Article archive / January 2020
Originally published: . Volume 11, No. 1. Source pages: 2.
Ideas for Psychology's 2020 Resolutions by J. Nelson
Time once again to participate in the mass delusion that we are somehow in conscious control of ourselves and the world. Notwithstanding Irv lane's warning about the likelihood that we are running around enthusiastically solving the wrong problems, including ignoring all sorts of feedback loops which resist our efforts and interventions, and which are also likely to cause unintended consequences due to our drilling down to the hedgehog level of problem-solving, seeing smaller and smaller fractions of the total picture and ignoring the vast universe of interconnected variables, it is time for "New Year's Resolutions."
Personally, I am in the enviable position of doing fairly well on all my resolutions from last year and simply need to stamp them "continue." This leaves me with time to fantasize about others and how they can improve their lives. Since my children long ago stopped listening to me and my grandchildren are perfect this leads me to brood over the psychology community, one of my favorite pastimes.
Here are my top three resolutions for us.
#1. Learn how to talk and write in plain English so the public can understand what we are saying. The longer I've been at the Times, the more it's obvious to me that psychologists as a group have almost no ability to speak to the public in simple and practical ways. Most in the public are too polite to tell us how weird we sound.
#2. Get politics out of our science. As the saying goes, we have a right to our opinions but not to our facts. We are in a time where facts don’t matter, but they must.
#3. Once we've accomplished #1 and #2, engage the public and develop trust and credibility in ourselves and our science. Psychological science produces a mountain of information each year, let's put it to good use. Let's develop a critical mass of communicators and applied scientists who join together and aim for key tipping points.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.