Skip to main content

Towards Methodological Pluralism in Psychological Sciences

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

Synonyms

Anthropology; Context – sensitivity; Ecological validity; Human behavioral ecology; Interdisciplinarity; Methodological and phenomenological narrowness; Methodological pluralism; Psychology

Definition

An overreliance on experimental methods in psychology comes with its problems of low context sensitivity, ecological invalidity, and limited scope of study. A move towards interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism, along with an increased attention to the cultural context of behavior, can give greater validity to its findings, making psychology a more robust science.

Introduction

Gordon W. Allport, in his Presidential address at the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association (1939), discussed the results of a survey they had conducted. It showed an increasingly empirical, mechanistic, quantitative, and analytic focus in the field of psychology. He warned against a “slavish subservience” to such a paradigm, pointing out how as a science, psychology, and...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Allport, G. W. (1940). The psychologist’s frame of reference. Psychological Bulletin, 37(1), 1–28.

    Google Scholar 

  • Astuti, R. (2015). Implicit and explicit theory of mind. Anthropology of This Century, 13, 636–650.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baumard, N. (2016). The origins of fairness: How evolution explains our moral nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bender, A., Hutchins, E., & Medin, D. (2010). Anthropology in cognitive science. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2(3), 374–385.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bernard, H. R. (1994). Research methods in anthropology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bernard, H. R., & Gravlee, C. C. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook of methods in cultural anthropology. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bloch, M. (1991). Language, anthropology and cognitive science. Man, 26(2), 183–198. JSTOR.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bock, P. K. (1988). Rethinking psychological anthropology: Continuity and change in the study of human action (pp. xii, 254). New York, NY: W H Freeman/Times Books/Henry Holt & Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boduroglu, A., Shah, P., & Nisbett, R. E. (2009). Cultural differences in allocation of attention in visual information processing. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 40(3), 349–360.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought?: Mandarin and English speakers’ conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43(1), 1–22.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Brunswik, E. (1956). Perception and the representative design of psychological experiments. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butterfill, S. A., & Apperly, I. A. (2013). How to construct a minimal theory of mind. Mind & Language, 28(5), 606–637.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chua, H. F., Boland, J. E., & Nisbett, R. E. (2005). Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(35), 12629–12633.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cole, M. (1967). The new mathematics and an old culture: A study of learning among the Kpelle of Liberia. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cole, M. (n.d.). The illusion of culture-free intelligence testing. Retrieved from http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Cole/iq.html

  • Cronk, L. (1991). Human behavioral ecology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 20(1), 25–53.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • D’Andrade, R. G. (1981). The cultural part of cognition. Cognitive Science, 5(3), 179–195.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Durrant, R., & Ward, T. (2015). Evolutionary criminology: Towards a comprehensive explanation of crime. London: Academic.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Elmes, D. G., Kantowitz, B. H., & Roediger III, H. L. (2011). Research methods in psychology. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fish, J. M. (2000). What anthropology can do for psychology: Facing physics Envy, ethnocentrism, and a belief in “Race”. American Anthropologist, 102(3), 552–563. JSTOR.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H., McElreath, R., Alvard, M., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., Henrich, N. S., Hill, K., Gil-White, F., Gurven, M., Marlowe, F. W., Patton, J. Q., & Tracer, D. (2005). “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(6), 795–815.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Howitt, D., & Cramer, D. (2007). Introduction to research methods in psychology. Harlow: Pearson Education.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huemer, M., Perner, J., & Leahy, B. (2018). Mental files theory of mind: When do children consider agents acquainted with different object identities? Cognition, 171, 122–129.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, H., & Markus, H. R. (1999). Deviance or uniqueness, harmony or conformity? A cultural analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(4), 785–800.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Krull, D. S., Loy, M. H. M., Lin, J., Wang, C. F., Chen, S., & Zhao, X. (1999). The fundamental fundamental attribution error: Correspondence bias in individualist and collectivist cultures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(10), 1208–1219.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • List, J. A. (2006). The Behavioralist meets the market: Measuring social preferences and reputation effects in actual transactions. Journal of Political Economy, 114(1), 1–37.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mattingly, C., Lutkehaus, N. C., & Throop, C. J. (2008). Bruner’s search for meaning: A conversation between psychology and anthropology. Ethos, 36(1), 1–28.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Mayer, A., & Träuble, B. (2015). The weird world of cross-cultural false-belief research: A true- and false-belief study among Samoan children based on commands. Journal of Cognition and Development, 16(4), 650–665.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Neisser, U. (1976). Cognition and reality: Principles and implications of cognitive psychology. San Francisco: Freeman.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nettle, D. (2012). Behavior of parents and children in two contrasting urban neighborhoods: An observational study. Journal of Ethology, 30(1), 109–116.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nettle, D., Gibson, M. A., Lawson, D. W., & Sear, R. (2013). Human behavioral ecology: Current research and future prospects. Behavioral Ecology, 24(5), 1031–1040.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nisbett, R. E., & Masuda, T. (2003). Culture and point of view. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(19), 11163–11170.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108(2), 291–310.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Robbins, J., & Rumsey, A. (2008). Introduction: Cultural and linguistic anthropology and the opacity of other minds. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(2), 407–420. JSTOR.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roe, B. E., & Just, D. R. (2009). Internal and external validity in economics research: Tradeoffs between experiments, field experiments, natural experiments, and field data. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 91(5), 1266–1271.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rozin, P. (2001). Social psychology and science: Some lessons from Solomon Asch. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(1), 2–14.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schmuckler, M. A. (2001). What is ecological validity? A dimensional analysis. Infancy, 2(4), 419–436.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, J. A., Harre, R., & Langenhove, L. V. (1995). Rethinking methods in psychology. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Winterhalder, B., & Smith, E. A. (2000). Analyzing adaptive strategies: Human behavioral ecology at twenty-five. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews: Issues, News, and Reviews, 9(2), 51–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Angarika Deb .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Section Editor information

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this entry

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this entry

Deb, A., Knezevic, A. (2020). Towards Methodological Pluralism in Psychological Sciences. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3868-1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3868-1

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

Publish with us

Policies and ethics