here is my argument: stop thinking of psychological effects as truths we discovered, and instead realize we’re building environments that elicit certain ways of seeing the world, and psychological effects are the product of that particular way of seeing. (View Highlight)
Psychology experiments are gardens, not digsites A gardener isn’t uncovering hidden truths about a seed. A gardener finds the right mix of dirt, sun, and water in order to evoke a certain reaction. In a sense, the plant isn’t the mystery, the conditions are. The question is always about how to shape the conditions to get the desired response out of this living organism, as the plant will behave differently in soil, clay, or sand. In some conditions the plant will grow tall and fast, in another short and slow, and in yet a third, it will whither and die. By contrast, at a digsite such as ruins or a fossil bed, Archeologists and Paleontologists dig to find out what was already there independently and without regard to the current conditions. In fact, the current conditions are a mere nuisance to be removed so that the dead immutable truths can be found. Truth cannot be changed by the current context of dirt, sun, or water. The truth can only be obscured by such context. So by metaphor, the question is this: when we observe a psychological effect in an experiment, are we unearthing something buried in the human mind? Or are we watching something grow in the environment we built? (View Highlight)
it is true that some variation is consistent with the digsite approach to psychology. No one expects psychological laws (if such a thing were to exist) to be immutable. But how much variability does that approach allow before we should reconsider whether they are laws at all? How far can such a view be stretched before it breaks? (View Highlight)