THE BIGGEST PROBLEM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Part 2

Experiments; observations; jury decision-making; bystander intervention; assault; research ethics; anonymity

In last week’s newsletter, I tried to explain the concept of ecological validity – which means the extent to which our laboratory findings apply in a real-life scenario. Are academic discoveries just that - academic? Naturally, criminal psychologists want to do research with ecological validity. Unless it tells us about crime in the real world, what’s the point of it? Unfortunately, ecological validity exists in a precarious balance with control. The more we have of one, the less we tend to have of the other. That’s a pity because control, too, is valuable: it helps to establish cause-and-effect relationships. And causes are what science is all about.  As I mentioned, there’s a Nobel Prize for you if you can solve this dilemma.

Forensic psychology is plagued by this and related problems. Research into jury decision-making is especially vulnerable. That’s because, in many countries, it is illegal for psychologists (or anyone else) to sit in the jury room and listen to real-world, real-life deliberations. Psychologists in the UK are not allowed to talk to jurors even after the verdict has been reached and the trial concluded.

You can understand the frustration. Jury decisions, after all, have far-reaching implications for people’s lives. We want to learn as much as we can about them. Point that out to a legal professional, though, and they’ll tell you that the real-life implications are precisely the reason why you mustn’t mess with the system. It’s a lot more important than your academic curiosity. Both sides have a point.

Jury decisions have a quality that psychologists find particularly intriguing. They are made in two separate stages. The psychology may be different at each stage.

First, jurors all sit in court and listen to counsel make their arguments. Although the jurors may be physically close together at this stage, the decisions they come to are individual ones. There is no discussion yet. I dealt with the psychology of this in a newsletter a few months ago.

Later on, in the jury room, all these individuals must pool their thoughts, discuss the case, and arrive at a collective decision. I wrote about it in this newsletter. The whole complicated process can take hours, days, weeks – even months. We simply can’t replicate that in the laboratory. Sceptics might argue that most of what psychologists think they know about juries, they actually know about mock juries.

What does that mean, exactly?

A psychologist makes up the details of a criminal case and presents them, in one fashion or another, to people who have been specially recruited to take part in an academic study. We call these recruits ‘participants’. (Is it revealing that we don’t use the word ‘jurors’?) It’s unlikely that such a group of participants would care to sit through endless days of realistic testimony. It’s even less likely that ordinary psychologists could afford to pay them. It’s even less likely yet that they could afford to pay counsel their regular rate.

For all these reasons, psychologists have tended to use ‘vignettes’ instead. These are short pieces of film or prose that feature important details of a criminal case. While they may be based ultimately on real-world jury trials, you can imagine that fictional jurors might well treat the vignettes as fictional, too. It’s only to be expected.

There is yet another layer of fiction. In a ‘real-world’ trial, as we’ve seen, the consequences can be big. In fact, if it happens to be a capital case, they could literally not be bigger. If the ‘trial’ takes place in the local Psychology department, though…well, we might expect recruits to be a little less conservative than they might be if an actual human life were at stake. It’s all pretend anyway, so why worry?

Ecological validity is nearly always in conflict with control.[i] There’s no way to resolve the conflict, at least not yet, not until you come up with your Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough (let me know when you do). The best psychologists can do for the moment is trade them off against each other. We have numerous strategies at our disposal.

Imagine we were interested in a phenomenon like bystander intervention. Perhaps we could try taking our ‘laboratory experiment’ out of the actual laboratory. Perhaps we could carry out the experiment on the local streets. After all, that’s where we’d go to find real-life bystanders. Well, perhaps. Our departmental ethics committee is definitely going to get involved. ‘No emotive stimuli,’ they will say. ‘No risks greater than the participants would expect in everyday life’. You see the problem.

Even so, some psychologists have carried out so-called ‘field experiments’ and we’ve certainly learnt something from them. Field experiments, though, inevitably remind one of that expression about ‘fish nor fowl’. Ecological validity isn’t that high. Neither is control.

How about observing some real-world behaviour? That’s no bad idea. Indeed, Psychology has a rich history of observational studies. The question remains, how far are they going to get us in researching, say, bystander intervention in cases of assault?

The psychologist will be waiting around a long time if she wants to observe a real-world assault, especially if she lives in same the kind of middle-class district as most of her colleagues. The police may well start asking the psychologist questions about what she thinks she’s doing, hanging around at closing time every night with her camera and clipboard. And, again, the psychologist will encounter this problem: while she may well learn something about the particular ‘real world’ event she just happened to see, its generalisability is going to be limited. Maybe her findings will apply only to this one single case.

It is not for nothing that we sometimes consider the best evidence in Psychology to be that which is derived from numerous different research methods. The psychologist, Philip Zimbardo, for instance, was interested in the effects of anonymity on anti-social behaviour. He suspected that people who were rendered anonymous (and could therefore get away with it) would tend to behave less well than people who might be more easily recognised in the street afterwards. In his book, The Lucifer Effect[ii], he devoted several pages to exactly that question. What do you think he found?

I’ll tell you all about it another newsletter soon. You’re going to love it, Crime & Psychology fan! Meanwhile, to help keep these newsletters coming, you know what to do to the blue buttons. Pretend you’re anonymous. And holding a mallet.

Alternatively, you could buy me a coffee. That’d be nice. I like coffee.

Picture courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.

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[i] When it comes to so-called ‘applied’ research, at any rate.

[ii] Zimbardo, Philip: The Lucifer Effect- How good people turn evil, Rider, London, 2007