Psychology’s Increased Rigor Is Good News. But Is It Only Good News?
We should have greater confidence than before that findings we read about in journals will replicate. What’s good about this is evident. But do we pay a price for increased rigor?
Barry Schwartz is a visiting professor at Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley, emeritus professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, and the author of The Paradox of Choice, Why We Work, and Practical Wisdom (with Kenneth Sharpe).
We should have greater confidence than before that findings we read about in journals will replicate. What’s good about this is evident. But do we pay a price for increased rigor?
A new study featuring more than 7,000 participants from six countries found that choice deprivation—a feeling of not having enough to choose from—not choice overload is the most common consumer experience.
As the world begins to open back up in fits and starts, we are, more than ever, longing for certainty. But certainty is likely a long way off. In the meantime, we should turn to practical wisdom to guide us.
We are reluctant to tell people how to live their lives, except insofar as individual decisions affect the lives of others. We can learn a valuable lesson for the present moment from the examples of smoking and drunk driving.
It is the fate of thousands of teenagers applying to dozens of selective institutions that they will not get what they deserve.
The “finding” from outside psychology that most influenced me—indeed it essentially shaped my entire career—was not so much a “finding” as an argument.
There is another way—a way that leads to happier workers, more fulfilling work, and more successful companies.
The field mistakenly called “behavioral economics” (mistakenly because what it is is psychology applied to domains that are the normal province of economists) has taken the intellectual and political world by storm.
Many years ago, the very distinguished experimental psychologist, George Miller, in a presidential address to the American Psychological Association, admonished the academics in his audience to “give psychology away.”
When I wrote an article for The Atlantic about a year ago arguing for the importance of a Council of Psychological Advisors, I was motivated by frustration that policy makers fail to take advantage of the best that psychology has to offer when it comes to formulating and implementing public policy.