Thread by @CameronBrick

📣📣 A very fun and rewarding project is coming out. It's being cited already and Perspectives has a backlog, so here's the skinny.

Our theory paper is about the pervasive tendency to assume that psychological concepts are real and discovered.

psyarxiv.com/eqma4/

1/n

Humans effortlessly categorize. Some concepts have referents in the real world (a tree), and some do not (justice). What about a 'face'?

Because most psych theories are verbal and informal, psych science is particularly vulnerable to how people think about and label categories.

Turns out we make predictable errors. A hilarious 2-min clip nailed the problem:

Wittgenstein and John Duncan were right: soup is just a functional word from everyday language and it has no 'real essence' at all.

'Essentializing' also describes the famous philosophical paradox of the Ship of Theseus. Imagine replacing the planks of a wooden ship one by one. When does it stop being the same ship? Pause to think.

(The paradox comes from the search for an illusory essence.)

We integrate examples of illusory essences across clinical, cognitive, and neuroscience because they seem more solid than areas like social psych and so offer a stricter test.

We talk about a lot of concepts: disorders, attention, faces, and my favorite, edge detectors in V1.

Borrowing from @EikoFried and friends psyarxiv.com/zg84s, is the label 'depression' the best explanation of variance and causes in symptoms and behaviors? Sometimes there is no single latent variable.

Essentializing is functional and useful but has specific risks for scientists, like shutting down the search for contextual and contingent explanations. E.g., we talk about vulnerable youth and the neglect of attention and interventions on social context.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

We end the paper with 4 concrete (untested) strategies for theory-building. #4 builds on 'kama muta' by Alan Fiske and colleagues in emotion research.

Co-authors: @VebjornEkroll, Bruce Hood, and senior author @leedewit. @PsychScience

Thanks to contributors incl. @DuncanAstle. This was a cumulative experience of building on others' work like by Susan Gelman.

Feedback warmly welcomed and all errors and omissions are mine.

Hope it's okay to tag a few people that might be interested. @LaskoEmily @annemscheel @IrisVanRooij @lakens @daveschester @JkayFlake @talyarkoni @hansijzerman @JoshuaGrubbsPhD @peder_isager

Legal pre-print: psyarxiv.com/eqma4/

Brick, C., Hood, B., Ekroll, V., & de-Wit, L. (2021, in press). Illusory essences: A bias holding back theorizing in psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science.

key omission: sorry for not finding your twitter handle co-author @profbrucehood !