Discipline Through Method: Recent history and philosophy of scientific psychology (1950-2018)

Abstract

Discipline Through Method investigates the disciplinary formation of scientific psychology in the second part of the twentieth century. In the period since the 1950s, research methods in scientific psychology were institutionalized across the varied communities of experimental, animal, educational, social, clinical, and applied psychologists. In the thesis, the epistemological implications of this institutionalization are discussed through the lens of existing historical and philosophical scholarship on scientific psychology’s methods, and the criticism of those methods that has been gaining steam in the reform movement forming around the replication crisis in 2010s. Although the conventions of institutionalized scientific psychology have allowed psychologists to expand their field drastically since World War II, the thesis casts a critical look on the question whether that expansion in number of practitioners, researchers, journal articles, and journals has actually lead to what the scientific community perceives as cumulative growth in psychological knowledge. Methods and disciplinary formation of psychology are approached in three ways: through textbooks, journals, and psychologists’ debates in the wake of the 2010s replication crisis. Textbooks were investigated as instructional manuals of disciplinary boundary-work, which provide expert psychologists with a platform for their broad views on the nature of psychology as a science. In particular, Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology was investigated because it went through thirteen editions in the period from 1950 to 2000, providing a unique view on the authors’ choices in “updating” the textbook as psychology changed. Journals were approached in a different way – by data-mining more than half a million titles/abstracts of journal articles retrieved from the APA’s database PsycINFO. In this way, psychology’s English-language literature was visualized, and the structure of that visualization was analyzed. The close-reading of Hilgard’s textbook and the stable structure of the journal literature indicates a methodological core to how psychological research was conducted during the whole period. An evaluation of that methodological core is provided by focusing on the replication crisis debates and the views psychologists-reformers express on the current state and future reform of their disciplinary conventions and research practices.