PSYCHOLOGY'S GRAND EXPERIMENT: IN SEARCH OF A CUMULATIVE SCIENCE

PSYCHOLOGY'S GRAND EXPERIMENT: IN SEARCH OF A CUMULATIVE SCIENCE
Abdulrazaq Imam, Behavior Labs Africa Consultancy, Nigeria

(Presented at the International Conference on Research in Education and Science (ICRES) which took place on April 27-30, 2024, in Antalya, TURKEY (https://www.2024.icres.net/) and at the International Conference on Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology (ICEMST) (https://www.2024.icemst.com/) organized by the International Society for Technology, Education and Science (ISTES) http://www.istes.org).

As the acclaimed science of behavior and mental processes, psychology has evolved from its philosophical roots into a discipline of diverse perspectives and approaches. Textbooks in psychology identify the scientific method as the glue that holds psychology together as a unified discipline. Psychology appears to be unique among the sciences in having developed two parallel research traditions due to historical philosophical divergences that have inevitably established psychology’s grand experiment. The experiment was a methodological assessment of the relative efficacy of the two traditions in supporting the cumulative character of sciences. Psychology’s history reveals that much experimentation relied on small-N designs despite significant differences in focus on behavior vs. mental processes. The introduction of inferential statistics changed that, marking the beginning of the growth of large-N group designs and coinciding with a rise in focus on the mental. The ongoing crises of confidence in psychology have had exaggerated expressions in mainstream psychology compared to behavioral psychology, the one heavily vested in large-N group designs mostly driven by null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST) and the other in small-N designs. To embrace a future that is focused on achieving a cumulative science, psychology needs to rethink and overhaul its almost exclusive reliance on hypothetical constructs and redirect attention to the study of processes, behavioral or mental. Doing so requires abandonment of arbitrarily adopting large-N group designs by default as is commonly taught in mainstream psychology. Choice of methods would be determined by the nature of the research question, not by statistical considerations, as illustrated.