses about modifiable and treatable factors, including mental health and personality, that bring about accelerated or slowed variation in young adults' pace of ageing.

What's the main change you've seen in your field, or Psychology more broadly?

The availability of new technologies has driven new modes of data collection. As a result, research questions are driven less by clinical concerns and theory and more by technology. What we need to look forward to is the three coming together to inform psychological research.

What are your views, if any, on the Research Digest and on other ways psychological research is communicated to wider audiences?

Universities' and funders' headlong lust for impact has had an outsized influence on how we communicate research. I'd like to see it toned down. Sometimes I fear that this has contributed to the public's mistrust of science.

What's missing, or what is there to be celebrated, about how we as Psychologists 'digest' our own research and that of others?

Psychology doesn't care enough about sampling. There is, of course, an appreciation of statistical power and large sample size. But there is very little concern about whether large samples, though seductive, represent people in the population, especially those who are unwell. Large samples, as most are currently constituted, tend to have a healthy volunteer bias.

If one cares about generalisability, one needs to attend to sampling considerations.

What do you think the next 20 years might hold for Psychology?

Demography and technology are important drivers of future psychological research. Population changes define new health priorities and new technologies identify new possibilities for measuring brain and behaviour. To do good psychology, we need good population health science and to be responsibly nimble in our use of new tools.

'It's always a body of evidence, rather than single studies'

Simone Schnall is Professor of Experimental Social Psychology, and Fellow and Director of Studies in Psychology, Jesus College, University of Cambridge.

The study covered was Schnall, S., & Laird, J.D. (2003) Keep smiling: enduring effects of facial expressions and postures on emotional experience and memory. Cognition and Emotion, 17, 787-797.

How would you 'digest' your study, looking back?

When I started my graduate studies I was intrigued by the 'Facial Feedback Hypothesis', namely the idea that changing a person's overt emotional expression could change their subjective emotional state. It goes back all the way to William James (1884), and sounds very counterintuitive because we typically assume that expressions follow from feelings, not the other way around.

A key finding by Jim Laird, my PhD supervisor, was that while this effect occurs for some people, others are more responsive to external, social cues. This is exactly what we found in the 2003 paper, namely that the predicted effects occurred only for people who were generally sensitive to their bodily states. Already at that point it became evident to me that many findings in psychology are very nuanced, rather than a 'one-size-fits-all.'

Were you aware at the time that your study had been included in the Research Digest? Did that have any impact or consequence at all?

I did this work when I was a PhD student (clearly, a long time ago!), and was flattered that findings by a very junior researcher were featured in such an exciting new publication. Thank you!

How did that line of research progress, if at all?

It's been gratifying to see that facial feedback findings have been widely replicated. A 2019 meta-analysis by Nicholas Cole, Jeff Larson and Heather Lench, published in Psychological Bulletin, concluded across 286 effect sizes that the effect is robust. But, as in our early research, there are various moderating variables that determine the precise relationship, again highlighting that psychological processes are often complex.

While facial feedback was my entry point into the world of scientific psychology, my research has evolved into investigating a wide range of mind-body connections, and how various bodily sensations feed back into not only emotional but also cognitive processes. This has included investigating subjective judgments such as moral condemnation, all the way to seemingly objective judgments such as perceptions of physical space (e.g. distance). Overall I've become more and more convinced that what goes on in the body influences us in many ways, but this typically happens outside of conscious awareness.

Has the way you approach research in Psychology changed over the last 20 years?

Back in the day sample sizes were tiny compared to today's standards. Having large samples for my studies is a top priority, even if it means running fewer studies overall. Like many psychologists I have been making use of online participant panels, to make large sample sizes feasible, but I still love running lab studies, like the one we did back in 2003.

It's also great to witness how insights from psychology can have a positive impact on people's lives, as was the case during the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, the University of Cambridge based the messaging campaign on research in which I tested which wording would be most likely to get students to wear masks, get tested, etc. Social psychology in particular has a lot to offer with respect to some of society's most pressing issues, and as scientists, we have a responsibility to apply our knowledge in beneficial ways. 

What's the main change you've seen in your field, or Psychology more broadly?

There has been an increasing awareness that we need to make our methods as robust as possible, including interrogating how reliable previously obtained findings really are. That's easier said than done, though. It might sound straightforward enough to re-run an experiment that was carried out a while ago, but various things might be different in the context in which you re-run it.

For example, in several studies, Rob Henderson and I (2021, Evolutionary Psychology) found that during the pandemic, people who were especially worried about contracting the coronavirus showed greater condemnation of others' immoral acts than people who were not. But this was in early 2020, and it would make little sense to ask people about their Covid-19 infection fears today, now that the pandemic is over. Other factors also play a role in whether a seemingly identical study will get the same results, such as the population from which you recruit your participants.

It therefore can often be more informative to use diverse methods to address the same research question, i.e., do a conceptual replication. The 2021 finding that concerns about COVID-19 infection make moral judgments more severe conceptually replicates another finding of mine, with Jon Haidt, Jerry Clore and Alex Jordan (2008), that an emotional state related to keeping the body safe from contamination, namely physical disgust, amplifies condemnation. Very different method, same general idea. Doing many different conceptual replications, rather than merely repeating identical studies, allows psychological researchers to hone in on what's really going on. The literature then evolves to reflect this, rather any given study concluding once and for all what is 'true'.

What are your views, if any, on the Research Digest and on other ways psychological research is communicated to wider audiences?

The Research Digest has been exemplary in terms of how to accurately communicate psychological findings. I wish the same could be said about other news outlets aimed at popular audiences. They often mischaracterise how scientific knowledge accumulates. There is a fundamental asymmetry between a 'positive' (i.e., evidence for X) and a 'negative' finding (i.e., no evidence for X): Many things can go wrong with a study, so there are always many more ways of ending up with a negative result than ending up with a positive result. If there are 1000 possible confounds, even if you control 999 of them, you'll still get a negative result. That's why positive results are usually much more conclusive than negative results.

I wish journalists would delete terms such as findings being 'debunked', 'disproven' etc. from their vocabulary when confronted with individual studies with negative results. Even if an experiment is exceptionally rigorous, highly powered, etc., it is limited in how much it can tell us about the general validity of a psychological phenomenon. It's always a body of evidence, rather than single studies, that needs to be considered, which is why meta-analyses across many effect sizes are so important.

What do you think the next 20 years might hold for Psychology?

The obvious big thing is Artificial Intelligence (AI). I think Psychology, and science more generally, will change beyond recognition over the next 20 years. This will range from AI writing parts of scientific papers, to AI providing data to address psychological research questions. After all, AI is trained on millions of data points in the form of human language utterances, so an AI can give a pretty good approximation of how the average person understands and represents information. This will raise questions about what makes our human psychology unique, and how to foster and support the very best in people while outsourcing the more trivial stuff to AI. Having a body made of flesh is bound to be something that gives human a competitive edge, so we might develop a whole new appreciation of the idea that the body shapes thoughts and feelings in fundamental ways.