Article archive / January 2023
Originally published: . Volume 14, No. 1. Source pages: 2.
I was talking to Kim VanGeffen about the current expansion of power at the LSBEP and we were reminiscing about the good old days (GOD). It was a time when the vision of psychology as a profession was articulated by great masters like Don and Virginia Glad, Joe Dawson, Art Riopelle, Sue Jensen, and Larry Siegel, to name a few. Kim and I agreed that psychotherapy has now become the territory of many professions (rightly so) but that psychometric assessment is still mostly under our umbrella, at least for now. I said that the other characteristic that makes us different, maybe even unique, is the fact that we are applied scientists. We use the questioning, scientific mindset. Personnel and Organizational Psychology was published in 1982, written by then LSU professors Larry Siegel and Irv Lane.
One of the delightful finds in this classic text is the description of what a psychologist is, crafted at a time when perhaps it was easier to define. Professional psychologists who deliver services, the authors wrote, “do so with a scientific perspective: professional practice is applied research. Solving a real problem in the real world […] requires that the issues be defined, alternative solutions be evaluated, and the optimal solution implemented.” As applied scientists, we understand that making decisions and solving problems involves independent, dependent, and extraneous variables. Good decision making requires a back-and-forth exchange between theory and application, deductive and inductive reasoning. The professional applied scientist’s approach to a problem or decision requires an understanding of validity—without validity our decisions are meaningless. At best, meaningless decisions are simply noise in the system, taking up space and resources. At worst, these meaningless decisions are self-oriented, misleading and destructive. What does it mean to be an applied scientist with a scientific mindset? It does not mean “follow the science.” It does not mean "believe me because I’m the expert." It does not mean I am morally– or otherwise–superior. And it does not mean we censor feedback or critique of our findings. Being an applied scientist requires constant feedback loops and critique, never being satisfied that we have captured all of the extraneous variables that could be influencing our predictors and judgments. It means we acknowledge there is always a source of bias somewhere, somehow, that we are probably missing. Watching the state psychology board perform its work, I wonder if thinking like an applied psychologist, and the scientific mindset, is something we have lost.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.