New book cites science's real-world impact


 

Human Ecology professor Robert J. Sternberg had college students in mind when he recruited essayists for his book “Scientists Making a Difference: One Hundred Eminent Behavioral and Brain Scientists Talk about Their Most Important Contributions” (2016).

Sternberg, senior editor and contributor (along with psychological scientists Susan T. Fiske of Princeton and Donald J. Foss of the University of Houston), says the book grew out of a common frustration among academics.

“Often, students who will go into behavioral and brain sciences also want to change the world. But a typical journal article can’t talk about how your research changes the world. That is a good way to get rejected” by most scientific publications, said Sternberg, author of many articles and books. “You’re supposed to report the empirical findings. But there are some scientists whose work really is changing things – and has a potential to make a difference. How do you convey this to students?”

That was a task with plenty of willing helpers, all of whom Sternberg culled from a 2014 Archives of Scientific Psychology article, “An Incomplete List of Eminent Scientists of the Modern Era.” (Sternberg was on that list, and so was Cornell’s Stephen J. Ceci, professor of human development, as well as Elizabeth Spelke, Ph.D. ’79, a former Department of Psychology faculty member now at Harvard University.) “We told them to write in a way a first-year student can understand, at a level that’s totally understandable to someone without a lot of background,” Sternberg said.

He points to eminently readable essays like “The Science of Our Better Angels” by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker; “Memory Matters” by Elizabeth F. Loftus at the University of Washington; and “How Positive Psychology Happened and Where It Is Going” by the University of Pennsylvania’s Martin Seligman.

The three co-editors also have been officers of an organization called the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and the book is a kind of fundraiser for the group, according to Sternberg.

If first-years don’t take inspiration from Sternberg’s book-ending essay, “Becoming an Eminent Researcher in Psychological Science” – or another essayist’s musings about the algorithms behind online dating sites, “Love and Sex in the Marketplace” – they might find extracurricular info in co-editor Fiske’s “How Warmth and Competence Inform Your Social Life.”

Ceci, for his part, throws down a challenge to students. In his essay, “Research on Children’s Recollections: What a Difference a Telephone Call Made,” the professor tells how he declined a judge’s request to be an expert in a murder case 35 years ago, when a young boy might have seen his father bludgeon to death his mother, who was buried in the backyard. After hearing the scenario, Ceci confessed that his early-career laboratory experiments had not accounted for the “real-world complexity” of human interactions – the way children, in particular, can develop false memories and convincingly recall experiences that never occurred.

Instead of speculating in court about a phenomenon, now called “source misattribution,” that science didn’t understand, Ceci called together experts on child memory from across the United States, Canada and Europe in a landmark conference at Cornell. They explored the legally relevant aspects of source misappropriation.

“Within a decade of receiving the judge’s call,” Ceci writes, “the field of memory development had largely moved outside the lab and into the real world.”

In 2016, Ceci concludes, there’s still plenty of work to do – on how people progress from lying to believing their lies, for instance – but now he’s reaching retirement age. “As I just turned 65, many of the next steps will fall to my students and their students.”

H. Roger Segelken is a freelance writer.

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