07 Apr 2019

Some of you might be familiar with psychology’s replication crisis, where only 36% of the 100 most impactful studies in psychology were replicated back in 2015. This was (and arguably still is) a very strong hit for psychological science. Attempts to rectify the crisis have been made but before it is ‘solved’, first we need to identify where the problem lies.

A recent paper tried to do exactly that – to see what the force was behind such low replicability rate – by turning to political orientation. It is fairly well-established by now that the ratio of liberals to conservatives among professional psychologists is approx. 14:1. So the researchers set out to investigate whether political orientation could explain the low replicability.

The answer was actually no. The political bias of the researchers did not significantly account for replicability rates. However, the political nature of the FINDINGS did… In other words, if the findings aligned closely to either end of the political spectrum, they could NOT be replicated (e.g. claiming that we are all implicitly prejudiced as liberals would suggest or that exposure to erotic-like images makes us judge other people as less attractive as conservatives would suggest).

This caught my interest because it, once again, shows that the truth is always somewhere in the middle of two opposite, extreme cases.

Still, I am fond of making extreme cases myself and I love engaging with views that take an extreme case scenario. Why do I think this is so important? Because extreme claims of any sort allow you to push the boundaries of our current understanding. In a sense, when we find a new limit of our understanding, we stretch our perception of what is the balance.

Let’s consider a simple analogy to make the point. We have two extremes – one of them is ‘1’ and the other is ’70’. The truth is in the middle of those claims, hence the truth is ’35’. But say somebody comes up with a new extreme claim beyond ’70’, say the claim is ‘100’. Now the truth lies between ‘1’ and ‘100’, hence the truth is now ’50’.

If that was too simplistic, let’s consider a more realistic scenario – consciousness. Animals are the only conscious creatures we know of and humans are ‘the most’ conscious ones – in other words, we have the greatest capacity for consciousness. In this case, animals are the least conscious creatures we know of. Therefore, we might have the claim that the most fruitful thing one can do to study the origins of consciousness is to look at the evolutionary relationship between animals and humans.

However, philosophers have now argued that plants might also be conscious, albeit minimally. So, we have a new, extreme-case scenario that changes our view of the consciousness continuum. Now, plants are the least conscious entities we know of, followed by animals and then humans. Therefore, the new claim is that to study the origins of consciousness you need to study the evolutionary relationship from plants to animals and then humans.

Through radical claims you push the boundaries of knowledge. Integrating and reconciling those radical claims is how you establish the foundations of knowledge.