Psychology calls itself the science of behavior, and the American Psychological Association’s current “Decade of Behavior” was intended to increase awareness and appreciation of this aspect of the science. Yet some psychological subdisciplines have never directly studied behavior, and studies on behavior are dwindling rapidly in other subdisciplines. We discuss the eclipse of behavior in personality and social psychology, in which direct observation of behavior has been increasingly supplanted by introspective self-reports, hypothetical scenarios, and questionnaire ratings. We advocate a renewed commitment to including direct observation of behavior whenever possible and in at least a healthy minority of research projects. For decades now, psychology students have been taught from the first day of class that psychology is the science of behavior and that its ultimate goal is to describe and explain what people do. Is that a fair description? The answer varies with the specific area of psychology. Neuroscience and cognitive psychology have never had much to say about the meaningful activities people perform in their daily lives, nor have they really intended to. These fields are more interested in understanding the internal workings of the mind and brain rather than behavioral outcomes. In contrast, animal learning and developmental psychology have .”consistently focused on behavior, perhaps because participants studied by these fields generally cannot fill out questionnaires or read prompts on a computer screen, and their studies have ranged from bar pressing as a function of rewards to behavioral coordination between small children and their parents.
The fields of social and personality psychology, however, offer a special and discouraging case. Both of these related fields have a mandate to study the important social behaviors that compose the very texture of human life, with personality psychology focusing on individual differences in those behaviors and social psychology exploring situational influences. But personality psychology has long relied heavily on questionnaires in lieu of behavioral observation, a state of affairs that has begun to change only recently and ever so slowly, at that. Even worse, social psychology has actually moved in the opposite direction. At one time focused on direct observations of behaviors that were both fascinating and important a focus that attracted many researchers to the field in the first place social psychology has turned in recent years to the study of reaction times and questionnaire responses. These techniques, which promised to help to explain behavior, appear instead to have largely supplanted it. The result is that current research in social and personality psychology pays remarkably little attention to the important hings that people do.
The 1990s was named the “Decade of the Brain” by the American Psychological Association (APA). This widely-advertised rubric, promoted heavily by the APA, focused attention on the importance of and advances in research on brain processes. It was wildly successful, to the extent that many funding agencies jettisoned many other research priorities as they poured money into expensive brain research and articles and conference sessions on brain studies proliferated. Brain researchers have always been more interested in brain and nervous system functioning than in behavioral implications. Address correspondence to Kathleen Vohs, Suite 3-150, 321 19th Avenue South, Marketing Department, Carlson School of Management,* University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455; e-mail: [email protected]. 396 Copyright © 2007 Association for Psychological Science Volume 2 Number 4 This content downloaded from 138.23.191.209 on Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:42:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, and David C. Funder Ironically, however, their esearch as benefited hugely from the conviction by funding agencies and the public at large that anything a neuron does must be behaviorally important. Such relevance has been demonstrated once in a great while (e.g., in the work by Damasio, 1994, on the interaction between emotional and cognitive systems in decision making), but more often it has merely been taken on faith. Meanwhile, the increase in study of the brain has helped erode interest in the actual observation of behavior. It seemed an extremely wise move therefore when, impressed by the success of the brain decade, APA came up with the idea of making the first decade of the new century “The Decade of Behavior.” The goal was to focus attention on the contributions of psychology toward understanding and affecting important behaviors and consequent life outcomes, thereby adding relevance, credibility, and (one hoped) big research budgets to the enterprise. This emphasis was or at least should have been especially welcome to social and personality psychologists, whose research programs would seem to be in a position to benefit greatly from a renewed recognition of the importance of behavior. It is now past halfway through the putative Decade of Behavior and is therefore a fair time to ask, “How’s it going?”
In particular, how are social and personality psychologists doing? To anticipate our answer, we think they are doing fine in many respects but not in respect to studying behavior. LOOKING FOR BEHAVIOR With that question in mind, we picked up a recent (January 2006) issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP)9 by consensus the premier journal in our subdisciplines (we are all social and personality psychologists). It is undeniably a fine issue, offering important advances in the topics the articles address. The methods are rigorous, and the discussions are thoughtful. The editors, reviewers, and authors did their jobs well. But behavior is hard to find. Or if it is there, it is rather different than what we had imagined it to be. If this issue offers a representative sample, then human behavior is almost always performed in a seated position, usually seated in front of a computer.
Finger movements, as in keystrokes and pencil marks, constitute he vast majority of human action. In fact, a remarkable amount of “behavior” turns out to be really just marks on a self-report questionnaire. Sometimes these questionnaires ask people to report what they have done, will do, or would do. More often, they ask people to report what they think, how they feel, or why they do what they do. In other words, most personality and social psychological studies gather self-reports of inner states. Nisbett and Wilson (1977) thought they had discredited introspection back in the 1970s, when they demonstrated that he factors that drive behavior are often invisible to the people who perform it. As their title expressed, most introspective r porting involves “telling more than we can know.” Although aspects of this research became controversial, it is abundantly clear from their studies, other research, and everyday observation that people have not always done what they say they have done, will not always do what they say they will do, and often do not even know the real causes of the things they do.
These discrepancies mean that self-reports of past behaviors, hypothetical future behaviors, or causes of behavior are not necessarily accurate. Nonetheless, elf-report appears to have all but crowded out all other forms of behavior. Behavioral science today, at least as represented in JPSP, mostly involves asking people to report on their thoughts, feelings, memories, and attitudes. Occasionally they are asked to report on recent or hypothetical actions. Or, somewhat differently (and more rarely), reaction times, implicit associations, or memory recall might be assessed in the service of illuminating a cognitive process. But that is as close as most research gets. Direct observation of meaningful behavior is apparently passe.
This is certainly quite an ironic turnabout from Nisbett and Wilson’s (1977) critical stance. In fact, Wilson’s more recent work has shown that when people introspect to analyze the reasons for their actions, they often mislead themselves (Wilson, 2002). In a choice rhetorical flourish, he advises people who seek self-knowledge to eschew direct inspection and instead consult books on social psychology. Yet the books on social psychology are increasingly based on research that itself is heavily based on introspection. The move from behavior to an emphasis on introspective selfreport and hypothetical responses to imagined events is potentially a hugely important shift in the very nature of psychology.
Psychological science started out in the 1800s with introspection (e.g., Wundt, 1894). One major development of the 20th century was the shift from introspection to direct observation of behavior, widely regarded as an advance in the development of scientific methodology. Did someone, somewhere, decide that that had been a mistake and that we should now go back to introspection? Let’s take a closer look at this recent issue of JPSP, which was chosen only for convenience and is presumably represent tative. It contains 11 articles reporting 38 studies. The closest thing to direct observation of behavior in the dependent measures of any of these studies was a participant making a decision. That is, one study asked participants to choose between two stimulus persons (who were made known to participants via photographs) to give them the postexperimental interview. Apart from that borderline case, not a single one of those 38 studies contained irect observation of behavior. The dependent measures consisted entirely of ratings, either on paper questionThis does not mean they are never accurate, but rather that here is no way to know whether they are accurate or not without direct observation of behavior.
