What are your thoughts?

“I used to think I was indecisive, but now I’m not so sure”. So runs one of the oldest entries in the bumper fun book of psychology jokes. It parallels one in the statistician’s equivalent volume: “statistics means never having to say you’re certain” (which, if you are too young to remember Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal^[1] in Love story, plays off the strapline “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”) And both have a serious echoes in professional practice: because psychology is an area in which data trees are always compromised by a forest of confounding factors, and samples can often be small. In most pure, classical psychology, to an even greater extent than in the physical sciences, only statistical analysis can (to mix metaphors) tease out the pure signal from the white noise with confidence.

Even in its pure and classic form, the concerns of even the most abstract psychological research are rarely far from pragmatic utility. Roland Bremond, a mathematical morphologist currently concerned with the very down to earth business of transport planning, neatly encapsulated the data analytic nature of the beast^[2] in Saussurian terms: “La «réalité», du monde des objets, en psychologie expérimentale, est définie statistiquement comme l’ensemble des propriétés perçues partagées par tous les sujets «normaux» ... ... ... Autrement dit, la réalité est une propriété statistique, sur une population...” (In experimental psychology “reality”, the world of objects, is defined statistically as the set of properties shared by all perceived “normal” subjects ... ... ... or, to put it another way, reality is a statistical property of a population...)

Not that pure classical psychological research is the only strand or even the most evident. Without straying too far into monist and dualist controversies it’s fair to say that complete separation of mind from body was abandoned a long time ago, and psychology interpenetrates deeply with neuroscience and biochemistry amongst many other physical areas.

In its classic guise, especially in combination with modern computerised statistics, psychology is one of the areas of science where real, useful, original research can still be done by the solitary researcher without institutional funding or resources. In my freelance consultancy life I regularly work with research psychologists and frequently encounter such individuals, most of them right at home in one data analysis software package or another. In the run up to this article several lines of thought came from lone workers including the occasional pre-university student. [More]